Environmental Policy Commons^™

The Missing Instrument: Dirty Input Limits, David M. Driesen, Amy Sinden

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article evaluates an environmental protection instrument that the literature has hitherto largely overlooked, Dirty Input Limits (DILs), quantitative limits on the inputs that cause pollution. DILs provide an alternative to cumbersome output-based emissions trading and performance standards. DILs have played a role in some of the world's most prominent environmental success stories. They have also begun to influence climate change policy, because of the impossibility of imposing an output-based cap on transport emissions. We evaluate DILs' administrative advantages, efficiency, dynamic properties, and capacity to better integrate environmental protection efforts. DILs, we show, not only have significant advantages that make …

Capping Carbon, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses the problem of how to set caps for a cap-and-trade program, a key problem in pending legislation addressing global climate disruption. Previous scholarship on emissions trading programs focuses overwhelmingly on trading’s advantages and sometimes wrongly portrays environmental improvement as an automatic byproduct of adopting a cap-and-trade approach. A trading program’s success, however, depends critically upon timely and effective cap setting.

This article shows that often regulators have employed a best available technology (BAT) approach to cap setting for trading programs, i.e., setting the cap at a level that regulated polluters can achieve with government-identified technology. This descriptive …

Neoliberal Instrument Choice, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This book chapter reviews the influence on economic thought about instrument choice and its influence upon United States climate change policy. It shows that the theory of instrument choice made a positive contribution to the United States policy arsenal by emphasizing the cost effectiveness advantages of emissions trading. But because of an ideological climate uncritically supportive of free markets prevailed during the period of U.S. failure to address climate change, the United States favored overly broad trading programs, both in terms of geography and scope. This posture had a large influence on the Kyoto Protocol, leading the world to adopt …

Toward Sustainable Technology, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers suggestions for climate change policies advancing technological changes necessary for sustainable development. It first explains why relentless pursuit of cost effectiveness through broad environmental benefit trading does not maximize long term technological advancement and explores options for narrowing trading's design. It then explores two alternatives to Kyoto style trading to show how a goal of creating a positive long term economic dynamic

Renewable Energy Under The Kyoto Protocol: The Case For Mixing Instruments, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This paper suggests that a mixture of measures may be needed to encourage renewable energy under the Kyoto Protocol. It explains that the goal of maximizing short term cost effectiveness tends to conflict with the goal of encouraging the long-term technological development that the world will need to move away from fossil fuels. Because of this tension, policy-makers should not, and generally have not, regarded global emissions trading as a panacea. The paper discusses how novel economic incentive measures and careful attention to design of emissions trading can help policy-makers use short term goals to lay the ground work for …

Sustainable Development And Market Liberalism's Shotgun Wedding: Emissions Trading Under The Kyoto Protocol, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article analyzes the international emissions trading regime at the heart of the world's effort to address global warming as a means of exploring broader international governance issues. The trading regime seeks to marry two models of global governance, market liberalism, which embraces markets as the model of global governance, and sustainable development, which seeks to change development patterns to protect future generations.

This article explores a previously unacknowledged tension between market liberalism's goal of maximizing short term cost effectiveness and sustainable development's goal of catalyzing technological change for the benefit of future generations. This article presents new data and …