Mr. Whittmore must not have thought through his assertion that the free market is not an effective means of influencing the emissions of greenhouse gasses. A type of emissions penalty system in which companies are charged based on the amount of emissions discharged would help companies determine how much they should spend in reducing emissions. Since companies' objective is to make money, they would make the necessary investments to reduce emissions so that they would not be charged for emissions they have the ability to easily reduce. Experimental emission control technologies may be too expensive to implement, but companies would research ways to make these technologies cheaper so they could reduce emissions and thus save the companies money. Setting fixed emission limits on companies or individual factories is foolish since each manufacturing process is unique and each has a minimum amount of emissions that will be released no matter how much is done to reduce them.
Also, the free market can help control emissions by automobiles. There are technologies available right now to generate energy with renewable resources, but the relatively low cost of oil makes them economically infeasible. If the government increased taxes on gasoline and diesel, this would make renewable energy technologies as cheap as oil-based technology and also pass the cost of pollution on to consumers and make people think twice about driving when they could walk or ride a bicycle.
Daniel Grooms
Ph.D. student
Spring Break
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