I had the good fortune to be involved with some very smart activists back in the 1980s who were working on acid rain. One of these was the Environmental Defense Fund’s senior scientist Michael Oppenheimer. Michael’s been at Princeton for a number of years and among his many projects, he co-curated the compelling climate change exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. He and Nathaniel Keohane, EDF’s Director of Economic Policy and Analysis, wrote a cogent case for cap-and-trade here at the Huff-Po a couple of weeks ago. Their four main reasons: environmental certainty; international opportunity; the market, not the government, sets the price; and political viability. See their explanation of how these play.
This article is a terrific complement to Robert Stavins’s article, The Wonderful Politics of Cap-and-Trade: A Closer Look at Waxman-Markey, that I referenced here at the end of May. (See under The Wonk Zone.)
To get a sense of the history of cap-and-trade, you can read this succinct and absorbing story at Smithsonian Magazine in which “an unlikely mix of environmentalists and free-market conservatives” worked together to create the mechanism that radically reduced the North American acid rain problem. Cap-and-trade now stands poised to do so much of the really heavy lifting on reducing greenhouse gases.
