Environmentalists Feel Sting of Cap and Trade

But perhaps the most fascinating irony of all is playing out inside the host Bella Center, where environmentalists and other nonprofit groups are getting a quick and brutal immersion in the “cap-and-trade” system that President Obama has proposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The problem here in Copenhagen is space: The Bella Center holds 20,000 people at capacity. The United Nations issued more than double that many credentials for the climate summit. So as more and more people arrived this week – delegates, environmentalists, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez – summit organizers started limiting who could come inside. They started by issuing “secondary passes” to nonprofits and requiring those passes for admission. The groups, commonly referred to as non-governmental organizations or NGOs, are free to trade the passes amongst themselves. The number of passes has declined each day. By some groups’ estimates, the entire U.S. environmental movement – consisting of 90 groups and thousands of people – will be down to fewer than 10 total passes by Thursday. If that plan sounds familiar, it should. It’s a super-compressed version of how Obama wants to reduce the emissions that scientists blame for global warming: declining cap, tradeable permits, near phase-out in the long term...read more