Articles by Eric de Place
Eric de Place is a senior researcher at Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based sustainability think tank.
All Articles
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Common Sense Regulations For Carbon Markets
With all the concern about carbon trading, it’s worth pointing out that there are some common sense solutions to the risk of carbon market manipulation. Foremost among these solutions is restricting trading to regulated exchanges (such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which handled agricultural futures) and banning unregulated, or lightly-regulated, “over-the-counter” trading. In a later post, […]
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Cantwell’s cap-and-trade bill: almost genius
Sen. Maria Cantwel (D-Wash.)To borrow Dave Eggers’ book title, the novel approach to cap and trade proposed by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Genius, because it is an innovative plan to create a best-case version of cap and trade. And heartbreaking, because by design and by omission it undermines […]
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A global perspective on U.S. climate emissions
To mark the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, I’m trotting out some maps I made a while back. This one has states labeled with the names of countries that are their greenhouse gas equivalents. In other words, Oregon is responsible for the same level of climate emissions as Ireland; Wyoming is the greenhouse gas equivalent of Vietnam, and so […]
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How James Hansen gets cap-and-trade wrong
Climate scientist James Hansen has gone on the warpath against cap-and-trade. (See this op-ed in the NYT, among other recent examples.) Perhaps what’s most alarming is that, for all his intelligence, Hansen doesn’t appear to grasp even the basic elements of cap-and-trade systems. In a blog post last weekend, economist Paul Krugman took him to task: … […]
