Interview - Forward market thinking

Richard Sandor, chairman and chief executive officer of the Chicago Climate Exchange, pioneered the first ever emissions trading scheme in the late 1980s for acid rain, drawing on his experience in launching interest rate futures 20 years earlier. He speaks to Katie Holliday about his vision for the future of US emissions trading

Q. What first piqued your interest in green markets and made you believe emissions trading could work?

A. I'd been interested in the environment in a passive way for a long time. One of my dearest friends, John Goldstein, did one of the first PhDs in environmental economics back in the 1960s and John, through 30 years of friendship, was constantly urging me to be sensitive and aware of the environment.

Then I was approached by a public interest group in the late 1980s who wanted to find out if