Does black carbon induce negative thinking?

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It has long been known that the colour black induces negativity. It is the colour of occult sciences, the colour of depression, the colour of carbon, and now the colour of negative economics. Economists more known as the unseen hand behind the concepts of human development and destruction, the reasons behind all the glory and misery have been infected by the black colour of carbon to spin a wave of negative economic theories in climate change. This despite the fact that they still cannot manage or even think of handling economic contraction or downturns capably.

Carbon and resultant pollution has been a puzzle for economists for decades. In the early 1900s, a British economist named Arthur Pigou proposed taxes on polluters. Ronald Coase, a University of Chicago economist, won a Nobel Prize for his 1960 book, "The Problem of Social Cost," which showed how market economics could address pollution problems.

In 1966, Mr. Thomas Crocker, still struggling to finish his thesis at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, sketched out the cap-and-trade idea to deal with air pollution produced by fertilizer plants in Florida. Mr. Crocker first pitched the idea of trading at a conference in Washington. He had been asked to attend as a stand-in for a professor who couldn't go and present data on the Florida plants. He didn't have all the data yet and came up with the theory instead. Possibly that reliance on half baked knowledge of a student of economics without any industrial experience has fried the world for last forty years.It was indeed strange that instead of calling energy specialists to solve problems of pollutions a under-prepared, ill informed economists was relied upon to furnish a hypothesis that today looks a billion dollar failure.

Working separately, Mr. Dales in 1968 published a book called, "Pollution, Property and Prices," which used the same approach for farmers who were polluting Canadian lakes and streams.
Their logic went like this: When governments capped smog emissions from power plants or the runoff of pesticides by farmers into local streams, it was indirectly putting a value on these emissions. Some farmers and some power plants could reduce these emissions more efficiently than others, and some placed a higher value on them than others. By setting caps on pollution but then allowing the polluters to trade these rights, the economists theorized, the polluters themselves would figure out the cheapest way to meet new targets.
Another economist, David Montgomery, advanced their ideas in the 1970s, converting their theories into the complex mathematical formulas to demonstrate that they weren't merely an idea but were also economically feasible. Mr. Montgomery, too, is a skeptic of cap-and-trade for greenhouse gases. He prefers an outright tax.
"You get huge swings in carbon prices with a cap, which creates more volatility and uncertainty for business," he says.
Cap-and-trade got a big boost in 1990, when President George H.W. Bush signed amendments to the Clean Air Act that imposed new limits on emissions of sulfur dioxide, which produces acid rain. Economists said the move let producers save billions of dollars and still hit their targets.
Still, Messrs. Dales and Crocker never got much personal mileage out of the idea. Mr. Crocker says he had such a hard time getting funding to further his research on the subject that he moved on to other matters