[TheForge] Cap and trade

[Paul Boulay]

Peter,

I'm afraid I have to disagree. I actually tried reading the proposed legislation a few months back. It was tough to know for sure what it was saying because there was so much that was obviously in a state of flux not to mention being self contradictory. And the legislation leaves a lot of the implementation and details to the bureaucrats. However it looked to me that the big users of coal such as power plants had established positions at the coal feeding trough. Their percentage shares remain constant over time but their actual amount starts to shrink in around 2015 and keeps shrinking out to 2050. I don't remember if it is zero at that point. 

If you are a small user you have to get your coal from someone who does have a position at the trough. So there might be industrial coal distributors who hold an allocation and could still sell to us small fry (at an inflated price). It might also mean that a coal mine would be prohibited from selling to anyone who didn't hold an allocation. If you hold an allocation you could sell some of your shares to one of the other stakeholders. But I didn't see a way for us small time users to guarantee that there would be someone out there willing to sell small quantities. 

I did notice some exception clauses for small industrial users of gaseous fuels. But I saw no such exemption for coal. 

It might be necessary to find a legislator out there with a sympathetic ear for small scale users with artistic or traditional reasons to keep using coal to write a carefully crafted exception but the political winds clearly don't look favorable. Got a spare $100K to fund a lobbying campaign? (Before anyone even goes there, ABANA's organizational tax status prohibits lobbying.)

Paul Boulay


>Date: Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:24:07 -0800
>From: Peter Fels & Phoebe Palmer <artgawk at thegrid.net>
>Subject: Re: [TheForge] Cap and trade

>
>I'd imagine that the costs of dealing with small scale emitters like us 
>will keep us safe for quite a while.
>


Paul Boulay
408-483-1986