So Much for THAT Excuse: China Starts a Cap-and-Trade Program

If there is a somewhat credible reason for the United States not to embark on climate legislation, it is that other major emitters — particularly China — are not doing the same.  I don’t buy it, because China is a much poorer country than the United States is and because the West has received the lion’s share of the benefits of the industrialization that has caused climate change in the first place.

But in any event, that dog’s hunting days are over:

China’s first steps to build what is destined to be the world’s second-biggest emissions market are boosting the prospects for fledgling programs from Australia to California.

Four cement makers in China, the world’s biggest emitter, bought 1.3 million pollution permits for 60 yuan ($9.55) a metric ton last month in Guangdong. The province plans the largest of seven pilot programs for a proposed national market within three years. Exchanges will trade permits to emit an estimated 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases a year by 2015, close to half the volume in the European Union system.
By setting its own emission limits and allowing polluters to buy and sell permits, China’s domestic market is set to dwarf its own participation in the UN market, Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecasts. The country’s commitment may also help break a logjam in global-treaty negotiations and support trade in Australia and the U.S., where opposition to carbon pricing is unwavering, according to Climate Bridge, which has developed projects in China since 2006.

“What China is doing with its pilot scheme and ultimately with a national scheme sets a terrific example for the rest of the world,” said Alex Wyatt, the Melbourne-based chief executive officer of Climate Bridge and author of a report released yesterday with the Sydney-based Climate Institute.“Any suggestions by people in the West that China is not acting on climate change aren’t true.”

This report is courtesy of Bloomberg, a notoriously left-wing Marxist Islamist source.

Maybe Bob Schieffer can shoehorn this into the debate under the section on “The Rise of China and Tomorrow’s World”:

Now that China is capping its own carbon emissions and constructing a nationwide cap-and-trade system, isn’t it time for the United States to catch up with it?

Bloomberg, Bob Schieffer, cap-and-trade, cement plants, China, Climate Bridge