Capping and trading that would work (June 8)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
The so-called “cap-and-trade” proposal being floated in Congress for cutting back on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is meant to punish businesses that pollute and reward businesses that don’t pollute. The net effect is supposed to be the slowing of global warming.
Without getting into whether the whole idea is something that actually will work, or whether it is just a scam for raising taxes, we need to point out a couple of major items that were left out.
First, there is no way in the legislation to compensate farmers and timber growers, even though they are responsible for more carbon sequestration than anybody else. Carbon sequestration, in case you don’t know, is what happens when plants use carbon dioxide to grow. Just as animals use oxygen and throw off carbon dioxide, so plants use carbon dioxide and throw off oxygen.
All the privately owned ranches, farms, woodlots and forests are sucking up carbon dioxide right and left and giving off oxygen. But they have been left out of any proposals for compensation. That just doesn’t seem right.
Carbon-sequestration payments could help farmers keep farming and help foresters and woodlot owners keep growing their trees instead of resorting to selling to developers.
Second, the San Joaquin Valley is a pollution “sink.” Some 40 percent of all the air pollution with which we have to deal floats over from the coast, much of it a product of impacted traffic from the big cities. It would seem only fair that gasoline sold on the coast would carry a tax which would be sent to San Joaquin Valley communities which must deal with pollution they didn’t cause. The money could be used to help our local drivers and industries pollute less.
That would be capping and trading that actually could have an effect.
