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

96 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingit insisted that each firm install technology of a certain standard. Aslong as each firm did so, the government could be assured that someemissions reductions were being made, even if it could not preciselymeasure them, because officials could easily visit each installation andsee whether the right technology was in place. In the early 1970s, forinstance, the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District managedto inspect the technology at every major source once a month, ata time when it would not have been possible for it to monitor pointsourceemissions for all regulated pollutants at finite cost. 108Pollution trading theorists might assume that this approach was necessarilyless efficient in achieving the Act’s goals than trading wouldhave been. But, in context, it was more efficient, given the state of pollutionmeasurement at the time. 109 Trying to trade would have been,in effect, infinitely costly, due to the lack of the necessary measurementtechnology. 110 With technology-based regulation, on the otherhand, the technology itself was the monitoring device. As Michael T.Maloney and Bruce Yandle explain, ‘If the approved technique wasin place, and working order documented, emission control was beingaccomplished.’ 111 Similarly, the Corporate Average Fuel Economyregulation enacted by the US Congress in 1975, which doubled autoefficiency, did not prove either ‘costly, inefficient or unsafe’. 112This points up a general lesson summarised by Daniel Cole: ‘[The]comparative efficiency of alternative environmental instruments cannotbe determined in isolation from the institutional and technologicalcircumstances in which they operate.’ 113 Trading systems are‘quantification-heavy’. They can’t reduce the costs of achieving anemissions reduction goal except in the presence of an extensive, far-Oil extractionin the US.