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While Lovins addressed fossil fuels, renewables, and a carbon tax as a consultant and public intellectual, Jim Rogers, until recently the chief executive officer of Duke Energy, the nation’s largest electric utility, did so as a shrewd pragmatist and soldier in the trenches of legislative conflict. A facile lawyer who served as a FERC litigator, Rogers once ran the gas pipeline business of Houston Natural Gas, an Enron predecessor. Later he took the helm at PSI Energy, a coal-fired utility, where he reached an accommodation with environmental opponents on cleaning up his company’s SO₂ emissions, then the subject of cap-and-trade amendments to the Clean Air Act. Rogers defied industry logic and supported the new program just as other utility executives lobbied against it. Rogers saw the SO₂ cap-and-trade program as a smart and creative compromise that allocated generous allowances to utilities in coal-dependent states and enabled them to modernize their plants to meet emissions targets without price spikes. In the conservative utility industry, Rogers was an outlier whose environmental credentials generated favorable publicity but at the same time drew skepticism. In 2006, after a series of acquisitions, Rogers headed Duke Energy, just in time to participate as a key player in shaping forthcoming climate change legislation that proposed CO₂ cap-and-trade methodology modeled on the successful SO₂ program of almost twenty years before. Rogers wanted Duke Energy to receive enough free allowances to make the transition to clean energy affordable and avoid rate shock for its customers. Environmentalists saw free allowances as a giveaway to polluters and demanded they be auctioned, but Rogers objected to according the government free rein to spend revenues raised from selling allowances. In his first State of the Union message President Obama proposed legislation that placed a market cap on carbon pollution. Coal-fired utilities, with Duke Energy in the forefront, saw a looming threat. Eager to shape the debate, Rogers urged that the power sector receive 40 per cent of all allowances for free as a bridge to a decarbonized economy and got most of what he wanted in the Waxman-Markey bill that narrowly passed the House in 2009 but later failed in the Senate, the victim of polarized politics. In negotiations with Congress, Rogers had used his pivotal position to extract the accommodation he required only to see cap and trade blown away by hard economic times, extreme partisan division, and effective right-wing opposition. Given the threat of legislation, he tried to mitigate the risks to his company. “When you see a parade form on an issue in Washington,” he said, “you have two choices: you can throw your body in front of it and let Washington walk over you, or you can jump in front of the parade and pretend it’s yours.”

After RGGI’s implementation in 2008, a series of political set backs led some to declare cap and trade “dead.” This chapter rejects the asserted demise of cap and trade, arguing that the public benefit model for climate policies offers the best hope for political progress. The chapter reviews post-2008 climate policies, noting thatdespite a few prominent failures,cap and trade with auction has become the most common approach to addressing climate change. In addition, the chapter documents how three policies—the EU ETS, California’s cap and trade program, and RGGI—used the public benefit frame to resist political challenges and strengthen their emissions goals. The chapter then describes additional potential applications for the public benefit model, including carbon tax policies and the new Clean Power Plan regulations promulgated by the U.S. EPA in 2015. As uses of the public benefit frame expand, the chapter notes, a key question for the future will be what types of policy designs will be perceived as “fitting” with the norms that constitute the frame. Finally, the chapter discusses how normative framing could improve the ability to understand and predict other sudden policy changes beyond the topic of climate change.