Not new news, but new to me...
Global Cool the celebrity driven campaign to lower carbon emissions was launched at the begining of the year by a whole load of famous faces. The campaign will be running fund and awareness raising concerts alla 'Make poverty history'.
The campaign is collecting cash through donation and a large proportion of this money is used to buy carbon credits on the European emissions trading scheme, but with out then selling them. As we all know buy increasing demand in a market of restricted supply this will of course force prices up, that's the plan of Global Cool to make it more expensive for business to buy carbon credit and hence more economic to lessern emissions.
In terms of the discussion about participation this is pretty fascinating.
The European ETS is basically a public policy tool born of Kyoto. It's aim is to provide a market based incentive for lessening emissions. Of course having a open market as a part of your public policy creates a new avenue for influencing that policy. Global Cool is exploiting that avenue, by buying carbon credits they effectively making European emissions policy more strigent without having to go to the trouble of lobbying legislatures or anything as quaint as that.
But in a world where money already has a huge influence in the shaping of public policy is this a retrograde development, even if in this case it's for the better?
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