The acid-rain market has been considered a success, helping to reduce sulfur-dioxide emissions by half. Permits to emit sulfur had once traded for $1,600 a ton.<\/em><\/p>\nBut in 2008, in response to lawsuits filed by a handful of utilities and North Carolina, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the EPA had overstepped its authority… Prices of allowances fell in response, and trading dwindled.<\/em><\/p>\nIn response to the ruling, prices for the pollution allowances plunged to $130 a ton. Utilities held off on projects to clean up their plants…<\/em><\/p>\nLast week, the EPA issued new rules to comply with the court’s decision. The new program will limit the use of the market and instead require most of the emission reductions to come from changes at the plants themselves. And millions of allowances that utilities now hold can’t be used under the new program, which will issue its own allowances. <\/em><\/p>\n“It really feels like prices are going to zero quickly,” says Peter Zaborowsky, a managing director of Evolution Markets Inc., a White Plains, N.Y.-based provider of environmental brokerage services for utilities and investors. Allowances traded at times at less than $3 last week…<\/em><\/p>\nThe market’s collapse shows how vulnerable market-based approaches to reducing air pollution are to government actions. That could scare off investors, who won’t commit to a market where the rules can change at any minute.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSo, that’s one definition of “successful.”\u00a0 Another player in the acid rain market has another take:<\/p>\n
“It is tragic,” says Gary Hart, an analyst at ICAP Energy LLC based in Birmingham, Ala., who has worked on environmental markets for two decades. “It is something that worked so well.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\nUntil it didn’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let’s look at how the term is used by John Walke, clean-air director at the Natural Resources Defense Council: “The acid-rain market continues to be relevant to the debate over CO2 because it is a successful model.” This quote finished off an article about the collapse of the acid-rain market: The acid-rain market has been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-practical-definitions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2597,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2596\/revisions\/2597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}