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I have some knowledge of this area. So the basic problem with acid rain was that the acidity was freeing trace amounts of aluminum in the soil, causing widespre
by Alex3917 10y ago
I have some knowledge of this area. So the basic problem with acid rain was that the acidity was freeing trace amounts of aluminum in the soil, causing widespread deaths of trees and fish. (There are other mechanisms also, but that was one of the primary ones.)
The solution was the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, which made cap & trade the law of the land. This law placed a legal limit on the total amount of SO2 and NOx that society can release into the atmosphere. Further, by allowing companies to trade their emissions allotments, they created a mechanism that dramatically reduced the cost to society of making these reductions by creating enormous financial incentives to reward the companies that figured out the least expensive ways to reduce these emissions.
This is one of the most successful environmental laws of all time. To quote the EPA:
"We estimate that the annual dollar value of benefits of air
quality improvements will be very large, and will grow over time as emissions control programs take their full effect, reaching a level of approximately $2.0 trillion in 2020. These benefits will be achieved as a result of CAAA-related programs and regulatory compliance actions estimated to cost approximately $65 billion in 2020. Most of these benefits (about 85 percent) are attributable to reductions in premature mortality associated with reductions in ambient particulate matter; as a result, we estimate that cleaner air will, by 2020, prevent 230,000 cases of premature mortality in that year."[1]
[1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-07/documents/fullreport_rev_a.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-07/documents...
- j2kun 10y agoIs there a good reason we can't implement the same system for other types of emissions, such as, say, CO2?
- Alex3917 10y agoThere's no reason it can't be used to fix climate change, and in fact cap & trade is the only type of law that's ever actually fixed any air pollution problem in real life. But for various reasons congress is preventing cap & trade from getting implemented at the federal level. And while Hillary Clinton supports a carbon tax, this doesn't actually impose any legally binding cap on carbon pollution, nor does it incentivize the entrepreneurs who are able to invent new technologies to get the biggest reductions for the least money. One place it is working though is with fisheries. Today the majority of US commercial fisheries are managed using cap & trade (called 'catch shares'), and the work is being done to get 70% of the world's commercial fisheries managed this way be 2020: https://www.edf.org/oceans/how-turn-around-overfishing-crisis https://www.edf.org/oceans/how-turn-around-overfishing-crisi...
- skybrian 10y agoIt seems like either a carbon tax or cap-and-trade would spur innovation. Why do you think one would spur more innovation that than the other?
- b34r 10y agoA tax is simply a deterrent, where c&t is an opportunity to make a boatload of money selling your credits to a carbon hog while simultaneously improving the state of the art for co2 emission reduction to free up more credits to be sold/bartered.
- skybrian 10y agoA tax provides an incentive to make money too, because it's an expense that businesses can optimize. Businesses that are better at cutting carbon output either become more profitable or gain market share (through lower prices than their competitors). It's also an opportunity for businesses that sell equipment to reduce carbon output.
- BurningFrog 10y agoAlmost all economists agree that a CO₂ tax is the best way to minimise those emissions. According to something I read that seemed credible (I know...), this is politically impossible to get through congress without exempting most major CO₂ producers.
- dTal 10y ago"Too big to regulate." Scary stuff.