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

lessons unlearned 97reaching, uniform and accurate system of measurement and monitoring.Although, as Marc Roberts observes, ‘[w]hen economists discusssuch matters as emissions trading they sometimes talk as if monitoringdevices were widely available to cheaply and reliably record theamount of all pollution emissions’, 114 such devices can’t be taken forgranted. If they are not available, giving polluters pollution quotasmakes little sense.So this is one of those cases in which emissions trading would have been inefficient, not effi cient.Yes. Although measurement technologies improved (there were sixtimes as many ambient concentration monitors in 1977 as in 1970, andthey were more reliable), they weren’t good enough or cheap enoughto support an efficient trading system (or taxes) until much later. Thefirst continuous emissions monitoring systems (CEMs) became availableonly in 1975, and it was only the succeeding two decades of furthertechnological development that made sulphur dioxide tradingpossible in the 1990s. Today, CEMs used by major SO 2 sources arecapable of collecting data every fifteen minutes, and real-time datafrom every plant are sent via computer to Environmental ProtectionAgency headquarters in Washington. 115 The whole process is fullyauto mated, minimising opportunities for cheating. On-site inspectionsare also made periodically. 116In sum, the sulphur dioxide market was less a matter of Congresssuddenly grasping the economic theory of tradeable permits than ofa change in the technological and institutional conditions that madea market possible. 117With respect to measurement of production and absorption of carbondioxide and other greenhouse gases, the United Nations today isin a position similar to that the US was in 1970 with sulphur dioxide– only worse.Like Marc Roberts’s naïve economic theorists, the framers of theKyoto Protocol ‘simply presumed that a trading system would providea lower cost mechanism than traditional command and controlfor meeting the Protocol’s goal’ 118 without looking carefully atwhether the conditions for such a market – and thus for such savings –existed. As quickly became clear, the measurement systems requiredfor the Kyoto market were simply not there.In fact, the prospects of a quantification system robust enough to supportproperty rights in a market are even less promising for the KyotoProtocol than they were for a sulphur dioxide trading system in theUS in 1970.