Looking Back on SO2 Trading: What's Good for the Environment Is Good for the Market

Fortnightly Magazine - August 1997
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The overwhelming impression is one of growth (em in volume and in the number of participants.

The early 1990s was an anxious period for advocates of emissions trading. Concerns about whether the sulfur dioxide allowance market would ever develop tempered the heady success of the first national emissions trading program implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, Title IV. These concerns were heightened when in May 1992, Wisconsin Power & Light traded 10,000 allowances to the Tennessee Valley Authority. The response from the media and environmental groups was not good:

• A representative from an environmental group asked a reporter: "What's next, the L.A. Police Department trying to buy civil rights credits from Wisconsin?" %n1%n

• A Tennessee newspaper ran a cartoon of a man trying to arrange his release from hell by making a trade for "a few brownie points." %n2%n

• An op-ed piece in USA Today intoned ominously that because of allowance trading "people will die." %n3%n

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