Environmental Defense Fund head says CDM offset system is broken; defends cap-and-trade

In New York, Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said that “the Clean Development Mechanism which provides about 95% of the [carbon] offsets used in the European market, is clearly broken and should be quickly phased out.”  Krupp also defended cap-and-trade, as opposed to a carbon tax, saying that “We can’t find an example of any air-pollution problem ever solved without a quantitative limit on the pollution that can be dumped into the air, and that’s what a cap is. If a [carbon] tax proposal were to be taken seriously, the number of exemptions would be huge; consider our 17,000 page IRS code.”

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