These guys must be making a mint. They caught me on my way out, scheduled a time to come back, then when I cancelled at the last minute, came again. All they got where 3 bulbs, but they still seemed pretty pleased. More persistent then door to door mobile phone guys.
I guess this is like a super simple case study in carbon trading, pitfalls & all. How many credits should these guys be getting?
In my case, I probably would have replaced those bulbs anyway. In other cases, the incentive can be weirder. For one thing, There's a double jeopardy going on here. 1. Individual feel-goodness of the guy who traded in his bulbs 2. Individual feel-goodness via the carbon market.
Both are getting credit here. I feel like I'm lowering my emissions. But since those credits have been sold, someone else is emitting them in my place. They do the equivalent of taking my 100W bulb & plugging it into their wall with the fuzzy feeling that even thought they are emitting carbon, it is being offset. We are both claiming credit.
That's before the perverse incentives kick in. Why should I pay $8 X 10 to bulb my house with low watt bulbs when I can pay $0.50 X 10 to do so with cheap bulbs & call in these guys?
Sure, it may eventually. If they need to buy them to do whatever it is they want to do & I sell because I want the money. But at the moment this is just a way of cashing in public sentiment towards climate change: at a bad rate.
I feel like I am saving X watt hours & the purchaser does too. So they (the company) are trading in 2X watt hours "emotional credits" (the utility of this market) for 1x watt hour savings.
Of course, that's an exaggeration. I lost my drive & ability to save those emissions by replacing my bulbs, but it's not 100% certain that I would have done so anyway.
Companies are compelled to do this in Australia (amongst others) due to our Kyoto targets, etc.
Are they? I don't think they are directly. The Government is probably subsidising this & other efforts but there is no compulsion to purchase carbon credits. They Get bought by bus companies, airlines, etc. They are basically also riding on public sentiment.
"...the fuzzy feeling that even thought they are emitting carbon, it is being offset."
You shouldn't get a warm fuzzy feeling. You're not reducing the total amount of CO2, you're just changing the allocation. However, both parties should feel good about the transaction because each party is economically better off than they were beforehand.
Nice idea, but given the Commonwealth Government will pass legislation to ban incandescent light bulbs in 2009/10, this product has probably has a fairly limited life. My local supermarket has already stopped stocking them for the most part.
Water is way easier. Could turn water into a working market in 6 months, given the political support. Water is something that is much easier to control. In fact, it's already controlled. All you need to do is limit supply (via mostly government "owned" resources) to whatever you deem to be a reasonable level, & charge for consumption. The smaller players (people with dams on their land) will follow.
You could even have the government manipulate prices by literally 'flooding' the market when necessary.
You can say that again. A few banks have carbon credit trading arms doing hundred of millions of revenue doing similar stuff (Replacing non-ecological friendly pots in Africa with greener pots)
Unquestionably. What they ultimately do is reward the unproductive for their great virtue of being unproductive.
If the purpose was simply to reduce the amount of CO2 produced, then governments would agree to a common tax: x number of dollars per metric ton of CO2, period. Instead of that, the money transfer occurs between different entities. This rewards countries that aren't capable of significant CO2 creation, CO2 creation being a signal of a first-world, productive country.
Reducing carbon is not being productive? Isn't it saving the world and whatnot? As long as care is taken when creating offset credits. Like, don't give someone a credit for not buying a hummer. But if they buy an electric car.. or make one.. why not?
If they agreed to a single common tax for carbon creation it would still end up as a transfer from high carbon producing countries to lesser ones. They wouldn't just burn the money collected or something, it would be redistributed. So the developed world would end up shouldering most of the cost. In my view that is only fair and natural. If the US had agreed to Koyoto we would probably be close to negotiating that very situation about now.
I guess this is like a super simple case study in carbon trading, pitfalls & all. How many credits should these guys be getting?
In my case, I probably would have replaced those bulbs anyway. In other cases, the incentive can be weirder. For one thing, There's a double jeopardy going on here. 1. Individual feel-goodness of the guy who traded in his bulbs 2. Individual feel-goodness via the carbon market.
Both are getting credit here. I feel like I'm lowering my emissions. But since those credits have been sold, someone else is emitting them in my place. They do the equivalent of taking my 100W bulb & plugging it into their wall with the fuzzy feeling that even thought they are emitting carbon, it is being offset. We are both claiming credit.
That's before the perverse incentives kick in. Why should I pay $8 X 10 to bulb my house with low watt bulbs when I can pay $0.50 X 10 to do so with cheap bulbs & call in these guys?