What a Difference a Datum Makes: Revisiting the Impacts of Cap-and-Trade on Emissions and Environmental Justice

Abstract

A recent article by Danae Hernandez-Cortes and Kyle Meng suggests that the cap-and-trade program in California led to improvements in the degree of environmental inequity in the state, a result that was taken up with some enthusiasm by proponents of carbon pricing. We suggest that their approach is not designed to capture the variation at the heart of the equity debate and show that the results these authors offer may be problematic because of the potential misidentification of which facilities were actually subject to the cap.