Re: 1980s?
Except that 'cap-and-trade' is NOT really market-based economics, because the amount of the cap is artificial and arbitrary. The woman making this quote:
“Reducing our individual energy use, particularly that of our travel, our houses, and our appliances, is the quickest and easiest way to reduce our own carbon emissions"
seems not to understand that a cap does not mean "this amount of emmissions AT MOST", it means "DEFINITELY this amount of emmissions", because whatever I save of my allocation I will sell to someone else to emit (the article mentions this specifically. My personal energy savings will not amount to a net energy saving)
Under cap-and-trade, the only way to reduce emmissions is to reduce the cap, and every time that comes up for review it will be all talk and no action - Kyoto all over again. The main beneficiaries of cap and trade will be traders who will take a cut off every trade even if they are really not offering any added value.
The best way of approximating a true market-based carbon reduction system is to add the externalised costs of burning fossil fuels back into their price through a carbon tax*. That way, fossil fuels will only be burnt if the value released from burning them is greater than the cost including externalised costs, and overall consumption will go down since trivial / wasteful uses will get cut out.
A carbon tax as opposed to cap-and-trade is a LOT simpler, and therefore cheaper, to administer (no need to audit all carbon usage, no need for complex trading schemes), and also instead of financial benefits going to banks and traders, teh tax money is collected by government (in an ideal world, to be ringfenced and spent ONLY on renewable energy research)
*Of course there still will be much wrangling as to what the correct level of tax should be, but it's a start