To many environmentalists, nothing symbolizes the drive toward a cleaner, more sustainable and more environmentally friendly future as well as the modern wind turbine. Pristine white, lean, elegant, and minimalist, it is such a ready summation of all the things many clean-energy advocates desire that their appearance in green-oriented advertising—even for products unrelated to wind power—is hard to miss.

 

However, while high-profile, and a major, viable step toward a future powered by cleaner energy, wind power might not be the cure-all it is sometimes made out to be. Some conservation groups oppose wind turbines in certain locations, citing their visual disruption of natural views, and interference with local wildlife in rural areas. Additionally, demand for wind turbines is drastically outstripping manufactures ability to produce the iconic power generators. It’s clear that other options must be exercised in moving worldwide energy production toward sustainable sources.

One of the most potentially viable means of doing this is a market-driven approach to reducing the heat-trapping emissions leading to global-warming. Broadly referred to as “cap-and-trade”, the concept is not as widely understood as it ought to be, given that 11 of 13 carbon-reduction bills presented before congress this past legislative session involved market mechanisms, rather than direct carbon taxes.

In a simplified model, the way cap-and-trade works is that a government sets a cap on how many greenhouse gasses a country can emit in a given time period. It then sells or auctions off licenses to produce these emissions. Revenue generated from these sales can be “recycled,” so to speak, into subsidizing cleaner sources of power, like wind turbines, funding research into new clean energy sources, or furthering the development of existing technology.  In short, it makes energy that contributes to global warming expensive, while making energy that doesn’t fairly cheap.

Though many object to cap-and-trade plans on a philosophical level, because they essentially allow large companies to buy the right to pollute, they do soothe one of the most frequent arguments against greener technologies—namely, their comparatively high cost. By adjusting the price of various energy sources to account for their environmental impacts, cap-and-trade gracefully intertwines the market system that drives the world economy, and the environmental protection that is of growing concern to consumers.

While cap-and-trade plans don’t create the motivational and attitude-adjusting vistas of a regiment of wind turbines, they have arguably had the largest impact in reducing human-produced climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1996 by most of the developed world (the United States failed to ratify), began imposing a cap-and-trade system on many notable greenhouse gas producers in 2005, and its successes have inspired even more ambitious programs to curb climate change.

Photo by Bethany Brady