Wk 5: Levitt

Climate Change Policy

Eli Levitt

4-5:30, Tuesday, October 27, 2009, LH 1

PLATO Royalty Lecture Series[1]

Eli Levitt is a policymaker who endorsed creating a market for carbon emissions with cap and trade (27 October 2009) after eliminating policymaker options of lowering CO2 emissions with a Carbon Tax or “outdated command & control strategies”.  His focus was centralized power plants because large scale home-based power generation (solar roofs) need funding to become more efficient (diminishing if not removing incentives.) He spoke of laws to be placed on power companies and state success in cooperation with Canada. Discussed carbon offsets were from forestry, agriculture, or waste sectors, with priority given to and Cap and Trade.

The Speaker: Mr. Levitt is Market Mechanisms Analyst, Washington Department of Ecology.

Slides from Eli’s talk are here.

Companion Reading

( Note to Students:  Please be aware that your program might have additional reading! Check your respective program web site. )

  1. Cap and Trade 101:  Sightline’s Federal Climate Policy Primer (2 pp).
  2. Cap and Trade 101:  A Federal Climate Policy primer, by Alan Durning with Anna Fahey, Eric de Place, Lisa Stiffler, Clark Williams0Derry.  Sightline Institute. July 2009.
  3. See also www.sightline.org/climate for Sightline’s most recent work on climate policy.
[1] This Lecture is sponsored by Evergreen’s PLATO Royalty Fund, established with royalties from computer assisted instruction (CAI) software, written by Evergreen faculty John Aikin Cushing and students in the early 1980’s, for the Control Data PLATO system.