No longer termed a 'failure,' California's cap-and-trade program faces a new critique: Is it too successful?

Sometimes it seems as if California's cap-and-trade program can't catch a break.

It wasn't so long ago that critics were blasting the program as a failure. Its fortunes seemed to hit bottom at the state's May 2016 auction of emission allowances, each of which carries the right to pump 1 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Only 11 percent of the allowances offered at that auction were sold. Only one-third of the inventory sold at the next auction three months later.

Since May 2017, however, every allowance put up for auction has been snapped up. But that has inspired another concern: Industries could buy and hoard so many allowances to emit greenhouse gases now that they might not need to actually reduce emissions in the future, when the state's