As the Chesapeake Bay marches toward an EPA mandated cap on pollutants under the Federal Clean Water Act (known as a Bay TMDL); the idea that using pollution trading might be an avenue worth pursuing, is being touted as "inevitable". Mind you, it is not as though the notion of such trading has broad based support from the environmental community. On the contrary, many are just afraid to speak up for fear of censure from peers, or they don’t fully understand it, or still others fear that open opposition will impair their ability to raise funds from establishment funding sources who like the idea of turning the environment over to the "marketplace".
Ultimately, a relatively small cadre of monied (or money focused) environmental organizations have made the enormous leap of faith that market based pollution trading is better for them and better for the Bay than a simple command and control/compliance approach. There is no middle ground between these extremes. Either we are to have voluntary pollution reductions through trading or mandatory ones through enforcement of the Clean Water Act. A Bay TMDL with voluntary trading weakens the Clean Water Act.
But the more people talk to me about pollution trading and I raise good faith questions and concerns, the more I am told that the train has already left the station. That it is pointless to oppose what is increasingly obvious as deeply flawed pollution reduction policy motivated by money making and not-so-plausible and illusory claims for cleaner water. On the eve of pollution caps for the Bay, lo and behold, the environmental community has teamed up with the business community to provide an alternative to the caps! It's nothing short of incredible. A respondent to a BLOG I posted on this topic several weeks ago actually argued that I simply was not intelligent enough to grasp the intricacies of trading! Maybe he was right, because it seems to me, that instead of a bright environmental future for all and a clean environment, trading just increases the likelihood that most of us will be stuck with the very best environmental quality money can purchase.
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