IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rff/dpaper/dp-11-49.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Playing without Aces: Offsets and the Limits of Flexibility under Clean Air Act Climate Policy

Author

Listed:
  • Richardson, Nathan

    (Resources for the Future)

Abstract

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues to move ahead with regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act (CAA). Previous work has indicated that basic forms of compliance flexibility—trading—appear to be legally permissible under the relevant part (Section 111) of the CAA. This paper takes a close look at more expansive and ambitious types of flexibility: trading between different kinds of sources, biomass co-firing, and, above all, offsets. It concludes that most types of such extended flexibility are either legally incompatible with the CAA, or so legally problematic that EPA is unlikely to adopt them. This has important implications for both the costs of CAA climate policy and the level of environmental benefits that are achievable. It also creates tension between CAA climate policy and state-level policies, such as California’s, that aim to include various forms of extended flexibility.

Suggested Citation

  • Richardson, Nathan, 2011. "Playing without Aces: Offsets and the Limits of Flexibility under Clean Air Act Climate Policy," RFF Working Paper Series dp-11-49, Resources for the Future.
    • Handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-11-49
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-11-49.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Harrington, Winston & Krupnick, Alan, 2012. "Improving Fuel Economy in Heavy-Duty Vehicles," RFF Working Paper Series dp-12-02, Resources for the Future.
    2. Burtraw, Dallas & Fraas, Arthur G. & Richardson, Nathan, 2012. "Tradable Standards for Clean Air Act Carbon Policy," RFF Working Paper Series dp-12-05, Resources for the Future.
    3. Burtraw, Dallas & Woerman, Matt, 2013. "Technology Flexibility and Stringency for Greenhouse Gas Regulations," RFF Working Paper Series dp-13-24, Resources for the Future.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Clean Air Act; offsets; carbon; GHGs; greenhouse gases; flexibility; §111; §111(d); CAA; biomass co-firing; AB32;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-11-49. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Resources for the Future (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rffffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.