This draft paper, intended for a general audience interested in environmental policy, has been prepared for the Next Generation Project at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. We examine what will be required if market-based environmental policy instruments are to become a major...

Some eighty years ago, economists first proposed the use of corrective taxes to internalize environmental and other externalities. Fifty years later, the portfolio of potential economic-incentive instruments was expanded to include quantity-based mechanisms -- tradeable permits. Thus,...

The possibility of encouraging the growth of forests as a means of sequestering carbon dioxide has received considerable attention because of concerns about the threat of global climate change due to the greenhouse effect. Would this approach be as inexpensive as studies have suggested? We...

California's GHG cap-and-trade program is a key element of policies designed to achieve the goal of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32) to reduce GHG emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. Throughout the process of implementing its GHG cap-and-trade program, ARB has shown an...

The GHG cap-and-trade system is a key element of the policies designed to achieve California's ambitious goal of reducing GHG emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. The cap-and-trade program creates allowances necessary for regulatory compliance that become valuable because of their limited...

Policy makers and analysts are often faced with situations where it is unclear whether market-based instruments hold real promise of reducing costs, relative to conventional uniform standards. We develop analytic expressions that can be employed with modest amounts of information to estimate the...

There is growing impetus for a domestic U.S. climate policy that can provide meaningful reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. I describe and analyze an up- stream, economy-wide CO2 cap-and-trade system which implements a gradual trajectory of emissions reductions (with...

There is growing impetus for a domestic U.S. climate policy that can provide meaningful reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. In this article, I propose and analyze a scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically feasible approach for the United States to...

There is growing impetus for a domestic U.S. climate policy that can provide meaningful reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. I describe and analyze an up- stream, economy-wide CO2 cap-and-trade system which implements a gradual trajectory of emissions reductions (with...

There is growing impetus for a domestic U.S. climate policy that can provide meaningful reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. In this article, I propose and analyze a scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically feasible approach for the United States to...