Landowners are earning millions for carbon cuts that may not occur

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613326/californias-cap-and-trade-program-may-vastly-overestimate-emissions-cuts/

Landowners are earning millions for carbon cuts that may not occur
A new analysis finds California’s cap-and-trade program may vastly overestimate emissions reductions.

by James Temple April 18, 2019

Under a California program aimed at curbing climate pollution, landowners across the US have received hundreds of millions of dollars for promised carbon dioxide reductions that may not occur.

The state has issued carbon offset credits to projects that may overstate their emissions reductions by 80 million tons of carbon dioxide, a third of the total cuts that the state’s cap-and-trade program was expected to achieve in the next decade, according to a policy brief (PDF) that will be released in the next few days by the University of California, Berkeley.

The findings raise troubling questions about the effectiveness of California’s cap-and-trade program, one of the world’s most high-profile tests of such a market-based mechanism for combating climate risks. Implemented in 2013, the system is a centerpiece of the state’s ambitious efforts to rollback greenhouse-gas emissions, expected to achieve nearly 40% of of California’s total cuts.

“If [the] findings are correct, then it would appear that a substantial component of the cap-and-trade program is not producing real emission reductions,” said Danny Cullenward, a research associate at the Carnegie Institution and member of a California Environmental Protection Agency committee that analyzes the impacts of the cap-and-trade system, in an e-mail.

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[mountain grammy]

1. Cap and trade is a republican idea..

and some sound good on paper, but do they work?