RE: People don't know what to make of carbon crediI agree Westport , it is obscure but its meant to be . If what happened over in Europe is the template . Carbon credits are a scam that creates a lot of money sloshing around in the system . Men of power , greed and questionable ethics like Gore , Soros and Strong can ( and have ) make fortunes from . Carbon credits can be issued by fiat like US dollars . They can be granted for nothing and churned over and over .
In practical terms my calculations are :
A tonne of diesel contains about 750 kg of carbon , and has a volume of about 1400 litres . Complete combustion of 750 kg carbon creates 2.75 tonnes of CO2 .
So if you were charged $ 25 per tonne carbon it would be about 0.02 per liter . Since natgas has about half the carbon per unit energy as diesel the savings would be 0.01 per liter . So clearly a carbon tax of $ 25.00 tonne won't drive the economics nearly as much as price differential between natgas and diesel . But the purpose of carbon credits is to create a trading vehicle so for the aforementioned fatcats its mission accomplished .
If you were charged for tonnes CO2 rather than just carbon it becomes about 0.075 per liter for a savings of 0.04 per liter . Still not much compared to relative fuel prices .
I don't think carbon credits or taxes are coming to the US anytime soon . The medicare bill was hard enough to get through despite being watered down and built in giveaways to bribe enough votes . With carbon taxation all they can promise is takeaways . Unless of course they water that down , issue trillions of carbon credits , and create a trading market that makes billions for the bigboys . Hey maybe thats what will happen afterall .
regards
G