Natwerk Designs

Is California stepping out of bounds in addressing GCC in this fashion?

Thursday's L.A.Times, in an editorial titled "Hope for Hot Air Only," praised Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger but also berated him for overreaching in his quest to address GCC. "Indonesia will announce at the governors' summit that it wishes to join California's carbon trading program. That could mean polluters in California would be granted permission to emit greenhouse gases here in exchange for buying "offsets" in Indonesia that compensate for the damage -- for example, a California refinery might buy a chunk of rain forest in Indonesia to act as a carbon sink." The Times questioned the ability to verify whether these offsets would reduce carbon as much as the amounts claimed and that they might serve to stifle innovation. I encourage you to read the entire editorial before responding. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/11/13/editorial_pages/ed-climate13 Sorry, meant to include this link as well: http://site.governorsglobalclimatesummit.org/Home_Page.html

Public Comments

1. NO way NO way NO way Indonesia is in a strong phase of savage deforestation and expantion of unsustainable biofuels over peatlands. The wish for Indonesia with its poor environmentl standards for GCC to join the Western Initiative would lead to a lot of wealth transfer to project developers without verifiable and measureable reductions im GHG emissions, thus jeopardizing the hard won integrity of the Western Climate Initiative. Flooding the GHG Californian system with token emission reduction projects would be the most straightforward way of killing it. Instead, development help focused on sustainability and emission reductions should be achieved in a more directive manner to beginn with a high quality standard.
2. Your question has two important parts: 1) How well do offsets work in GCC, and the answer is not very well. There are lots of unproductive games played with offsets. Moving ahead, hopefully more accountability will be established. 2) California overreaching? The problem is global, the solutions must be global. The right thing would be for the U.S. to take the lead but we have had no leadership. Schwarzenegger stepped into the leadership vacuum. The states are ahead of the federal government but that is likely to change with a new Executive Branch.
3. Sorry, but a 1 degree F increase in average temp over 20 years followed by 10 years of flat temps is not a "global problem." And there remains no direct evidence that the 20 year warming was caused by the activities you now seek to limit. Thus, limiting them isn't a "solution" to any "problem."
4. More evidence that Global warming or the imbecile's phrase "global climate change" is more about politics and money. What a farce. What a sham. Thank you for helping to expose it though I am not sure too many alarmists will figure it out. There is no such thing as a carbon sink in Indonesian rain forest. You would have to be the biggest fool to buy into that. Next it will be swampland in Florida they want to sell. Never trust a leftist with your wallet.
5. ALL governments and activist groups call for addressing GCC in this fashion. NONE of their proposed solutions actually address the problem, according to the very people proposing them. This move, like ALL other GCC "solutions" serves to move money from producers to non-producers. That's what it does, that's ALL it does.
6. If a private citizen does this, it's called a scam and is illegal.