The idea of marketable permits was conceived in the United States, and this is where they were first implemented. Textbooks (e.g. (Stavins 2003)) indicate three historic projects: (1) offset policy; (2) bubble policy; and (3) phasing out lead additives to gasoline. Combined, they allowed to save USD 5–12 billion on US environmental policy (Hahn and Hester 1989). The fourth early implementation, namely the Fox River cleanup in Wisconsin—perhaps because of its local scale—is not mentioned frequently. The following sections contain brief outlines of these implementations. The last section deals with intertemporal transactions called banking.