Price floors in greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes can have advantages for technological innovation, price volatility, and management of cost uncertainty, but implementation has potential pitfalls. We argue that the best mechanism for implementing a price floor is to have firms pay an extra fee or tax. This has budgetary advantages and is more compatible with international permit trading than alternative approaches that dominate the academic and policy debate. The fee approach can also be used to implement more general hybrid approaches to emissions pricing.
Federal action addressing climate change is likely to emerge either through new legislation or via the U.S. EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act. The prospect of federal action raises important questions regarding the interconnections between federal efforts and state-level climate policy developments. In the presence of federal policies, to what extent will state efforts be cost-effective? How does the co-existence of state- and federal-level policies affect the ability of state efforts to achieve emissions reductions? This paper addresses these questions. We find that state-level policy in the presence of a federal policy can be beneficial or problematic, depending on the nature of the overlap between the two systems, the relative stringency of...
