3 ms·
There's always a better system on paper. The Kyoto protocol with quotas and CO2 trading was decided on 1997. It was modeled after the successful sulphur emissi
by Gravityloss 5y ago
There's always a better system on paper. The Kyoto protocol with quotas and CO2 trading was decided on 1997.
It was modeled after the successful sulphur emissions trading, at the insistence of USA.
And even with that, it's been hard to get it through internationally.
So one way to actually cause delay and harm is to just always propose scrapping what's halfway built and go for the next system.
Rio in 1992, Kyoto in 1997, Cancun 2010, Paris 2015 https://www.cfr.org/timeline/un-climate-talks https://www.cfr.org/timeline/un-climate-talks
- eru 5y agoCap-and-trade has a lot of appeal from a mechanism design point of view. But I suspect that in practice it's harder to make work than a simple tax. In a perfect world, a tax can do everything that cap-and-trade can do and vice versa. They are basically dual approaches. 'Dual' in the linear programming sense of the word. On paper, it looks like cap-and-trade would be easier to make work. But in practice, politicians seem to like handing out permits for too cheap? A tax that generates revenue might be easier to get right? Perhaps a proper cap-and-trade system should auction off all permits every year, instead of handing them out to grand-fathered polluters?
- throwaway346434 5y agoIts really not. Australia's carbon tax was simple, and worked. It only failed to take into account crony capitalism and ideological actors.
- Gravityloss 5y agoYou can go to zero-quota cap-and-trade. I tried to find easy to read information on how has it worked so far but I couldn't find anything on the right level. If there's a carbon trading expert here, I would really appreciate some layman appropriate (international law perspective) links.