Sandor Got Obama’s Nod for Chicago-Style Climate Law

A Brooklyn-born economist who gave up teaching at the University of California at Berkeley in 1973 to trade the first Treasury-bond futures is getting his way with the biggest change in U.S. environmental policy in 20 years. And he has an unwitting ally from Chicago. Legislation to let polluters buy and sell carbon-dioxide emissions like pork bellies is the outgrowth of Richard L. Sandor, founder of the Chicago-based network of people trading pollution permits from Beijing to Brussels known as Climate Exchange. It doesn’t hurt that the six-year-old market got $1.1 million of seed money from the city’s Joyce Foundation, whose board included a little-known state senator named Barack Obama. Now the 44th president is determined to enact America’s first limits on greenhouse gases. That the 67-year-old Sandor finds himself working with Henry Waxman, the California Democrat sponsoring the bill to cap emissions from refiners, utilities and manufacturers, is a belated recognition that Chicago-style pragmatism may prevail in the battle between business and environmentalists...Bloomberg