Heatmap: “Washington’s Carbon Credits Are About to Get a Lot Cheaper”
RFF Senior Fellow Dallas Burtraw comments on Washington State’s decision to link its cap-and-invest program with those in California and Quebec.
“While emitters aren’t thrilled by the idea of carbon pricing, Dallas Burtraw, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future, told me businesses in these regions are generally enthused by the market stability linkage provides. ‘They want reduced oscillations, reduced variability in what’s happening in climate policy,’ he told me. ‘And I think linking with Washington adds a degree of credibility and certainty also to the California program.’
The idea is that the larger and more deeply integrated the markets become, the more durable they’ll be. Or as Burtraw put it, ‘it’s like joining rafts together in a storm.’ Once businesses begin making long-term investments and building compliance strategies around a shared market—and state budgets come to depend on its expected revenue—it becomes much more difficult for a new leader to simply pull out.”
