The Second Term of the Obama Administration

In his inaugural address on January 21st, President Obama surprised many people – including me – by the intensity and the length of his comments on global climate change.  Since then, there has been a great deal of discussion in the press and in the blogosphere about what climate policy initiatives will be forthcoming from the administration in its second term.

Given all the excitement, let’s first take a look at the transcript of what the President actually said on this topic:

            We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.  The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But American cannot resist this transition.  We must lead it.  We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries.  We must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure, our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow capped peaks.  That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.

Strong and plentiful words.  Although I was certainly surprised by the strength and length of what the President said in his address, I confess that it did not change my thinking about what we should expect from the second term.  Indeed, I will stand by an interview that was published by the Harvard Kennedy School on its website five days before the inauguration (plus something I wrote in a previous essay at this blog in December, 2012).  Here it is, with a bit of editing to clarify things, and some hyperlinks inserted to help readers.

The Second Term: Robert Stavins on Energy and Environmental Policy

January 16, 2013

By Doug Gavel, Harvard Kennedy School Communications

President Obama’s second term in office began on Inauguration Day, January 21st, and the list of policy challenges facing his administration is daunting. Aside from the difficult task of addressing the nation’s economic woes, the president and his administration will also deal with the increasing complexities of global climate change, a rapidly changing energy market, entitlement and tax reform, healthcare reform, and the repercussions from the still simmering “Arab Spring.” Throughout this month, we will solicit the viewpoints of a variety of HKS faculty members to provide a range of perspectives on the promise and pitfalls of The Second Term.

We spoke with Robert Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, and Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, about energy and environmental policy issues the president will face in the next four years.

Q: What are the top priorities for a second Obama administration in energy and environmental policy?

A: The Obama administration faces a number of impending challenges in the energy and environmental policy realm in its second term, which I would characterize – in very general terms – as finding balance among three competing factors: (1) demands from some constituencies for more aggressive environmental policies; (2) demands from other constituencies – principally in the Congress – for progress on so-called “energy security;” and (3) recognition that nothing meaningful is likely to happen if the country’s economic problems are not addressed.

Q: What will be the potential challenges/roadblocks in the way of implementing those top priorities?

A: The key challenge the administration faces in its second term as it attempts to achieve some balance among these three competing objectives is the reality of a very high degree of political polarization in the two houses of Congress.

The numbers are dramatic.  For example, when the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 that established the landmark SO2 allowance trading system were being considered in the U.S. Congress, political support was not divided on partisan lines. Indeed, environmental and energy debates from the 1970s through much of the 1990s typically broke along geographic lines, rather than partisan lines, with key parameters being degree of urbanization and reliance on specific fuel types, such as coal versus natural gas. The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 89-11 with 87 percent of Republican members and 91 percent of Democrats voting yea, and the legislation passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 401-21 with 87 percent of Republicans and 96 percent of Democrats voting in support.

But, 20 years later when climate change legislation was receiving serious consideration in Washington, environmental politics had changed dramatically, with Congressional support for environmental legislation coming mainly to reflect partisan divisions. In 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454), often known as the Waxman-Markey bill, that included an economy-wide cap-and-trade system to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The Waxman-Markey bill passed by a narrow margin of 219-212, with support from 83 percent of Democrats, but only 4 percent of Republicans. (In July 2010, the U.S. Senate abandoned its attempt to pass companion legislation.) Political polarization in the Congress (and the country) has implications far beyond energy and environmental policy, but it is particularly striking in this realm.

Q: In the Obama administration’s second term, are there openings/possibilities for compromises in those areas?

A: It is conceivable – but in my view, unlikely – that there may be an opening for implicit (not explicit) “climate policy” through a carbon tax. At a minimum, we should ask whether the defeat of cap-and-trade in the U.S. Congress, the virtual unwillingness over the past 18 months of the Obama White House to utter the phrase “cap-and-trade” in public, and the defeat of Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney indicate that there is a new opening for serious consideration of a carbon-tax approach to meaningful CO2 emissions reductions in the United States.

First of all, there surely is such an opening in the policy wonk world. Economists and others in academia, including important Republican economists such as Harvard’s Greg Mankiw and Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard, remain enthusiastic supporters of a national carbon tax. And a much-publicized meeting in July, 2012, at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. brought together a broad spectrum of Washington groups – ranging from Public Citizen to the R Street Institute – to talk about alternative paths forward for national climate policy. Reportedly, much of the discussion focused on carbon taxes.

Clearly, this “opening” is being embraced with enthusiasm in the policy wonk world. But what about in the real political world? The good news is that a carbon tax is not “cap-and-trade.” That presumably helps with the political messaging! But if conservatives were able to tarnish cap-and-trade as “cap-and-tax,” it surely will be considerably easier to label a tax – as a tax! Also, note that President Obama’s silence extends beyond disdain for cap-and-trade per se. Rather, it covers all carbon-pricing regimes.

So as a possible new front in the climate policy wars, I remain very skeptical that an explicit carbon tax proposal will gain favor in Washington. Note that the only election outcome that could have lead to an aggressive and successful move to a meaningful nationwide carbon pricing regime would have been: the Democrats took back control of the House of Representatives, the Democrats achieved a 60+ vote margin in the Senate, and the President was reelected. Only the last of these happened. It’s not enough.

A more promising possibility – though still unlikely – is that if Republicans and Democrats join to cooperate with the Obama White House to work constructively to address the short-term and long-term budgetary deficits the U.S. government faces, and if as part of this they decide to include not only cuts in government expenditures, but also some significant “revenue enhancements” (the t-word is not allowed), and if (I know, this is getting to be a lot of “ifs”) it turns out to be easier politically to eschew increases in taxes on labor and investment and turn to taxes on consumption, then there could be a political opening for new energy taxes, even a carbon tax.

Such a carbon tax – if intended to help alleviate budget deficits – could not be the economist’s favorite, a revenue-neutral tax swap of cutting distortionary taxes in exchange for implementing a carbon tax. Rather, as a revenue-raising mechanism – like the Obama administration’s February 2009 budget for a 100%-auction of allowances in a cap-and-trade scheme – it would be a new tax, pure and simple. Those who recall the 1993 failure of the Clinton administration’s BTU-tax proposal – with a less polarized and more cooperative Congress than today’s – will not be optimistic.

Nor is it clear that a carbon tax would enjoy more support in budget talks than a value added tax (VAT) or a Federal sales tax. The key question is whether the phrases “climate policy” and “carbon tax” are likely to expand or narrow the coalition of support for an already tough budgetary reconciliation measure.  The key group to bring on board will presumably be conservative Republicans, and it is difficult to picture them being more willing to break their Grover Norquist pledges because it’s for a carbon tax.

What remains most likely to happen is what I’ve been saying for several years, namely that despite the apparent inaction by the Federal government, the official U.S. international commitment — a 17 percent reduction of CO2 emissions below 2005 levels by the year 2020 – is nevertheless likely to be achieved!  The reason is the combination of CO2 regulations which are now in place because of the Supreme Court decision [freeing the EPA to treat CO2 like other pollutants under the Clean Air Act], together with five other regulations or rules on SOX [sulfur compounds], NOX [nitrogen compounds], coal fly ash, particulates, and cooling water withdrawals. All of these will have profound effects on retirement of existing coal-fired electrical generation capacity, investment in new coal, and dispatch of such electricity.

Combined with that is Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32) in the state of California, which includes a CO2 cap-and-trade system that is more ambitious in percentage terms than Waxman-Markey was in the U.S. Congress, and which became binding on January 1, 2013.  Add to that the recent economic recession, which reduced emissions. And more important than any of those are the effects of developing new, unconventional sources of natural gas in the United States on the supply, price, and price trajectory of natural gas, and the consequent dramatic movement that has occurred from coal to natural gas for generating electricity.  In other words, there will be actions having significant implications for climate, but most will not be called “climate policy,” and all will be within the regulatory and executive order domain, not new legislation.

Q: Are there lessons that a second Obama administration can draw upon from the first administration, or from history, when constructing its energy & environmental policy over the next four years?

A: It will take a great deal of dedicated effort and profound luck to find political openings that can bridge the wide partisan divide that exists on climate change policy and other environmental issues. Think about the following. Nearly all our major environmental laws were passed in the wake of highly publicized environmental events or “disasters,” including the spontaneous combustion of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1969, and the discovery of toxic substances at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, in the mid-1970s. But note that the day after the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, no article in The Cleveland Plain Dealer commented that the cause was uncertain, that rivers periodically catch on fire from natural causes. On the contrary, it was immediately apparent that the cause was waste dumped into the river by adjacent industries. A direct consequence of the observed “disaster” was, of course, the Clean Water Act of 1972.

But climate change is distinctly different. Unlike the environmental threats addressed successfully in past U.S. legislation, climate change is essentially unobservable to the general population. We observe the weather, not the climate.  Notwithstanding last year’s experience with Super Storm Sandy, it remains true that until there is an obvious, sudden, and perhaps cataclysmic event – such as a loss of part of the Antarctic ice sheet leading to a dramatic sea-level rise – it is unlikely that public opinion in the United States will provide the tremendous bottom-up demand that inspired previous congressional action on the environment over the past forty years.

That need not mean that there can be no truly meaningful, economy-wide climate policy (such as carbon-pricing) until disaster has struck.  But it does mean that bottom-up popular demand may not come in time, and that instead what will be required is inspired leadership at the highest level that can somehow bridge the debilitating partisan political divide.

Postscript:  Please note that the Kennedy School series on the second term of the Obama administration also includes an interview with my colleague, Professor Joseph Aldy, offering his own views on potential environmental policy developments in the next four years.

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Reflections from Cambridge on the Climate Talks in Doha

Ever since I returned – some two weeks ago – from Doha, Qatar, the site of the Eighteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-18) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), I have planned to offer some commentary on this year’s annual climate negotiations, including the principal outcome, namely, the “Doha Gateway.” I decided to wait, mainly in order to put some geographic and temporal distance between the conference and my thoughts, so that I could reflect on “the forest,” rather than enumerating “the trees.”

Then, a few days ago, a reporter from the Harvard Gazette, Alvin Powell, came to my office to discuss this very subject. Having covered this and related topics for a number of years, he has considerable background on both the science and the policy. And he had done his homework to prepare for the interview. When I read the published result just now in the Harvard Gazette, I realized that this is – in fact – the reflection I had wanted to write for readers of this blog. So I’m offering it here.

The interview started with a quick history of climate negotiations, a brief description of my own role at COP-18 in Doha, and then an assessment of the conference’s outcome. From there, the conversation became more freewheeling, with Mr. Powell asking me about the status of U.S. climate policy, as well as the potential role and responsibility of a major research university such as ours. At the end of the interview, we returned to reflections on the slow pace of international climate negotiations.

You can read the original version in the Harvard Gazette here, but I also offer the published version below without any editing (but with the addition of some hyperlinks for interested readers).

Harvard Gazette

Climate change on world stage

Q&A with Robert Stavins on prospects for adopting a plan to confront it

By Alvin Powell

Harvard Staff Writer

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

International climate talks wrapped up last week in Qatar. Harvard Professor Robert Stavins attended and characterized the gathering as a qualified success, representing another step in a long process of reaching a workable international agreement.

Gazette staff writer Al Powell talked with Stavins about the work of international delegates and the prospects for a meaningful agreement going forward.

GAZETTE: Can you explain the purpose of these talks?

STAVINS: In 1992, at a United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro, a major outcome was the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Among other things, that convention provided for annual conferences at which representatives of countries would get together to discuss and negotiate how to address the threat of climate change. These annual negotiations go by the name of a “Conference of the Parties,” commonly abbreviated as a “COP.” COP-1 took place in Berlin in 1995, and COP-18 just took place in Doha, Qatar, in December 2012.

GAZETTE: What is your role at these conferences?

STAVINS: My role is typically on behalf of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements. Our purpose is to help the various national negotiating teams identify modes of international cooperation that will address climate change in ways that are scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic.

We hold events to which everyone is invited, two events this time. One of the mandates that came out of the Durban conference in December 2012 was for the delegates to think about new ways they can make use of the market to address the threat of climate change. We put together a panel of people to talk about potential “new market mechanisms.” We had a room with a capacity of several hundred, and every seat was taken. People were standing in the aisles, sitting on the floors, and spilling out into the hallway waiting to get in. In other words, interest in our intellectual contributions was at a high level. Importantly, the session was jointly sponsored with the Enel Foundation and the International Emissions Trading Association, which is a trade association of companies interested in emissions trading and related mechanisms.

The second event was co-sponsored with the government of the State of Qatar, and looked forward, post-Doha, to the potential paths ahead, with particular focus on the problems of arid countries, a chronic issue for the Middle East. The panel included Fahad Bin Mohammed Al-Attiya, chairman of the Qatar National Food Security Programme, who is one of the key thinkers and leaders on these issues.

In addition, we carry out bilateral meetings with negotiating teams and also do press meetings. Typically, we hold a couple dozen such meetings.

GAZETTE: How do you feel the conference went?

STAVINS: My view is that these international negotiations need to be viewed not as a sprint, in which you win or lose, but as a very long distance relay race, and the Qataris succeeded in handing off the baton.

The Qataris invited us to Doha last summer to help them begin to think about what success at the December conference would look like and how they could achieve it. There were three aspects to what we identified in advance as success, and they achieved all three, though maybe not to the degree or in the way that every country in the world would have preferred.

GAZETTE: What were those three?

STAVINS: First, they successfully brought to a close negotiations on a second commitment of the Kyoto Protocol, that is, extending the protocol beyond its first commitment period, which expires at the end of 2012. The second commitment period is now set. It will run to 2020. Second, they also brought to a successful close negotiations in what was called the Long Term Cooperative Action track, which included a set of issues that were put on the table at COP-13 in Bali in December 2007. Third, they began to make some progress on the one remaining negotiating track, which is the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action. They initiated discussions about establishing, by 2015, a comprehensive new international agreement, for implementation by 2020, that will include all key countries in the world, including the major emerging economies of China, India, Brazil, Korea, South Africa, and Mexico. That itself is a departure from the Kyoto Protocol, which is focused exclusively on a subset of countries of what used to be characterized as the industrialized world.

The negotiators from around the world did not make as much progress on the Durban platform as I would have hoped. But at a very minimum they did no harm, and that’s very important. That is, they did not introduce any problematic text into the negotiations that will later cause problems. In general, my view of these annual Conferences of the Parties is similar to the physician’s Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm, and keep things moving ahead.

GAZETTE: In looking at news coverage, I read about two emotions, anger and despair, felt by some after the conference. Are those warranted?

STAVINS: AOSIS [Alliance of Small Island States] nations are the most extreme in their point of view, for very good reasons, and they were surely disappointed by the outcomes. They’ve been very vocal, again for good reason. But the major emitters, the only ones that can do anything about the problem — the United States, China, the other large economies of the world, among them — there was recognition that in the real world, this is what success looks like.

I think of this as if we’re back at Bretton Woods in 1944, when Europe was in shambles. An agreement was reached at Bretton Woods, but it took 50 years to establish the World Trade Organization, and to continue the process of putting the global financial house in order. The problem of global climate change is actually more difficult politically than the economic problems that the world faced after World War II. We have this terrible situation where those who can reduce their emissions now are not the ones who will be damaged by climate change. You’re asking current voters to foot the bill, while it’s the future generation that will benefit from reduced damage. Furthermore, any country taking action will foot the bill for its costs, but the benefits of those actions — reduced climate change — will be spread globally. Hence, for any individual country the direct benefits of action will inevitably be less than the direct costs of action, despite the fact that global benefits may be considerably greater than global costs. That’s the global commons problem, and it creates an incentive for each country to free ride on the actions of others. So politically, it’s an exceptionally challenging problem.

GAZETTE: What about the gap between the emissions cuts that were promised and that have been achieved?

STAVINS: What became clear to me at the conference is that there is increasing acceptance of three facts from a broad set of delegations. One was that the frequently discussed target of limiting concentrations to 450 parts per million [of CO2 in the atmosphere], which is equated to approximately 2 degrees centigrade maximum warming, is simply not achievable.

Number two, there’s increasing recognition that a bottom-up international policy architecture is probably the future path forward, not a top-down approach. By top down, I mean a highly centralized approach like the Kyoto Protocol, with targets and timetables, as opposed to a bottom-up, pledge-and-review approach in which each country essentially says, “Look, this is what I can do,” and they put all of those into the hopper.

The third thing I observed was that there was greatly increased acceptance of the reality that market–based approaches to emissions reduction are absolutely essential. One heard this in the past from economists and from certain countries, but now it is unanimous, except for the small set of Marxist economies that essentially object to the world economic order.

GAZETTE: Where does the U.S. stand on that issue?

STAVINS: The U.S. has been at the forefront of that approach back to the Clinton administration. What’s interesting is that the official U.S. commitment under this pledge-and-review approach, a 17 percent reduction below 2005 emissions by the year 2020, is very likely to be achieved.

The reason is the combination of CO2 regulations which are now in place because of the Supreme Court decision [freeing the EPA to treat CO2 like other pollutants under the Clean Air Act], together with five other regulations or rules on SOX [sulfur compounds], NOX [nitrogen compounds], coal fly ash, particulates, and cooling water withdrawals. All of those will have profound effects on retirement of existing coal-fired electrical generation capacity, investment in new coal, and dispatch of such electricity. Combined with that is California, which Jan. 1, 2013, is putting in place a CO2 cap-and-trade system that is more ambitious in percentage terms than Waxman-Markey was in the U.S. Congress. Add to that the recent economic recession, which reduced emissions. And more important than any of those is what new, unconventional sources of natural gas in the United States have done to the price and price trajectory of natural gas, and the dramatic movement from coal to natural gas for generating electricity.

GAZETTE: Are there things that places like Harvard can do?

STAVINS: My view is that the best thing that Harvard can do is to carry out first-rate research, combined with the best possible teaching, and effective outreach to the public sector and the private sector. That’s our comparative advantage. In other words, our greatest impacts on the environment, including with regard to global climate change, will be through our products (research findings, smart and capable alumni, and direct impact on the policy world and private industry), not our processes. The emissions reductions that Harvard will achieve as a result of changing our carbon footprint, for example, whether it’s through increased energy efficiency of some buildings or some other means, are absolutely trivial compared with our impacts on the world [through teaching, research, and outreach]. And all of us — students, faculty, and administrators — have only so much time available. A very important concept in economics is “opportunity cost,” and there’s an important opportunity cost of a faculty member’s time, for example. If they’re working on one thing, they can’t be working on something else.

GAZETTE: Isn’t there kind of a living-laboratory aspect to what we’re doing?

STAVINS: I agree with that. So the one caveat — which I always mention — to what I said would be if direct actions by the University to limit emissions or energy demand were part and parcel of a research initiative or part and parcel of teaching, then those would be part of our core functions.

GAZETTE: Does that extend to the conversation on divestment?

STAVINS: I guess the way in which it links to that issue is whether or not symbolic actions are of value, but again you have to weigh symbolic actions against truly meaningful actions.

GAZETTE: What’s the most important thing for a member of the public to know about the climate talks and about climate change generally?

STAVINS: I think the most important thing to understand is that this is a long-term problem. Economically, a cost-effective approach is going to be very gradual reductions in emissions, not sudden changes. We’re not confiscating everyone’s automobiles tomorrow, but putting in place incentives or regulations so that next time they buy an automobile they move in the right direction, one that is less carbon intensive.

A massive amount of technology change is going to be required. That’s long term, and the creation of durable international institutions is going to be necessary, and that’s long term. That’s why that cliché we always hear from ballplayers each spring when they’ve lost their first 10 games — that it’s a marathon, not a sprint — applies even more to global climate change policy.

People should get neither excited nor depressed, in my view, over one single negotiation. It’s an ongoing process that’s going to be with us for a long time.

GAZETTE: Are you confident that ultimately what needs to happen will happen?

STAVINS: I’m not sure that it will happen through a centralized, top-down, international agreement. Nor am I even certain that the core of the action will be through international negotiations. Remember, 20 countries and regions account for about 90 percent of emissions. So there are alternative venues where meaningful action can happen without requiring agreement from 195 countries! One way or another, — through national action, bilateral action, multilateral action — things will be addressed. That doesn’t mean they will be addressed without the world first experiencing significant climate change damages.

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While International Climate Negotiations Continue, the World’s Ninth Largest Economy Takes an Important Step Forward

A little more than two weeks ago, while some 195 nations prepared to meet in Doha, Qatar, for the Eighteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-18) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in an ongoing effort to hammer out a durable scheme of effective international cooperation, the ninth largest economy in the world took an important step forward to achieve its own ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals.  I’m referring to the CO2 cap-and-trade allowance auction held by the State of California (which ranks just below Brazil and just above India in the size of its economy) on November 14, 2012.

The Design

Under the California auction design (a single-round, sealed-bid, uniform price auction), all allowances are sold at the same price, no matter what the specific bid submitted.  This is done by awarding the first allowances to the highest bidder, then the next highest bidder, and so on until all allowances (or bids) are exhausted.  The bid for the last allowance becomes the price of all allowances sold in the auction.  The auction had two parts:  a current auction of 2013 vintage allowances, and advance auction of 2015 vintage allowances.

The Results

Just a few days after the auction, the California Air Resources Board released the results.  In brief, they were as follows:

  • All 23,126,110 (metric tons of) allowances for 2013 emissions were sold, with the number of qualified bids exceeding the number available by about 6 percent.
  •  These 2013 vintage allowances sold for $10.09, just above the auction’s reserve price of $10.00.  (Note, however, that the bids ranged from $10 to over $90, with a median bid of about $13 and a mean bid of nearly $14.)
  • Some 97% of the allowances were bought by compliance entities, as opposed to investors of various kinds.
  • The advance auction of 2015 allowances produced significantly different results, with only 14% of available allowances sold, at the auction reserve price of $10.00.  (The bids ranged from $10 to about $17, with median and mean bids of about $11.)

Those are the results, but what do they mean?  Here’s my view of the implications.

The Implications

First of all, the fact that the auction ran smoothly and compliance entities and others put their money down is one important step in establishing the program’s credibility and operational success.

Second, given that all 2013 vintage allowances sold and there was significant demand above the clearing price (mean prices were $13.75 per MT), the cap is clearly binding.

Third, the expected marginal abatement cost (accounting for market uncertainty and regulatory risk) is roughly at the reservation price of $10/ton (fairly close to the current price in the European Union Emissions Trading System, it so happens).

On the one hand, it is very good news that the allowance price is as low as it is, because this is indicative of the market’s prediction of what the marginal cost of abatement will be.  Lower cost is good news for the California economy.  Of course, low prices mean smaller funds raised by the auction ($233 million raised by the 2013 auction, and $56 million by the 2015 auction).  However, given that the fundamental purpose of the auction is to cap emissions through the cap-and-trade system, not to raise revenues for the state, this doesn’t appear to be bad news either.

But there is some “bad news” in these low allowance prices, and in the 2015 results.  First, the 2015 results may indicate that there is significant “regulatory risk” that is lowering prices firms are willing to pay for allowances.  Such regulatory risk could arise from concerns that state legislators will back-pedal on the program, or that legal challenges to certain rules (for example, reshuffling requirements or regulation of out-of-state electricity) or Federal policy action in Washington will reduce allowance demand.

It could also arise from this being the first auction, bringing about reluctance to put a lot of money down before seeing any results.   Significant uncertainty over abatement costs could also have been a factor.  In these regards, it will be interesting to see whether bidding is much different at the second auction next year.

An Ongoing Concern

Other factors driving down demand for allowances and the auction price are the emission reductions that have already been achieved or are expected to be achieved by so-called “complementary programs,” such as energy efficiency programs, renewable portfolio standards, and low-carbon fuel standards.  You might think this is good news, but it’s not.  Why?

These “complimentary programs” exist under the cap of the cap-and-trade system.  Hence, there are two possible outcomes from this situation.  On the one hand, these additional programs can be irrelevant in terms of CO2 emissions; that is, their emission reductions would be achieved anyway by the cap-and-trade system on its own, which – remember – allocates the abatement burden cost-effectively across sectors and sources.  Or, on the other hand, these programs could achieve greater emissions reductions in some sector or by some sources than the cap-and-trade regime would have done on its own.  But, by doing this, the effect is simply to free up allowances for other sources and/or other sectors through the trading mechanism.

On the margin, nothing is accomplished in terms of additional CO2 emissions reductions; rather the emissions are simply relocated.  And, because under such circumstances marginal abatement costs are no longer equated, the allocation of the reductions is no longer cost-effective, that is, aggregate costs are driven up.  As I recently wrote, this is precisely what has happened in the European Union Emissions Trading System.  (By the way, for a more favorable view of the role of the complimentary measures under the California cap-and-trade scheme, see this essay by Dallas Burtraw and Clayton Munnings.)

So, this specific “bad news” about perverse policy interactions is not a problem of the cap-and-trade system per se, any more than it is in the European system.  Rather, the problem is with adding well-intentioned “complimentary programs” under the coverage of a cap-and-trade (or any “quantity-based averaging”) system.  Unfortunately, it is misguided public policy, at least from the perspective of this environmental economist.

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