The Origins and Practice of Emissions Trading

An important development in the field of environmental policy has been the growing acceptance and use of emissions trading as a cost-effective means to meet and maintain environmental quality standards. In the first half of the twentieth century, emissions trading programs not only would have been seen as unnecessary; they would have been inconceivable. The legal, bureaucratic, and technological infrastructure necessary to support such systems simply did not exist. Furthermore, most people did not see the release of pollutioncausing contaminants into the shared environment as transactions to be measured and monitored. Today, the use of emissions trading programs as a policy tool both reflects and represents the dramatic changes in pollution control policy that have since occurred.