Reconciling Renewable Portfolio Standards and Feed-in Tariffs

摘要

Conventional wisdom suggests that environmental policymaking often presents zero-sum options. Political debates cast environmental decisions as a choice between jobs and ecosystems.~1 Action on climate change is seen dichotomously as promoting either mitigation or adaptation;~2 in turn, the realm of possibilities on mitigation is divided neatly between a cap-and-trade regime on one hand and a carbon tax on the other.~3 Even the mode of environmental regulation falls prey to this kind of either-or thinking: One of the deep (and prevailing) debates on how to grapple with ecological dilemmas is whether legal action should take place at the local or federal level.~4 Despite a bevy of scholarship demonstrating that environmental regulatory options are not, and should not be treated as, binary,~5 much of the discourse continues to portray potential reforms as mutually exclusive alternatives.