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Old 12-14-2005, 12:18 PM
adios adios is offline
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Default Re: environmental policies

Cheer up some Californians are attempting to coerce (my interpretation) a "Kyoto" like policy in in the U.S. An article from yesterdays WSJ:

States Divide Over Greenhouse Gases

Northeast and West Coast Clusters Feud Over Implementing Limits on Emissions



WASHINGTON -- While the Bush administration resists binding international rules on climate change, about a dozen U.S. states are considering steps to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases. But those states -- clustered around the Northeast and the West Coast -- are running into legal, economic and political hurdles.

In the past month, California and Massachusetts have sparked regional fights over implementing limits. California has irked Western coal-mining states by suggesting that they follow Sacramento's rules; Massachusetts has expressed concern that a potential pact with neighbors to curb carbon emissions could lift energy prices even higher.

The spotlight in the global-warming debate has been on the United Nations, which is trying to continue the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 by setting further emissions reductions for industrial nations. The U.S. didn't join protocol discussions after President Bush took office in 2001. During an international climate-change conference in Montreal last week, his aides continued to decline requests from most of the world's industrial nations to become involved in binding negotiations for cuts. Instead, the U.S. will continue to hold informal talks on future possibilities.

As diplomats in Montreal wrangled over carbon emissions, state governments were conducting their own feuds. California officials say they would like to wield their clout as a big consumer of energy to impose greenhouse-gas emission standards on out-of-state power plants that sell power to California. Because Sacramento's environmental laws make it slow and tough to locate new power facilities in the state, about 25% of California's electrical needs come from out of state, most from coal-fired plants.

California officials say they aren't actively trying to regulate other states' power plants. "We're expressing a preference for greenhouse-gas performance that power plants will be able to meet," says Joseph Desmond, chairman of the state's Energy Commission. Because California is, by far, the biggest electricity consumer in the West, he notes, "it's an opportunity to shape what is built." The California emissions-reduction plan would cover imported and domestic electric-power producers as well as California oil refiners and producers, and landfills and cement production -- both of which emit substantial amounts of greenhouse gases.

California would require a power plant selling into the state's market to have no more emissions than a modern power plant fired by natural gas. The greenhouse-gas pollution from a coal-fired plant is at least double that from a natural gas plant. While the proposal has yet to be approved by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, it is being watched by officials in nearby Washington and Oregon, who are considering a regional alliance with California to regulate greenhouse gases.

The plan also is being monitored by Western coal states because there are at least 20 coal-fired power plants being built in the region that could serve California's electricity needs. Michael E. Easley, Wyoming's top energy official, has said California's proposed standard would disqualify all of them. In a letter to Mr. Desmond's office, he warned that California's standard may be in "legal peril" because it appears to violate the interstate-commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.


Montana has similar complaints. Evan Barrett, the state's top economic adviser, says California is "rushing" the technology. Clean-burning coal-fired power plants, which remove carbon dioxide and inject it deep into the ground, may not be available for at least a decade, he notes. California's regulations on imported electricity, on the other hand, could take effect next year.

Still, Montana is taking California's moves seriously because it is interested in shipping both coal and wind-generated power to California. In the electricity business, California is "the 600 pound gorilla and the 600 pound gorilla generally gets what it wants," he says.

Environmental groups -- which may have helped to bring on this crisis by pushing for clean-air standards in California that discourage new coal-fired plants -- say they are alarmed at the proliferation of coal-fired plants outside the Golden State. They want California to consider using more renewable energy, such as solar electricity. But state officials say California will face "severe shortages" of power in the next few years without additional conventional sources.

Mr. Desmond and other California officials say emissions trading will minimize the economic costs of their regulation by allowing industries and businessmen to find "offsets," or cheaper ways to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that can be used as credits against their allowable emission levels. Thus, power plants that didn't change their emissions could meet their quota by buying or producing offsets.

Nine Northeastern states are looking at a similar "cap and trade" approach for power plants in their region. It would assign each an emissions quota and then allow the use of offsets and emissions-credit trading that would make compliance easier and reward companies that bring emissions below certain levels.

Last week, Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts expressed concern that the plan could raise electrical rates too high. This could happen, he suggested, if the price jumped for a credit that a utility needed to buy in order not to exceed its allowed emissions level.

So, starting in January, Gov. Romney said, Massachusetts will launch its own carbon-dioxide regulation program -- the nation's first -- with a limit on how high the market price of an emissions credit can rise.

"I'm not going to risk impoverishing families and small businesses in my state to enrich traders on Wall Street," Gov. Romney said. "We already have energy prices in our state that are the highest or near the highest in the nation." The governor said he also worried that the proposed regional plan would lead to uneven prices that would allow New York to buy cheaper, coal-fired power from Pennsylvania, which isn't a member of the regional pact.

The Romney plan drew criticism from states trying to hammer out a regional compact with Massachusetts. Peter Constantakes, a spokesman for New York's governor, George E. Pataki, branded the Romney approach a "command and control plan" that would fail to reduce emissions because it wouldn't allow market forces to fully develop new emissions credits.

Still, Massachusetts says it will continue to negotiate with New York and a group of New England states on a regional plan that would require power-plant owners to cap their emissions at the average of 1997-1999 levels and gradually undertake steeper reductions with offsets and emissions trades.

Andrew Ertel, president of Evolution Markets LLC, an environmental brokerage firm in White Plains, N.Y., says the bickering among the states and the roadblocks they are hitting remind him of early state experiments in regulating smog and acid-rain emissions in the 1970s. "It was such a mishmash that power companies finally cried out for one clear standard," he said. "I think this will eventually hasten federal controls.



I wonder how much California electric bills will go up if the environmentalists have their way?
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