Here are some things that won’t be talked about over the coffe breaks at the Senate Energy Committee “Roundtable” on Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme, because the people not making money off of or attaining authority under this racket weren’t welcome.

You won’t hear much talk about the leading assessment of the ETS, from United Kingdom think tank Open Europe, styled “The High Price of Hot Air: Why the EU Emissions Trading Scheme is an environmental and economic failure” (http://www.openeurope.org.uk/research/ets.pdf), offering, inter alia, the following conclusions applicable to any U.S. application of such a scheme:

“Botched central planning, rather than a real market. Instead of auctioning off permits and allowing the market to operate, member states have handed permits out to firms according to 1960s-style National Allocation Plans (NAPs). This means handing permits free to individual firms on a variety of rather sketchy criteria. This attempt at central planning has had all kinds of perverse results. For example NHS hospitals have been forced to spend a total of £1,300,000 buying up permits, and 18 UK universities are also net contributors. Ironically, Large oil companies have made substantial profits from the scheme.”

“An administrative nightmare. Compared to an energy tax or focussed emissions tax on power stations, the scheme is complicated and has imposed very high administrative burdens. Many small plants – for example the main boiler in a hospital – are covered by the scheme, and have to employ staff toconduct monitoring, and compliance activities, and pay for official verification. Despite this, such plants contribute little to total emissions. The estimates in the UK Government’s preliminary Regulatory Impact Assessment suggest that this administrative burden is costing firms and public sector bodies approximately £62 million a year in the UK.”

Maybe these are among the reasons why “Tom Crotty, chairman of the chlorine producer Ineos ChlorVinyls, said that spiralling energy costs had led to the loss of 100,000 job losses over the past 18 months. Included in those losses were the closure of 13 glassmakers and 11 papermills. Ineos ChlorVinyls, which had to halt production temporarily last year because of higher energy costs, has 80 per cent of its costs tied up in energy. Mr Crotty said that energy policy had failed industry: ‘The true cost comes in lost business, lost jobs and lost income’.” The Times (UK) November 28, 2006