cap and trade

Welcome to the audio archive & slides for the first chunk of our green finance summit "How To Save The Planet on A Budget". This first session focuses on carbon: 1. Carbon: Pricing It, Taxing It + Trading It, Moderated by Gernot Wagner Featuring: Janet Peace, Lee Thiessen, Lucas Merrill Brown[read more]

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the United States' first market-based regulatory mechanism to reduce carbon emissions, has completed its 12th quarterly carbon credit auction. The auction [pdf] saw 12,537,000, or 30%, of the 42,034,184 available carbon allowances sold.  25 entities submitted successful bids to acquire...[read more]

The following essay was written by Tad Tietze and Elizabeth Humphrys, and originally published at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website (http://www.abc.net.au/). The opinions expressed in the essay are those of the authors alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Breakthrough Institute. What if one of the biggest...[read more]

The ABC has a look at some of the campaigning over the carbon tax - Carbon's Bill.CHRIS CLARK: But a $26 carbon price has been welcomed by some.JOHN CONNOR, CLIMATE INSTITUTE: Not a bad starting point. It will drive changes in the way in which generation - energy generation - is delivered right now.CHRIS CLARK: But it's not enough for...[read more]

 WindPower 2011 is finishing up today in Anaheim, but I had to cut loose early and get back to the Bay Area. My coverage of Sunday and Monday are available here at The Energy Collective. After being only slightly overwhelmed with the technology and brainpower surging through the convention show floor, I...[read more]

...the more they stay the same. In the year since I started this blog, we've witnessed many substantial changes, events, and progressions on the energy/climate frontier. And yet, on the whole, it seems American policy hasn't evolved much at all. Three examples illustrate this frustrating truth*.As you may have heard, this week is the one...[read more]

Last Thursday I gave a talk at the annual American Association of Geographers meeting in Seattle. The AAG attracts throngs and throngs of academic geographers from around the world. Frankly, the meeting is so big you need to be a geographer to navigate your way to a chosen talk, the subject of which may very well be a Marxist analysis of...[read more]

The confrontation over climate policy that was teed up by the results of last November's mid-term election culminated with the House of Representatives voting overwhelmingly yesterday to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. However, the more crucial votes took place...[read more]

The latest rage in Washington policy discussions these days (that’s relevant to climate change) is renewed interest in renewable electricity standards, this time in the form of so-called “clean energy standards.”  I’ve written about this policy approach recently at this blog (Renewable Energy Standards: Less Effective, More Costly,...[read more]

Carbon prices won't drive the level of energy innovation required to mitigate climate change and fuel sustainable global development, according to a new report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). One of the most influential pieces of conventional wisdom in the energy and climate debate is that a price on...[read more]

By the time I left Australia on Wednesday evening the debate over a carbon price in the economy had reached what I can only describe as fever pitch. It dominated the daily headlines in almost every mainstream newspaper and in Federal parliament it dominated the debate, even resulting in numerous divisions of the House as censure motions...[read more]

The Australian government announces a proposal for an economy wide carbon pricing mechanism, with the intention to transition to an emissions trading system in 3-5 years. But the politocal firestorm that followed was something to behold!![read more]

As the next Congress goes to work in January 2013, this scenario could play out almost purely because it makes the ‘math’ work for a workable fiscal policy. If Barack Obama is re-elected President and Democrats regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives — or not — there almost surely will come a time when federal lawmakers...[read more]

With the recent “shellacking” (as President Obama referred to the election results) of the Democratically controlled Congress, much of the buzz in the cleantech space has been doom and gloom. Is cleantech doomed to a new dark age?[read more]

This week the new Australian Government will sit down again with various society representatives to restart the discussion on emissions policy, with a particular focus on the delivery of a carbon price signal into the economy. These meetings will take place over the next year as a number of policy ideas are considered, but given we are at the start of the process this presents an opportunity to look again at the options. Of course a carbon price is one part of a broader policy framework, which needs to cover a number of very different sectors and also respond to commercial realities such as the development and demonstration of emerging technologies. Whatever the result, the policy approach adopted needs to trigger the implementation of emission reduction projects throughout the economy, with the lowest cost result being delivered by doing the most attractive projects first and progressively moving from left to right across the abatement curve.[read more]