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Comment by medearis | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't really find much in what he had to say about WHY it is a "scam." The linked article requires registration and is cut off before it starts explaining why "this approach is misguided."

While carbon trading may not be a solution for global warming, it is one of the few models we have for using market incentives to curb carbon emissions in the short term.

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I think there's some info in here:

http://www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/carbon_neutral_myth.pdf

It's been a while since I read it through but their basic point is that carbon credits are to the environment what indulgences were to the mediaeval church.

Mediaeval Catholic church please. No other church sold indulgences (the other major church, Eastern Orthodox, definitely did not). Yeah, I'm a semantic nazi.

PS: great comparison, I'll steal it for my own arguments. With your permission of course.

"With your permission of course."

Not my comparison, so go ahead. The PDF I linked to was interesting because I'd always wondered if carbon trading (in all its forms) helped much, and the answer seems to be "no".

If you just tax carbon emissions at say 1$ per ton it's easy to track. But with cap and trade people who say plant 1 million trees in the desert can get credits for making things cleaner and sell them. Now the plants all die, but that's not important as long as you can convince the regulators that some of them might make it your in the clear.

With a simple tax everyone pays, when it get's complex those who understand the system pay far less.

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