Cap and Trade

1. Cap and Trade

2. What is Cap and Trade? Goal Reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions economy-wide in a cost-effective manner.

3. What is Cap and Trade?The Cap Each large-scale emitter (company) A limit on the amount of greenhouse gas that it can emit.

4. What is Cap and Trade?The Cap Emission Permits Over time more restrictive

5. What is Cap and Trade?The Trade Some companies will reduce their emissions below their required limit more quickly and efficiently than others.

6. What is Cap and Trade?The Trade They can sell their extra permits to other companies.

7. Agriculture and Cap and Trade • Create an incentive for carbon-emitting industries to buy less carbon intensive forms of energy • Biofuels grown on America's farms and ranches • An incentive to pay farmers to employ conservation practices that actually take carbon dioxide out of the air and store it in the soil. 

8. Agriculture and Cap and Trade Create a market for how farmers grow in addition to what they grow. Through conservation practices like no-till farming and the use of buffer strips that fix carbon in the soil and keep it there, farmers can offset carbon emissions in a more cost-efficient way than many companies. As a result, farmers could provide the low-cost means of meeting the greenhouse gas cap for private companies.

9. Agriculture and Cap and Trade Launch a new market for livestock producers Ranchers who use methane digesters to capture and reuse methane gas for power generation will now not only save money on their electric bills. They also could become suppliers of reduced carbon power to their local utilities.

10. Agriculture and Cap and Trade Create a market for agricultural residue. Possibly selling wheat stalks to the local utility to burn alongside coal to create low-carbon electric power or using corn stalks, wood chips and alfalfa to create a new kind of ethanol. The demand for low-carbon power will mean a second crop for farmers -- one for food, another for energy -- and all from the same field.

11. Cap and Trade& International Trade Unless all the big carbon-intensive economies reduce their emissions – there is little chance for reducing global warming.

12. If the U.S. implements a carbon reduction policy – what about countries that don’t?

13. Energy Secretary Steven Chu:Place tariffs on countries that don’t comply (carbon duties).China has threatened a trade war if faced with carbon duties.

14. Critics say that the U.S. cap and trade will reduce our competitive advantage and hurt our econmy.