Until government can show that it can monitor and enforce limits, emissions trading should not be implemented. An emissions trading system has no inherent, built-in incentives to reduce pollution. Unless the system requires an annual decrease in the total pollution allowed, emissions trading will simply lock in today's pollution levels. Polluters need a constant incentive to reduce their discharges toward zero, but emissions trading inherently offers no such incentives. In accord with the principle that the polluter should pay, polluters should be required to absorb the costs of the entire pollution control system.
Present systems give away the store to the polluters.
See pages 202-203. Even if one is a teetotaler or a vegetarian that level of affluence is desirable, and would serve by itself to rule out populations at or above today's level. What really must be stabilized is total consumption, which of course is population times per capita consumption. Both of the latter factors must be reduced. Dr. Makhijani describes a situation in India in which a pollution permit program might increase, not decrease, pollution.