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WashACE Blog
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
How Green is the EU? How Much Does it Matter?
Posted by Richard Davis on 2/17/2009 1:50:00 PM
According to this article in Business Week, European renewables mandates have successfully launched a green economy. But, they've not been much less successful at cinbatung climate change. ...wind turbines and solar energy plants are revolutionizing Germany's mix of power sources, creating jobs and making the country more independent from imports. But they aren't helping in the fight against climate change. In the worst case scenario, sustainable energy plants might even have a detrimental effect on the climate. As more wind turbines go online, coal plants will be able to reduce their output. This in itself is desirable ƒ? but the problem is that the total number of available CO2 emission certificates remains the same. In other words, there will suddenly be more certificates per kilowatt of coal energy. That means the price per ton of CO2 emitted will fall. That is exactly what happened in recent trading.
H/T Don Brunell at Olympia Business Watch, who asks:
So, if Washington, which is one of 11 participants in the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), joins California in passing a "cap and trade" bill along the lines suggested in the WCI accords and neighboring Idaho, only an observer of WCI, takes a pass, will the same thing happen here?
Probably.
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