A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

lessons unlearned 95What do you mean?If the US can offer any model at all for pollution control schemes relevantto global warming, it should not be the 1990 Act which launchedthe sulphur dioxide trading programme, but rather the original USClean Air Act of 1970.Although the theory of tradable permits had been formulated by thelate 1960s, the US’s pioneer 1970 Act had no provisions for pollutiontrading. And it was a good thing that it didn’t, at least with respect tosulphur dioxide. In 1970, there would have been no way of making asulphur dioxide market work, because at the time there was no way ofmeasuring how much sulphur dioxide each firm was releasing at anyparticular time. As one specialist noted, ‘emission measurement technologyis presently inadequate to meet the requirement that a regulatoryagency be able to determine with some precision just how muchan individual polluter is contributing to the atmospheric burden’. 105In 1970, there were only 86 ambient sulphur dioxide monitors in theentire US, and those were only crudely accurate. 106 Monitoring at thepoint of emission was in an even more primitive state.But that means there would have been no way of either verifying independentlywhat each fi rm’s original emissions level was or monitoring emissionsafterwards to fi nd out how much they were exceeding or falling short of theirquotas.Exactly. And even if firms had been allocated quotas, they wouldhave had no means of finding out whether their emissions were inline with them, nor any incentive to do so. So there would have beenno point in allocating different amounts of atmospheric ‘dump space’to each firm to put its sulphur dioxide emissions in.Still less would there have been any ability or incentive on the partof firms buying quotas to verify what they were buying. As DavidDriesen notes,Polluters purchasing emissions allowances have no interest in thequality of the goods. Buyers of blue jeans care about whether theywear out; buyers of pollution reduction credits only care aboutwhether regulators will accept them in lieu of local compliance. 107In short, debits, credits and trading would have been impossible at thetime – as would have been taxes.How did the 1970 law reduce emissions, then?The 1970 Act worked only because it took a different, directly regulatoryapproach. Instead of trying to monitor each firm’s emissions,