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As the U.S. Congress begins to consider how to follow-through on President Obama's call to create a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions, it ought to begin by looking at the European experience with cap and trade.
The European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which first went into effect in 2005, is the first significant attempt at establishing a wide-scale cap-and-trade system to limit the emission of carbon dioxide.
Like any significant new policy program, it had to work out some kinks in its early days, and the United States would do well to heed the lessons learned from the European experiment.