The Next Restructuring: Environmental Regulation

Abstract

From oil, to natural gas, and now electricity, the regulation of energy markets has been successively restructured to allow greater scope to market forces. The likely next domain for restructuring, environmental regulation, may seem far fetched now, but it is no more so than the restructuring of electric utility regulation would have seemed to be twenty years ago. The "grand experiment" with emissions trading under the U.S. acid rain program has set a propitious example by showing that markets in environmental goods can be constructed and that the explicit recognition of property rights in the use of the environment is compatible with effective and non-intrusive environmental regulation.