Carbon Equivalence not Good Enough

An article by Jeffrey Ball in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, prompted by the UN global warming conference starting in Bali, reports extensively without criticism on the defect in the cap and trade system that while it reduces global warming gas output (like HFC-23, which is 11,700 as potent per unit mass as CO2), it hasn't much affected CO2 output. There is fretting that the market reduces global warming gasses most cheaply per CO2 equivalent unit, without regard to whether actual CO2 production is reduced.

The only way I can make sense of this is that there's an implicit idea that were CO2 reduced, it would be the result of technology improvements that would come in discrete steps of sufficient size that more than the targeted amount would have been achieved or that those improvements would reduce the future cost of improvements in CO2 reduction technology. I don't know of any reason to think this. CO2 is 77% of all CO2 equivalents and is produced in many ways some of which may be much more expensive to affect and via a much different manner than others (eg., nuclear energy works better for electricity than for the current stock of cars).

The article notes that most of the HFC-23 reduction that can be had is already set to be had, so that further reductions will come from other gasses, thus eliminating the problem that the article finds with the reduction's coming from HFC-23 (methane also looks a little overrepresented but not by much).