Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It became clear to Professor Richard Sandor that Global Warming offered a great opportunity to investors to decrease carbon dioxide and make a profit. Since CO2 is in everything, energy would have to be decreased. How is this to be done? By permitting the voluntary trading of carbon credits by buyers and sellers. Manufacturers emitting CO2 would need a permit to increase the CO2 they needed to produce. Firms having a surplus of permits, having no need of the surplus, would be able to sell the surplus in the free market to the manufacturers needing it. So Richard Sandor, professor of business at Northwestern University in Chicago, applied to the Joyce Foundation in Chicago for a $1.1 million start-up grant for voluntary buying and selling permits-to-emit carbon dioxide. Between 1994 and 2002, Barack Obama sat on the Board of the Joyce Foundation. Sandor’s voluntary exchange system would be available and might become mandatory—and profitable—with the passing of a Cap-and-Trade bill...