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  • African Americans will pay a steep price for Trump’s new solar tariff

    “Now they are back at square one ... I thought that what this was what Trump’s policies were supposed to prevent?”

  • 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, […]

  • How carbon markets work in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative

    With all the hand-wringing over the alleged risk of market manipulation in cap-and-trade, you’d almost forget that the United States already has a carbon cap-and-trade program up and running. But it does. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a regional program among 10 Northeast states, has been auctioning permits, allowing trading on a secondary market, and even, in […]

  • ‘Subprime carbon’: Risk or hype?

    On the announcement that the Clean Energy Jobs (CEJ) bill cleared a key Senate committee last week, Friends of the Earth complained: The bill’s backbone is a poorly regulated carbon trading scheme that entrusts the Wall Street bankers who brought us the current economic crisis with the responsibility to solve global warming. Sheesh. Of course, […]

  • Gaming cap-and-trade: Should we worry?

    Worries about “gaming” or market manipulation sometimes crop up as an objection to cap-and-trade, often with reference to recent shenanigans in the financial markets. Some fear that a cap-and-trade system could be manipulated to artificially raise — or lower — permit prices to generate profits for a few at the expense of consumers. While distrust […]

  • Paul Krugman Versus Matt Taibbi

    I love reading Matt Taibbi. I mean, who else puts together a sentence like this?: The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. Funny and righteous at the same time. Good stuff. But in a piece he […]

  • Have Cap-and-Trade Programs Been

    I’ve got an emerging obsession: the risk of market manipulation in cap and trade programs. It’s something you hear about all the time, at least in carbon policy circles, but the details about “gaming” always seem to be in very short supply. Still, it’s something we should take a close look at because the alleged consequences are […]