From a Theory to a Consensus on Emissions

[XemaSab]

As Congress weighs imposing a mandatory limit on climate-altering gases — an outcome still far from certain — it is likely to turn to a system that sets a government ceiling on total emissions and allows polluting industries to buy and sell permits to meet it.

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But not long ago, many of today’s supporters dismissed the idea of tradable emissions permits as an industry-inspired Republican scheme to avoid the real costs of cutting air pollution. The right answer, they said, was strict government regulation, state-of-the-art technology and a federal tax on every ton of harmful emissions.

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If there was a single moment when cap and trade crossed the threshold from relatively untested economic concept to prevailing government policy, it came in May 1989 in the West Wing office of C. Boyden Gray, counsel to President George H. W. Bush. Mr. Gray had gathered a number of Mr. Bush’s economic and environmental advisers to try to come up with a politically palatable plan to break a decade-long deadlock on the problem of acid rain, caused by sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants in the Midwest.

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A month later, the Bush White House sent Congress a cap-and-trade plan for sulfur dioxide emissions that 18 months later became the linchpin of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, considered by many to be the most successful domestic environmental legislation ever enacted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/us/politics/17cap.html?pagewanted=all