Bionic Planet: Your Guide To The New Reality

It's an article of faith among some on the left that markets and capitalism are the roots of all evil, while some on the right see pure, free markets as the invisible hand of God, and regulation as the work of the Devil. Most economists will tell you they're both wrong, because there's no such thing as either a pure free market or a marketless society. We need markets to get things done, and we need governance to keep markets honest.  That's especially true in environmental markets, which almost always exist because of laws that require people to clean up their messes or reduce their pollution. To slow climate change, for example, we have to put a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions, but how do we meet that cap? There are basically two ways. In command-and-control, a regulator writes up detailed, step-by-step prescriptions that have to be followed to the letter. In cap-and-trade, which is a market-based mechanism, emitters find their own way of meeting the cap, and they're allowed to sell emission-reductions to o