Climate Auctions: The Meme Spreads
Seems like, every time I turn around, someone else has written about the virtues of auctioning carbon permits: not just auctioning some of them, but auctioning all of them. Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly has the latest examples.
We Send Letters
Update 5/15 by Eric: We send memos too. Here is a fuller version of our concerns.
***
The Western Climate Initiative -- the multi-state, multi-province pact designing a cap-and-trade system for the Western U.S. and, now, large swaths of Canada as well -- has contracted out a bunch of economic modeling, in an attempt to get a handle on how various cap-and-trade policies might play out in the real world.
That's a good thing. Entering blindly into a cap and trade system would be dopey.
That said, your friendly neighborhood research nerds are a little worried about how the economic analysis is being done. It's not that we have specific complaints about the model itself. It's the opposite -- we can't possibly complain, because the company that the WCI chose to do the modeling won't tell anyone how their model works. It's a proprietary, closed system, you see, so there's absolutely no way to tell what inherent biases the model may have.
That's obviously a substantive problem: without a lot of eyes scrutinizing the model, flaws can go undetected. But -- far worse -- it's a perception problem. No matter how the model results turn out, people can point to the fact that the model is closed to challenge or outright reject its conclusions.
We even wrote a little letter to the WCI about these issues.
Wild Sky Wins
At long last, it's official: Washington gets a new wilderness area, the Wild Sky. It's 100,000 acres of streams, forests, lakes, and mountains on the west side of the Cascades.
Big congratulations are in order to the hundreds of people who worked to win this designation. The Wild Sky political process was an epic. First proposed in 2002, the nascent wilderness area was an exercise in tenacity. Last week, when the bill finally passed out of Congress, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly had a nice article on the context and history. (Also good coverage last week from Seattle Times reporter Warren Cornwall, here.)
New wilderness designation in the Northwest has been tough to come by lately. But 2008 looks to be a promising year. As High Country News reports, the Wild Sky may be the first of several in the West: these include more than 500,000 acres in the Owyhee country of southwestern Idaho (the first wilderness in 30 years in that state); plus 264,000 acres in Utah (some of which is already in Zion National Park); and if we're lucky, a small but important new wilderness on the Oregon Coast that would protect nearly 14,000 acres in an area dubbed the Copper Salmon.
