Back in the Air Again

The Antiplanner will be in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho today speaking at a conference that seeks to find a balance between property rights and clean water. Golf courses, waterfront homes, and other developments along Lake Coeur d’Alene spill nitrogen, phosphorous, and other nutrients into the lake, leading to algal blooms that can cause serious problems.

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To prevent this, some propose that the county regulate or limit new development. But the Antiplanner argues that any regulations should apply equally to existing developments. Instead of regulation, I propose a system of tradable pollution rights, in which every waterfront property owner starts out with a right to a tiny amount of pollution. Those who don’t pollute could sell to those who do, and those who pollute in excess of their rights would be severely fined.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

3 Responses to Back in the Air Again

  1. LazyReader says:

    For one thing if you’re gonna have pollution or emission crediting, it gives unjust financial advantages to major polluters. If you’re rich like the golf course for instance one can afford to substitute money for conscience objective. Even businesses that are fined for committing a perceived environmental harm, it can be cheaper to simply pay the fine. If they pay “X” amount a day and commit “Y” amount of pollution, if by some miracle they reduce their waste/emission/pollution output by a slight degree, they can sell that dividend if ever so small to a desperate smaller business and continue with business as usual.

    Second you can liken them to papal indulgences, a way for the guilty to pay for absolution rather than changing their behavior. Widespread instances of people and organizations buying worthless credits that yield no reductions in emissions. Because offsets provide a revenue stream for the reduction of some types of emissions, they can in some cases provide incentives to emit more, so that emitting entities can later get credit for reducing emissions from a high baseline (producing more emissions but less than what I would have given our level of production). For example, one Chinese company generated $500 million in carbon offsets by installing a $5 million incinerator to burn the HFCs produced by the manufacture of refrigerants. The profits provided incentive to create new factories or expand existing ones solely for the purpose of increasing production of HFCs and then destroying the resultant pollutants to generate offsets. Not only is this outcome environmentally undesirable, it undermines other offset principle by encouraging more emitting. Australia’s CO2 emissions are beginning to exceed the US. Australia burns dirty brown coal while the US uses black coal and natural gas which is cleaner. Australia wont adopt nuclear power which emits virtually nothing but sells uranium to politically unfriendly nations as well as brown coal to China.

    The worst polluter on planet Earth is not a major corporation, but the United States federal government, and if we’re going to be serious about reducing our impact on the environment, we need to advocate for less, not more government. The federal government is the single largest consumer of energy with 500,000 buildings and 600,000 vehicles. In 2009 alone, the government’s bill for utilities and fuel totaled $24 billion. They dump unsealed radioactive waste in the ground. Built factories in Colorado for the production of chemical weapons. Tested nukes in the Nevada desert letting the fallout blow into Utah, New Mexico and California. While official accounts put US military usage at 320,000 barrels of oil a day, that does not include fuel consumed by contractors, in leased or private facilities, or in the production of weapons and accounts for 80% of the governments energy demand. Built land mines that spread across Asia and Africa, depleted uranium, dioxin contamination left over from the Vietnam War.

    Most of all offsets are cheating, is it cheating when Leonardo DiCaprio buys carbon offsets for his private jet, yes it is as long as he keeps the jet. The ineffectiveness of the system caused by cheating in connection with pollution and the fact that purchasing credits that essentially allow people to continue to operate as is is merely a distraction from the search for authentic solutions. Their greatest component to supply additional credits is to plant trees which have some benefit but they tend to overexaggerate the benefit. Trees can easily release carbon into the atmosphere through fire, disease, climatic changes, natural decay and timber harvesting, that’s why CO2 reduction is effectively useless even if you replanted all of Europe and North America. Offsets for emission reductions are no substitute for actual cuts in emissions. What do you achieve by telling wealthy suburbanites or exurbanites they can dump slightly or more than their poorer kin. If an Average Joe strangles a hooker to death it’s murder, if a Wall Street broker does it, not only does he not go to jail, as he’s deemed a more productive member of society, you can call it criminally negligent. They got lawyers, they got cash, if you can just compensate the victims family. I suppose it’s no loss to society to kill the hooker.

  2. LazyReader says:

    William McDonough is an American architect. Growing up in early post-war Japan, he was raised around a society where conservation of resources and tending to land wasn’t a hobby but a daily means of productivity. The question being the change in our behavior. Most environmental woes are the result of consumer society, rather than be a consumer society, why not be a productive society where consumer products are the byproduct, not the end result.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0c-QUxVJcM

  3. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    I do not know the specifics around and about Lake Coeur d’Alene, but one of the most-effective measures (note, effective, maybe not cost-effective) to reduce pollutants of this kind is to hook every home up to a sanitary sewer system and treat the sewage at a modern wastewater treatment plant.

    None of that is cheap, but it does greatly reduce the flow of unwanted substances into bodies of water.

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