Dutch politician Sharon Dijksma dreams of an ETS type system to reduce industrial emissions around the world. She thinks that with the help of the EU she can introduce a limited emmision rights system that can restrict CO2 emissions even in aviation and shipping. The ETS system has been found officially defunct simply because there are more than plenty of emission rights sloshing around and no plans to restrict their amount. This means industry really doesn’t feel much pressure to exit fossil fuels, so the fossil fuel dependent industrial sectors are pretty much protected.
It is excessively naive to think you can introduce an emission rights scheme where there is an existing one in place, failing completely, and then want to do it globally where the ETS system is European. It is not naive, it is malintended. There is a rich history in politics of inventive delay strategies, and failing plans is definitely one of them. While one tries to do the undoable there is no room for alternative approaches and there is no real progress. Who better to try that than the PVDA, who has been in a dependent alliance with the liberal right wing party. One can basically say the PVDA is now inhabited with liberals that will say they want change but will always side with the liberal VVD in holland. A total scam party, which is why people flock to the SP, a more truthflly pro labour and pretty green party. The mistake is wanting to govern instead of protecting the interests of workers, which the PVDA doesn’t do.
But the whole idea of new emissions rights trading is totally wrong to begin with. The approach is already indirect. The point is that those that are realistic about the consequences of climate change want to reduce the buring of fossil fuels. Many people try to achieve this. The simplest way is to make these fuels more expensive. Tax them more! There is an important caveat with this approach though : Whatever tax revenue you get from his can only be used to make renewable energy sources. Who understands the carbon base of our economy understands that any money spend will cause emissions (by being spend into a carbon fuel burning production system) and thus is better off not being spend. So with the fossil fuel tax you either NOT spend it at all (also not use it as base for credit, which is exactly the opposite of what you want) or use it to build renewable energy sources.
Right now we seem to have low fossil fuel prices and cheap credit. This seems significant, but you can also have low prices if there is next to now fuel when there is next to no credit. The fossil fuel price says NOTHING about how scarce the fuel is, how much can be delivered in the future, what the fuel volume is today, because prices are as much a function of the availability of money as they are of the availability of product. This is a vary scary aspect. It also means that even if you tax fuels you can expect banks to create more credit to deal with the price hike, and so governments have to watch barrels, tons of fuel etc, not the cashflow, price etc. Tons imported minus tons exported should be minimized. Throughput should also be minimized. This will be extremely hard for Holland as we derive a lot of power from our control over fuel/pretrochemical/gas logistics.
As banks produce fossil fuel credit which is wastefully spend in our economy a government that wants to reduce emissions has to either tax and keep the cash (not spend it) or become a bank and eliminate the commecial banks. A third option is to set clear standards for investment, so that wastefull (CO2 budget wise) activities are curtailed. Since the government is infested with pro banking, pro fossil fuel thinking people, from labour to liberal, any big change won’t happen soon. Maybe there will be a green revolution with the conviently named ‘socialist party’ and ‘green left’ but the liberals basically have a majority of the political spectrum, because in Holland if you don’t want to rich you won’t have much of a life (a situation created by the liberal banker lakeys).
So what to do? One option is to tax into a renewable energy source fund that is just about building wind turbines and solar farms and storage to support the grid. Put the money in pensions, which is a great way to destroy its fossil fuel purchasing power for now. Sadly the opposite is happeing, liberal labour politicians want to free up pension cash to drive fossil fuel consumption.
Another option which is indirect is to open up fuel standards. Instead of dictating the fuels used in vehicles the standard should only say something about safety and emissions. So any new fuel has to have at least the emissions and at least the safety aspects as the current fuels. One can be surprised that new fuels have to be MUCH safer than existing fuels to be allowed. This is another build in protection barrier for fossil fuels. Without going into detail this change can be a big change. It has to be introduced quietly, it is a rule of practical equivalence for fuels.
Another approach is to make a rule that determines the energy per carbon content per unit weight of fuel, which will favour high hydrogen fuels. The thinking should go to simple rules with large impact on emissions in fields not monitored by the fossil industry. This is exactly how the fossil industry has created the high fossil fuel wasting environment we find ourselves in, by creating laws where we didn’t understand their impact.
Politics and industy uses the fact new generations are unaware things have been tried many times before. The media sure help suggesting whatever doesn’t work as loudly as whatever does work. Economist don’t like profitable problems to go away, certainly not fossil fuel use. It makes total sense for the climate aware political parties to negotiate before the next Dutch elections in order to establish a majority outcome to counter the current VVD, PVV, CDA, PVDA group of short sighted economic thinking parties. Sharon Dijskma’s idea sure as hell will not help ever or fast enough.