Posted on Saturday, 15th January 2011 by Emily Smith
LAST week, I had an extended Twitter debate, which is not easy to do, with environmental writer David Roberts of the green site Grist (full disclosure: I have contributed to Grist in the past). The trigger for the debate was this piece, by Richard Schmalensee and Robert Stavins, on the relative merits of a cap-and-trade policy versus a renewable energy standard (RES). With the former, a cap is set on carbon emissions, the right to emit a certain amount of carbon under the cap is auctioned off or otherwise allocated, and those rights can then be traded on the open market. With the latter, power companies are simply required to generate a certain percentage of their energy output from renewable sources. There may also be a market component to the RES policy; firms can trade green energy credits, much as they’d trade carbon credits under a cap-and-trade plan.
The systems may sound similar, but as Mssrs Schmalensee and Stavins point out they have different impacts:
[R]enewable or clean electricity standards are a very expensive way to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions — much more expensive than cap-and-trade.
Tags: Green, Green Jobs
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