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Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s announcement about a cap-and-trade system comes at a good time. This year is a turning point in the global effort on climate change. International negotiations have picked up momentum since 2012, and a global climate agreement is expected to be sealed at the end of this year in Paris.

Public debates on cap-and-trade in Canada focus exclusively on the promise and challenges of a carbon pricing system to achieve one particular result: reduction of overall emissions. How successful Ontario’s cap-and-trade system will be depends on its design. This focus, however, overshadows the bigger picture questions.

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There is a tendency to think about climate action strictly as a function of implementing one policy (e.g. cap-and-trade, a levy on carbon, etc.) to achieve a particular mitigation result (limiting emissions). This is a straightforward and highly intuitive way of thinking. The problem is that it implies that a carbon pricing policy might be a sufficient condition for climate action, when in fact it is a necessary condition.