collision detection: Cap-and-trade your Hummer

August 17, 2005

Cap-and-trade your Hummer

How can you turn a massive, fuel-chewing Hummer into a zero-emissions vehicle? By buying "pollution credits" -- via this wacky new company called TerraPass. The concept works the same way that the "cap and trade" emissions-trading system works between companies and countries: If you pollute more than you're supposed to, you can buy a "credit" from someone who has voluntarily reduced their emissions to a nice green level. Theoretically, this keeps pollution to a regulated, accepted level, and encourages firms to voluntarily buy new superefficient technologies that reduce their emissions, because they can offset those costs by selling pollution credits.

Now TerraPass offers this deal -- for cars. As a story in CNN reports:

The stickers TerraPass sends its customers do nothing to stop pollutants from coming out of a car's tailpipe. Instead, the company offers its customers the chance to reduce pollutants from other sources, like power plants, in an amount equivalent to that produced by their car.
That way, you can drive your car while having no net effect on the amount of pollution in the air, the company says.

Apparently, it only costs $160 to effectively render your Hummer into a zero-emissions vehicle. Which to me is where you can see the fissures in this scheme -- because I'm pretty sure that if you calculated the amount of carbon a Hummer spits out in its lifetime, it'd cost quite a lot more than $160 to remove it from the air. I'm sure the cost will go down as carbon-sequestration technology improves -- and part of the goal of cap-and-trade schemes is to encourage the development and adoption of better sequestration tech, of course, so you could argue that we gotta start somewhere. Taken on its own terms, TerraPass is a pretty clever idea, I'd say.

But they've only sold 620 passes so far -- and most were bought by eco-freaks who already buy super-low-emission cars. As founder Tom Arnold notes: "We fully expected to target SUV drivers with SUV guilt," but "it just doesn't exist."

Posted by Clive Thompson at August 17, 2005 11:02 AM

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Comments

Sounds like a good idea at face value, but I would think people who buy Stupidly Unnecessary Vehicles don't actually give a damn about the environment, hence their choice of autombile.

But there is a sense of justice watching SUV owners fuming as gasoline pushes past $1 a litre (sorry, Canadian here) and it costs more than $100 to fill up that symbol of their lack of manhood.

Posted by: Dusty Bear at August 17, 2005 11:55 AM

Heh.

Posted by: Clive at August 17, 2005 12:10 PM

"Which to me is where you can see the fissures in this scheme -- because I'm pretty sure that if you calculated the amount of carbon a Hummer spits out in its lifetime, it'd cost quite a lot more than $160 to remove it from the air."

But it might cost less than $160 to fix a broken exhaust port at some factory which, unfixed, is going to emit much more exhaust than the Hummer would. So TP could still be successful at reducing total global emissions compared to if TP had not existed, which is admirable.

Drew Perttula

(I'm skirting your login system because it's a hassle)

Posted by: apb at August 17, 2005 12:47 PM

Good point! I didn't mean to bash the concept of cap-and-trade, which obviously has shown utility in the real world. But cap-and-trade only has long-term environmental utility if the goalposts gradually move higher -- i.e. the system aims every year to reduce emissions further and further, making it necessary to buy increasingly more credits per unit of pollution, and thus driving the adoption ever-better technologies.

Posted by: Clive at August 17, 2005 1:08 PM

Clive - as one of those wacky eco-freaks you mentioned, I purchased an eco-pass for my Subaru a month or two ago, when Terrapass first hit the news. There is a misconception in your post - the sticker/pass is a yearly renewal thing. I spent, I think, $80 on my Terrapass to offset the carbon emissions from driving my car about 20K miles/year. To continue offsetting emissions, I would have to renew the pass next year, and so on.

As to the "eco-freak" label, I don't really see it as that freaky that someone would want to take an alternate route to reducing emissions. Certainly I don't defend people that commute in Hummers, but I have a subaru wagon that gets 25-30mpg, and I need the space and the all-wheel drive. I know it's no Prius, but it's not bad. On the other hand, it's not as nice as my motorcycles which get 45+mpg, so when I heard about the Terrapass, I decided it seemed like a good way of doing my piece to take care of an environment that I car about.

Gabe

Posted by: gabriel kostolny at August 17, 2005 1:52 PM

"doing my piece to take care of an environment that I car about."

Pun intended?

Posted by: braine at August 17, 2005 2:31 PM

Gabe -- I actually meant "eco-freak" as a positive term, BTW! Of course, right-wingers usually use it in a derogatory way, but I nearly always use the work "freak" as a term of approval.

Thanks for clarifying the annual nature of the fee, too. In that case, $160 a year does probably come much, much closer to representing the actual cost of sequestering that much carbon for a Hummer for a year!

Posted by: Clive at August 17, 2005 4:03 PM