The Promise and Problems of Pricing Carbon

Friday, October 21^st was a significant day for climate change policy worldwide and for the use of market-based approaches to environmental protection, but it went largely unnoticed across the country and around the world, outside, that is, of the State of California. On that day, the California Air Resources Board voted unanimously to adopt formally the nation’s most comprehensive cap-and-trade system, intended to provide financial incentives to firms to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, notably carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, to their 1990 level by the year 2020, as part of the implementation of California’s Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Compliance will begin in 2013, eventually covering 85% of the state’s emissions.

This policy for the world’s eighth-largest economy is more ambitious than the much heralded (and much derided) Federal policy proposal – H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey bill – that was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in June of 2009, and then died in the U.S. Senate the following year. With a likely multi-year hiatus on significant climate policy action in Washington now in place, California’s system – which will probably link with similar cap-and-trade systems being developed in Ontario, Quebec, and possibly British Columbia – will itself become the focal point of what may evolve to be the “North American Climate Initiative.”

The Time is Ripe for Reflection

California’s formal adoption of its CO₂ cap-and-trade system is an important milestone on the multinational path to carbon pricing policies, and signals that the time is ripe to reflect on the promise and problems of pricing carbon, which is the title of a new paper that Joe Aldy and I have written for a special issue of the Journal of Environment and Development edited by Thomas Sterner and Maria Damon on “Experience with Environmental Taxation” (“The Promise and Problems of Pricing Carbon: Theory and Experience,” October 27, 2011). [For anyone who is not familiar with my co-author, let me state for the record that Joseph Aldy is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, having come to Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Washington, D.C., where he served, most recently, during 2009 and 2010, as Special Assistant to the President for Energy and Environment. Before that, he was a Fellow at Resources for the Future, the Washington think tank.]

Why Price Carbon?

In a modern economy, nearly all aspects of economic activity affect greenhouse gas – in particular, CO₂ – emissions. Hence, for a climate change policy to be effective, it must affect decisions regarding these diverse activities. This can be done in one of three ways: mandating that businesses and individuals change their behavior; subsidizing businesses and individuals; or pricing the greenhouse gas externality.

As economists and virtually all other policy analysts now recognize, by internalizing the externalities associated with CO₂ emissions, carbon pricing can promote cost-effective abatement, deliver powerful innovation incentives, and – for that matter – ameliorate rather than exacerbate government fiscal problems. [See the concise and compelling argument made by Yale Professor William Nordhaus in his essay, “Energy: Friend or Enemy?” in The New York Review of Books, October 27, 2011.]

By pricing CO₂ emissions (or, more likely, by pricing the carbon content of the three fossil fuels – coal, petroleum, and natural gas), governments wisely defer to private firms and individuals to find and exploit the lowest cost ways to reduce emissions and invest in the development of new technologies, processes, and ideas that could further mitigate emissions.

Can Market-Based Instruments Really Work?

Market-based instruments have been used with considerable success in other environmental domains, as well as for pricing CO₂ emissions. The U.S. sulfur dioxide (SO₂) cap-and-trade program cut U.S. power plant SO₂ emissions more than 50 percent after 1990, and resulted in compliance costs one half of what they would have been under conventional regulatory mandates.

The success of the SO₂ allowance trading program motivated the design and implementation of the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS), the world’s largest cap-and-trade program, focused on cutting CO₂ emissions from power plants and large manufacturing facilities throughout Europe. The U.S. lead phase-down of gasoline in the 1980s, by reducing the lead content per gallon of fuel, served as an early, effective example of a tradable performance standard. These and other positive experiences provide motivation for considering market-based instruments as potential approaches to mitigating GHG emissions.

What Policy Instruments Can be Used for Carbon Pricing?

In our paper, Joe Aldy and I critically examine the five generic policy instruments that could conceivably be employed by regional, national, or even sub-national governments for carbon pricing: carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, emission reduction credits, clean energy standards, and fossil fuel subsidy reduction. Having written about these approaches many times in previous essays at this blog, today I will simply direct the reader to those previous posts or, better yet, to the paper we’ve written for the Journal of Environment and Development.

Although it is natural to think and talk about carbon pricing using the future tense, a few carbon pricing regimes are already in place.

Regional, National, and Sub-National Experiences with Carbon Pricing

Explicit carbon pricing policy regimes currently in place include the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS); the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the northeast United States; New Zealand’s cap-and-trade system; the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism; a number of northern European carbon tax policies; British Columbia’s carbon tax; and Alberta’s tradable carbon performance standard (similar to a clean energy standard). We describe and assess all of these in our paper.

Also, the Japanese Voluntary Emissions Trading System has operated since 2006 (Japan is considering a compulsory emissions trading system), and Norway operated its own emissions trading system for several years before joining the EU ETS in 2008. Legislation to establish cap-and-trade systems is under debate in Australia (combined with a carbon tax for an initial three-year period) and in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. And, of course, California is now committed to launching its own GHG cap-and-trade system.

International Coordination Will Be Needed

Of course, climate change is truly a global commons problem: the location of greenhouse gas emissions has no effect on the global distribution of damages. Hence, free-riding problems plague unilateral and multilateral approaches, because mitigation costs are likely to exceed direct benefits for virtually all countries. Cost-effective international policies – insuring that countries get the most environmental benefit out of their mitigation investments – will help promote participation in an international climate policy regime.

In principle, internationally-employed market-based instruments can achieve overall cost effectiveness. Three basic routes stand out. First, countries could agree to apply the same tax on carbon (harmonized domestic taxes) or adopt a uniform international tax. Second, the international policy community could establish a system of international tradable permits, – effectively a nation-state level cap-and-trade program. In its simplest form, this represents the Kyoto Protocol’s Annex B emission targets and the Article 17 trading mechanism. Third and most likely, a more decentralized system of internationally-linked domestic cap-and-trade programs could ensure internationally cost-effective emission mitigation. We examine the merits and the problems associated with each of these means of international coordination in the paper.

What Lies in the Future?

In reality, political responses in most countries to proposals for market-based approaches to climate policy have been and will continue to be largely a function of issues and factors that transcend the scope of environmental and climate policy. Because a truly meaningful climate policy – whether market-based or conventional in design – will have significant impacts on economic activity in a wide variety of sectors and in every region of a country, proposals for these policies inevitably bring forth significant opposition, particularly during difficult economic times.

In the United States, political polarization – which began some four decades ago, and accelerated during the economic downturn – has decimated what had long been the key political constituency in the Congress for environmental action, namely, the middle, including both moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats. Whereas Congressional debates about environmental and energy policy had long featured regional politics, they are now fully and simply partisan. In this political maelstrom, the failure of cap-and-trade climate policy in the U.S. Senate in 2010 was essentially collateral damage in a much larger political war.

It is possible that better economic times will reduce the pace – if not the direction – of political polarization. It is also possible that the ongoing challenge of large budgetary deficits in many countries will increase the political feasibility of new sources of revenue. When and if this happens, consumption taxes (as opposed to traditional taxes on income and investment) could receive heightened attention, and primary among these might be energy taxes, which can be significant climate policy instruments, depending upon their design.

That said, it is probably too soon to predict what the future will hold for the use of market-based policy instruments for climate change. Perhaps the two decades we have experienced of relatively high receptivity in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world to cap-and-trade and offset mechanisms will turn out to be no more than a relatively brief departure from a long-term trend of reliance on conventional means of regulation. It is also possible, however, that the recent tarnishing of cap-and-trade in U.S. political dialogue will itself turn out to be a temporary departure from a long-term trend of increasing reliance on market-based environmental policy instruments. It is much too soon to say.

A Wave of the Future: International Linkage of National Climate Change Policies

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, but Politically Preferred to Cap-and-Trade?, January 11, 2011), and will do so again in the near future, but for today I want to turn to an important issue – for the long term – on the related topic of the international dimensions of climate change policy.

The Current State of Affairs

Despite the death in the U.S. Senate last year of serious consideration of an economy-wide cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions – and the apparent political hiatus of such consideration at least until after the November 2012 elections – a major cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is in place in the European Union; similar systems are in place or under development in New Zealand, California, and several Canadian provinces; systems are being considered at the national level in Australia, Canada, and Japan; and a global emission reduction credit scheme – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – has an enthusiastic and important constituency of supporters in the form of the world’s developing countries.

So, despite the fact that there has been an undeniable loss of momentum due to recent political developments in Australia, Japan, and the United States, it remains true that cap-and-trade is still the most likely domestic policy approach for CO₂ emissions reductions throughout the industrialized world, given the rather unattractive set of available alternative approaches. This makes it important to think about the possibility of linking these national and regional cap-and-trade systems in the future. Such linking occurs when the government that maintains one system allows regulated entities to use allowances or credits from other systems to meet compliance obligations.

Thinking About Linkage

In 2007, with support from the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Judson Jaffe and I analyzed the opportunities and challenges presented by linking tradable permit systems. Jaffe was then at Analysis Group in Boston, and is now at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. We presented our findings at the thirteenth Conference of the Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia, in December, 2007. In 2010, Matthew Ranson (a Ph.D. student in Public Policy at Harvard), Jaffe, and I expanded on these ideas in an article that was published in Ecology Law Quarterly, “Linking Tradable Permit Systems: A Key Element of Emerging International Climate Policy.” In today’s blog post, I summarize the highlights of this complex, yet important topic.

First, for anyone new to this territory, let me review the basic facts. Tradable permit systems fall into two categories: cap-and-trade and emission reduction credits. Under cap-and-trade (CAT), the total emissions of regulated sources are capped and the sources are required to hold allowances equal to their emissions. Under a credit system, entities that voluntarily undertake emission reduction projects are awarded credits that can be sold to participants in cap-and-trade systems.

The Merits of Linking

By broadening markets for allowances and credits, linking increases the liquidity and improves the functioning of markets. Linking can reduce the costs of the linked systems by making it possible to shift emission reductions across systems. Just as allowance trading within a system allows higher-cost emission reductions to be replaced by lower-cost reductions, trading across systems allows higher-cost reductions in one system to be replaced by lower-cost reductions in another system.

Other Implications

Along with the cost savings it can offer, linking has other implications that warrant serious consideration. Under some circumstances, linked systems collectively will not achieve the same level of emission reductions as they would absent linking. This can result either from a link’s impact on emissions under the linked systems, or from its impact on emissions leakage from those systems. Linking also has distributional impacts across and within systems. And linking can reduce the control that a country has over the impacts of its tradable permit system. In particular, when a domestic CAT system is linked with another CAT system, decisions by the government overseeing the other system can influence the domestic system’s allowance price, distributional impacts, and emissions.

By the way, linkage can also occur among a heterogeneous set of domestic policy instruments, including carbon taxes and various types of regulation, although the linking is more challenging under such circumstances. On this, see “Linking Policies When Tastes Differ: Global Climate Policy in a Heterogeneous World,” a discussion paper by Gilbert Metcalf, Department of Economics, Tufts University, and David Weisbach, University of Chicago Law School, for the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.

Concerns About Linking

Importantly, trading brought about by unrestricted links between CAT systems will lead to the automatic propagation of certain design elements, including: offset provisions and linkages with other systems; banking and borrowing of allowances across time; and safety-valve provisions. If these provisions, sometimes characterized as cost-containment measures, are present in one of the linked systems, they will automatically be made available to participants in the other system.

In the near-term, some links will be more attractive and easier to establish than others. Given the design-element propagation implications of two-way links between cap-and-trade systems, to facilitate such links it may be necessary to harmonize some design elements. And in some cases, it may be necessary to establish broader international agreements governing aspects of the design of linked cap-and-trade systems beyond mutual recognition of allowances.

An Emerging De Facto International Climate Policy Architecture?

Whereas some two-way links between cap-and-trade systems may thus take more time to establish, in the near-term one-way links between cap-and-trade and credit systems likely will be more attractive and easier to establish. A one-way link with a credit system may offer a cap-and-trade system greater cost savings than a two-way link with another cap-and-trade system. Also, such one-way links can only reduce allowance prices in the cap-and-trade system, giving a government greater control over its system than if it established a two-way link with another cap-and-trade system. The additionality problem is an important concern associated with such links, but it can be managed – to some degree – through the criteria established for awarding or recognizing credits.

Most important, if emerging cap-and-trade systems link with a common credit system, such as the CDM, this will create indirect links among the cap-and-trade systems. Through the indirect links that they create, such one-way linkages can achieve much of the near-term cost savings and risk diversification that direct two-way links among cap-and-trade systems would achieve. And they can do this without requiring the same foundation that likely would be needed to establish direct two-way links, such as harmonization of cost-containment measures. Such linkage may well emerge as part of the de facto post-Kyoto international climate policy architecture, and is fully consistent with the bottom-up, decentralized approach of the Cancun Agreements.

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For much more detailed discussions, here are some publications available on the web that describe various aspects of linkage:

Jaffe, Judson, Matthew Ranson, and Robert Stavins. “Linking Tradable Permit Systems: A Key Element of Emerging International Climate Policy Architecture.” Ecology Law Quarterly 36(2010):789-808.

Jaffe, Judson, and Robert Stavins. “Linkage of Tradable Permit Systems in International Climate Policy Architecture.” The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, Discussion Paper 08-07, Cambridge, Massachusetts, September, 2008.

Jaffe, Judson, and Robert Stavins. Linking a U.S. Cap-and-Trade System for Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Opportunities, Implications, and Challenges. Washington, D.C.: AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, January 2008.

Jaffe, Judson, and Robert Stavins. Linking Tradable Permit Systems for Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Opportunities, Implications, and Challenges. Prepared for the International Emissions Trading Association, Geneva, Switzerland. November, 2007.

Also, this issue of linkage among tradable permit systems has come up previously in a number of my essays at this blog:

AB 32, RGGI, and Climate Change: The National Context of State Policies for a Global Commons Problem

The Real Options for U.S. Climate Policy

What Hath Copenhagen Wrought? A Preliminary Assessment of the Copenhagen Accord

Only Private Sector Can Meet Finance Demands of Developing Countries

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Worried About International Competitiveness? Another Look at the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade Proposal

Renewable Energy Standards: Less Effective, More Costly, but Politically Preferred to Cap-and-Trade?

The new Congress is beginning to consider various alternative energy and climate policies in the wake of last year’s collapse in the U.S. Senate of consideration of a meaningful, economy-wide CO₂ cap-and-trade scheme. Among the options receiving attention are various types of renewable portfolio standards, also known as renewable electricity standards or clean energy standards, depending upon their specific design. These approaches, which focus exclusively on one sector of the economy, would be less effective than a comprehensive cap-and-trade approach, would be more costly per unit of what is achieved, and yet – ironically – appear to be much more attractive to some politicians who strenuously opposed cap-and-trade.

True enough, these standards can be designed in a variety of ways, some of which are better and some of which are worse. But the better their design (as a CO₂ reducing policy), the closer they come to the much-demonized cap-and-trade approach.

In an op-ed which appeared on November 24^th in The Huffington Post (click here for link to the original op-ed), Richard Schmalensee and I reflected on this irony. Rather than summarize (or expand on) our op-ed, I simply re-produce it below as it was published by The Huffington Post, with some hyperlinks added for interested readers.

For anyone who is not familiar with Dick Schmalensee, please note that he is the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Economics and Management at MIT, where he served as the Dean of the Sloan School of Management from 1998 to 2007. Also, he served as a Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in the George H. W. Bush administration from 1989 to 1991. By the way, in a previous blog post, I featured a different op-ed that Dick and I wrote in The Boston Globe in July of last year (“Beware of Scorched-Earth Strategies in Climate Debates”).

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Renewable Irony

by Richard Schmalensee and Robert Stavins

The Huffington Post, November 24, 2010

One day after the election, the White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that a national renewable electricity standard could be an area of bipartisan energy cooperation, after President Obama had said cap-and-trade was not the only way “to skin the cat.” It is ironic that while cap-and-trade — a sensible approach to reducing carbon dioxide emissions linked with climate change — is dead and buried in the Senate, considerable support has emerged for an approach that would be both less effective and more costly. A national renewable electricity standard would mandate that a given share of an electric company’s production come from renewable sources (most likely wind power), or, in the case of a “clean energy standard,” from an expanded list including nuclear and hydroelectric power.

One irony is that cap-and-trade is a market-based approach to environmental protection, which harnesses the power of the marketplace to reduce costs imposed on business and consumers, an approach championed by Republican presidents beginning with Ronald Reagan. Within its narrow domain, the renewable standard approach, which involves nationwide trading of renewable energy credits, is also market-based. Whereas cap-and-trade would raise the cost of fossil fuel, as its opponents have stressed so effectively, renewable standards would raise the cost of electricity, which its supporters seem reluctant to admit. If renewables really were cheaper, even with Federal subsidies, it wouldn’t take regulation to get utilities to use them.

A second source of irony is that renewable or clean electricity standards are a very expensive way to reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions — much more expensive than cap-and-trade. These standards would only affect electricity, thereby omitting about 60 percent of U.S. CO₂ emissions. And even then, the standards would provide limited incentives to substitute away from coal, the most carbon-intensive way to generate electricity. Even more problematic, renewable/clean electricity standards would provide absolutely no incentives to reduce CO₂ emissions from heating buildings, running industrial processes, or transporting people and goods. And unlike cap-and-trade, which would also affect oil consumption, the electricity standards would make no contribution to energy security. Only a very tiny fraction of U.S. oil consumption is used to generate electricity.

Increasing renewable electricity generation is no more than a means to an end for one part of the economy. Cap-and-trade keeps our eyes on the prize: moving the entire economy toward climate-friendly energy generation and use.

Those who believe that renewable electricity standards would create a huge number of green jobs have forgotten the lesson of Detroit: a large domestic market does not guarantee a healthy domestic industry. At the end of 2008, for instance, the U.S. led the world in installed wind generation capacity, but half of new installations that year were accounted for by imports. And a recent Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory study of the impacts of the economic stimulus package incentives for renewable electricity investments estimated that about 40 percent of the (gross) jobs created by new wind-energy investments were outside the United States, where many wind turbines are manufactured.

A sounder approach, for those concerned about green jobs, would focus on the long-term determinants of economic growth, such as technological innovation. That’s where cap-and-trade — which creates broad-based incentives for technology innovation — holds another edge over renewable electricity standards.

It is often argued that if cap-and-trade is dead, enacting renewable or clean electricity standards is better than doing nothing at all about climate change. While that argument has some merit, since the risks of doing nothing are substantial, there is a real danger that enacting these standards will create the illusion that we have done something serious to address climate change. Worse yet, it could create a favored set of businesses that will oppose future adoption of more efficient, serious, broad-based policies — like cap-and-trade.

If a national renewable electricity standard is nonetheless inevitable, it should not impose excess costs on businesses or consumers. It should pre-empt state renewable portfolio standards, since with a national standard in place, states’ programs simply impose extra costs on their citizens without affecting national use of renewables at all. And any national program should allow unlimited banking to encourage early investments. No environmental or economic purpose is served by limiting banking to two years, as current Senate legislation would do.

Carbon cap-and-trade has been killed in the Senate, presumably because of its costs. Renewable electricity standards or clean energy standards would accomplish considerably less and would impose much higher costs per ton of emissions reduction than cap-and-trade would. This does not sound like a step forward.

Richard Schmalensee is the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Economics and Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Robert N. Stavins is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.