Emissions trading already too late?

Cleaning up on carbon : article : Nature Reports Climate Change

For anyone out there (if there is anyone) who thinks emissions trading schemes are likely to do enough to limit CO2 fast enough, have a read of the above detailed opinion piece that was in Nature in June 2008.

It argues:

The limits of a strategy built around carbon pricing can be seen in the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme, the world's largest system for pricing carbon and trading permits. A full decade after signing the Kyoto Protocol, European nations finally have in place a cap-and-trade system with a significant price for allowances, namely US$40 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. Yet utilities in Italy, Great Britain, the Czech Republic and Germany are reported to still be pursuing new coal-fired plants⁴, so we must clearly go beyond pricing carbon.

The whole scenario set out in the article about how difficult it will be to achieve stabilisation at 550 ppm is pretty depressing, really. But the author argues that:

...such is the urgent need to reverse emissions trends by deploying a multitude of low-carbon technologies that we must rely on technologies that either are already commercial or will very shortly be so. Fortunately, venture capitalists and public companies have begun to inject many billions of dollars into the development and short-term commercialization of most plausible low-carbon technologies. Governments should now focus their R&D spending on a longer-term effort aimed at a new generation of technologies for the emissions reduction effort after 2040, but the notion that we need a Manhattan Project or Apollo programme for technology development is mistaken. Instead, what is urgently needed is an effort of that scale focused on the deployment of technology.

It's all interesting, and well worth reading.