Hi Ulf, thank you for bringing up Equal Right: I was actually not familiar with it!
From their cap-and-share proposal, I gather that they advocate for a cap on emissions with allowances that aren’t tradeable. An argument in favor of trading allowances is that polluters can freely redistribute allowances towards those who value them more (i.e. emit to produce more valuable things), resulting in lower pollution abatement costs. Cap-and-share involves direct government control over individual polluters, which makes climate mitigation costlier: Greenstone et al. (2025) found that cap-and-trade reduced pollution abatement costs by 11% relative to the traditional command-and-control approach in India.
Hi Ulf, thank you for bringing up Equal Right: I was actually not familiar with it!
From their cap-and-share proposal, I gather that they advocate for a cap on emissions with allowances that aren’t tradeable. An argument in favor of trading allowances is that polluters can freely redistribute allowances towards those who value them more (i.e. emit to produce more valuable things), resulting in lower pollution abatement costs. Cap-and-share involves direct government control over individual polluters, which makes climate mitigation costlier: Greenstone et al. (2025) found that cap-and-trade reduced pollution abatement costs by 11% relative to the traditional command-and-control approach in India.