I’ve argued for nigh on three years that Europe — and, if we followed them, the U.S. — would find itself saying (after discovering the cap-and-trade scheme was an expensive debacle, a rat hole into which more and more taxpayer money had been poured) “we’ve spent so much we have to keep going, can’t turn back now!” Well, they’re now starting to say it.
Apparently a policy that sends the economy into a dive can’t survive when the economy goes into a dive and so needs to be revived, along with its economy-crushing attributes, in order to save the scheme. Damn the economy. I believe we have just redefined “dogma.”
Or, as EU analysts are putting it, the Emissions Trading Scheme needs a bailout and isn’t “sustainable.” Politically, that is — meaning it’s well beyond unsustainability on an economic level — and they might even have to bug out.
Here’s Open Europe’s daily press summary:
Deutsche Bank: EU carbon trading could be “difficult to sustain”
EurActiv reports that UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband has joined calls to demand that the EU prop up the carbon market. . . . A report by Deutsche Bank has also called for action from EU policymakers if the allowance price falls further, saying “With so much political capital invested by the EU in establishing a global carbon market, a very weak EUA price and potentially significantly reduced activity in new CDM [Clean Development Mechanism] origination in the months leading up to Copenhagen would in our view be very difficult for the EU to sustain politically.”
It seems the only solution they’ve come up with to help its political sustainability is to make the thing more expensive. Yeah, that’ll be a big political help.
Gosh, I hope our own Solons on the Hill who try and get around the troubling reality of how cap-and-trade applied to CO2 works in reality by muttering oh, we’ll just avoid Europe’s mistakes can spare the time to let Europe in on their secret. Our pioneering friends across the pond certainly haven’t figured out how to avoid Europe’s problems.