U.S. goes own way on global warming strategy

Put a price on carbon?
The Congressional Budget Office report last month said any cost-effective U.S. policy on global warming must put a price on carbon — via an emissions tax or a “cap and trade” system of buying and selling emissions allowances among companies, as in Europe.

“Setting a current price for carbon emissions and announcing planned future carbon prices not only would induce firms and households to change their behavior but also would increase their demand for technologies that would reduce emissions,” CBO researchers said.

States aren’t waiting for Washington.

On Sept. 28, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed California legislation imposing a first-in-the-nation emissions cap on utilities, refineries and manufacturing plants, with a goal of cutting greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020. An earlier California law ordered 30-percent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles. And Schwarzenegger and British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced plans this summer to work toward a possible joint emissions-trading market.

Such a market pact is close to becoming reality among eight Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, which plan to impose caps on power plant emissions and encourage trading of allowances among utilities. Twenty-eight states in all have drawn up plans to combat warming, with some — notably Alaska, Arizona, Montana, New Mexico and North Carolina — also working toward possible mandatory limits on gases. Ten states plan to enact California’s auto rule, if it survives a current court challenge.

Some businesses want national caps now on carbon emissions, believing them inevitable. “It is very difficult to have a product that is regulated significantly differently from state to state,” said Bill Gerwing, environmental policy director for the oil company BP America.

Political football
Contributing to Washington’s impasse is skepticism in some quarters about whether global warming is even a problem.

The Senate Environment chairman, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., likens concerns about the Earth warming to Chicken Little saying the sky is falling.

“Global warming is an alarmism. It’s a type of a hoax,” said Inhofe. “The reality is that a cap on carbon is a cap on the economy, through the rationing of energy.”

Similar thinking pervades the House, Boehlert said. “The scientific consensus has simply not pierced through the ideological barriers,” he said.

Former Rep. Claudine Schneider, R-R.I., who in 1988 led the first major legislative attempt to curb greenhouse gases, said next month’s congressional elections could provide the “most important push” in the debate.

In her current job of helping the Environmental Protection Agency recruit companies to cut carbon, she finds more shareholders viewing climate change as a top concern, she said.

“You’ve got the push of shareholders and eventually the pull of Congress moving America,” Schneider said. “We just need a new Congress.”

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