The promiscuous history of market efficiency: the development of early emissions trading systems

Abstract

To investigate the ‘promiscuous history’ of the efficiency of emissions trading markets, I draw from Actor Network Theory and specifically the work of Bruno Latour, highlighting how the commonly made claim to efficiency was constructed as a ‘fact’. I trace the processes, beginning in the early 1970s, that constructed first the inefficiency of command-and-control regulation through the distinction between the means and the ends of regulation, and the conversion of the specific 1970 Clean Air Act regulations into the archetypal form of command-and-control. Alongside this, the efficiency of emissions trading was constructed through the provision of empirical, modeling evidence and the re-construction of the Environmental Protection Agency's early Emissions Trading System as an ‘ad hoc’ implementation of ‘pure’ economic theory. In this way specific regulatory forms were translated into a seemingly universal economic narrative, and emissions trading was stabilised as a regulatory technology applicable to multiple environmental pollutants.

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