So it's worth looking back at how such a radical idea first got translated into action, and what made it work. Congress is now considering whether to expand the system to cover the carbon dioxide emissions implicated in climate change-a move that would touch the lives of almost every American. With the help of federal bureaucrats willing to violate the cardinal rule of bureaucracy-by surrendering regulatory power to the marketplace-emissions trading would become one of the most spectacular success stories in the history of the green movement.
#Rain trading sides license
People now call that system "cap-and-trade." But back then the term of art was "emissions trading," though some people called it "morally bankrupt" or even "a license to kill." For a strange alliance of free-market Republicans and renegade environmentalists, it represented a novel approach to cleaning up the world-by working with human nature instead of against it.ĭespite powerful resistance, these allies got the system adopted as national law in 1990, to control the power-plant pollutants that cause acid rain. But if the system Gray had in mind now looks like a politically acceptable way to slow climate change-an approach being hotly debated in Congress-you could say that it got its start on the global stage on that hike up Acadia's Cadillac Mountain. "I thought he was smoking dope," recalls Henry, a Washington, D.C.
Gray, a tall, lanky heir to a tobacco fortune, was then working as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, where environmental ideas were only slightly more popular than godless Communism. Boyden Gray talk about cleaning up the environment by letting people buy and sell the right to pollute. Henry was hiking in Maine's Acadia National Park one August in the 1980s when he first heard his friend C.
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