The Washington Examiner has a new editorial out on the failures of Europe’s cap and trade system, which begins by noting the impacts here in North Carolina:
Logging was dead in North Carolina a few years ago, but it’s booming now with the timber industry hardly able to meet demand. In West Virginia, mining continues despite falling domestic demand and the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory efforts to shutter the industry permanently.
Big Green environmentalists in America can thank their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic for these developments. European demand for wood and coal is up, but it can’t be satisfied by sources over there due to the European Union’s rigorous limits on greenhouse gases. Those limits have created a series of perverse incentives that have boosted Europe’s carbon-fuel demand instead of reducing it, forcing consumers there to turn elsewhere, including the U.S., for alternative sources.
