Northeast States Don’t Need Feds to Cap Emissions
While there will be no capping and trading in President Bush’s government, 10 northeast states are taking emissions into their own hands. On Thursday, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, bypassing the federal government, started its permit auction, creating the first mandatory cap-and-trade program in the United States.
The initiative involves Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont. The auction gave 12.5 million permits for CO2 emitters, with each worth one ton of carbon dioxide. The group will then offer 188 million permits a year for three years, according to a Reuters article.
The group hopes for emissions to be stabilized from the region’s power companies by 2012, and then they’ll lower the emissions cap by 10 percent of current levels by 2019. The intiative is setting modest goals to begin with - probably a good idea, considering it’s not caught on so much at the federal level yet. Best to start low and meet those goals than to show the feds that a cap-and-trade program doesn’t work.
There is still question about what how the states will spend their auction money. The official doctrine says they’ll spend it on alternative energy - but who knows yet if that’ll actually come to play and how exactly they’ll do that. I think the states should use that money as subsidies to residents and local businesses who use, say, expensive solar panels in their homes and other green technology. Hopefully the money won’t just go into budgets or big corporations.
And hopefully this cap-and-trade trend will expand across the country. Other regions are carefully watching the results of this auction and the next in December - maybe our new president will start paying attention, too.
But it may take awhile. RGGI has been on discussion tables since 2003…and finally five years later we’re seeing this first auction. It took until 2007 for Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maryland to definitively sign onto the intiative. And who knows if capping and trading is even the right way to go. But it’s a step in the right direction.
Photo Credit: Wigwam Jones at Flickr under a Creative Commons License
Related Posts:
Midwestern Governors Sign Climate Change Accord
Is McCain Serious About Cap and Trade?
Amanda:
You wrote: “I think the states should use that money as subsidies to residents and local businesses who use, say, expensive solar panels in their homes and other green technology. Hopefully the money won’t just go into budgets or big corporations.”
Generally speaking, the companies that produce solar panels are large corporations like BP Solar and Sharp. Any subsidies of middle to upper middle class residents and businesses that use those feel good, but not especially economic energy sources will reduce the amount of money available to help low income people adjust to significantly higher energy costs.
The money will flow through those higher income people - you will not see many solar panels on the high rise apartments or tightly packed townhomes inhabited by lower income people - to those major corporations.
I’ll put a cap somewhere.
[...] week at RG&B, we reported that the nation’s first cap-and-trade for greenhouse gas emissions was moving ahead with the [...]
[...] Thursday, 10 Northeastern states kicked off the first U.S. cap-and-trade market under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). The unexpectedly strong demand at North [...]
[...] Ian Bowles-Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection Leader: Bowles worked with officials from other Northeast U.S. states to open the first American market for trading greenhouse gas permits. [...]