The influential Pew Center has a new report out by a couple of MIT researchers (A. Denny Ellerman and Paul Joskow) purporting to assess the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). ETS is of course the cap-and-trade rationing scheme – under which EU energy costs went up, up, up and covered emissions . . . uh, also went up – that our brave Senate will confront imposing on the U.S. in two weeks’ time. That’s a coincidence, by the way. Don’t let their membership of corporate rent-seekers fool you, Pew isn’t a lobbying group.
Presuming that Lieberman-Warner’s opponents reveal (or its champions admit) how ETS has in fact been a failure, as any objective analysis indicates, we should have a robust debate, in with the Pew/MIT paper is flogged mercilessly.
Just to give you a flavor of the paper, as repeated in the “Greenwire” coverage of it last week and in today’s “OnPoint” interview with author A. Denny Ellerbman, the argument distills as follows:
OK, so it didn’t do anything, but it must be hailed as a success because at least it “did something.”
If anyone asks you for one example to illustrate the substance of today’s policy debate, no soundbite does the job better.
By the way, in a tacit admission of the failure it hopes to explain away — no, no, that policy ship you see isn’t sinking, it’s, uh, awash in prosperity! – I noted how the paper’s introduction and text casually (if slavishly) tries to redefine the 2005-2007 first phase of the ETS as a “trial phase” or “trial period” – as promiscuously as an American teen uses “like”: 74 times in 59 pages. Sure it was, folks.
It is now quite common for ETS cheerleaders to slap qualifying adjectives of “trial,” “test,” or “calibration” onto any discussion of the ETS’s three very bad years. This tends to precede the amorphous claim that the U.S. will somehow fix or avoid the ETS’s problems, a secret that Europe would love for these folks to let them in on.
Yet Pew et al. were so clumsy about this that I did a little digging. And those likely opportunities when official Europe might have said such a thing, well, they didn’t, but instead quite plainly sold it instead as refined salvation, not some temporary stopover in policy purgatory. The Directive establishing the ETS, 2003/87/EC, doesn’t say anything about a trial and neither does the ETS FAQ page. Nor did the Commission make mention of a test when it formally approved ETS, nor in the previous announcement when it was finalized – when, in fact, they hailed ETS as the means for bringing Kyoto coming into effect.
So we’re, like, seeing history being totally revised right before our eyes.