| Sourced From Vancouversun.com |
VANCOUVER Calculating the difference between a $25 carbon credit purchased in British Columbia and a 14-cent credit purchased in daily trading on the Chicago Climate Exchange is apparently not a matter for simple arithmetic.
The $25 credit is what you, as taxpayers, are forking out to support the B.C. governments ambitious, precedent-setting plan to make itself carbon-neutral before 2011.
B.C. anticipates that core government agencies and offshoots, including schools and health districts, will be annually responsible by the end of 2010 for about one million more tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions than their conservation efforts can reasonably prevent.
Thats where you come in.
The governments ambition, announced by Premier Gordon Campbell in 2007, is to compensate for every one of those million tonnes by purchasing carbon credits from businesses and industries that reduced their reliance on fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas, or coal and had their efforts certified by independent, third-party auditors.
The credits are collected by Pacific Carbon Trust, a new Crown corporation that pays emitters an unspecified amount for each tonne of CO2 emissions they cut through innovative conservation efforts, and resells them to government at $25 a tonne.
Assuming the scheme can be carried out in the time frame established by the premier, the province will be paying $25 million a year to compensate for its carbon emissions.
There are entire B.C. government ministries such as energy, finance, and environment, whose annual capital expenditures are less than $25 million, according to the governments 2010 fiscal year estimates.
Cheaper credits are available.
You can buy a tonne of carbon credit, or offset, for 14 cents on the spot market of the Chicago Climate Exchange, although critics suggest your money would be safer in a penny mining stock from a Howe Street promoter circa 1975.
You could buy one from the European Climate Exchange, which is pricing a tonne of carbon at about the same level as B.C.
That would mean shipping tax dollars to foreign jurisdictions with no commensurate economic stimulus to justify the effort.
The good news here, if youre in favour of the B.C. governments effort, is that this province has established a market and a trading system that appear to be working as hoped as the first North American jurisdiction with mandatory carbon emission reduction targets.
(Credits available in Chicago are from voluntary emission cutbacks whose pedigrees, as the price of carbon on that market suggests, are suspect.)
Christine Schuh, environmental practice leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers, said in an interview that comparing B.C.s pricing system to Chicagos is like comparing apples to oranges. The system in this province is regulated, while Chicagos is not.
But she added that its also difficult to compare B.C. to the European exchange, because the systems themselves are
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