The political allocation of green pork and its implications for federal climate policy

This paper examines how the simultaneous choice of an emissions cap and the allocation of permits to secure key votes affects the ability for climate policy to pass the U.S. Congress and the conditional efficiency and equity of such feasible policies. When permits are politically allocated, Congress selects a cap both for the external benefits it provides as well as the private green pork, or value of permits, it generates. Legislative bargaining in contexts when public and private goods are co-produced, such as climate change, induces trade-offs between policy passage and conditional efficiency and equity. Moreover, lowering the vote threshold or originating climate policy in the Senate results in a policy that is more vulnerable to unanticipated deviations in the winning coalition.