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Friday, October 21, 2011

Cap and Trade Comes to California

KQED Climate Watch:
It’s official…. California has cap & trade… [T]he program starts ramping up next year. Today’s approval by the state’s Air Resources Board was described by chair Mary Nichols as like “moving a large army a few feet in one direction.” The objective that “army” is marching… toward is… the fulfillment of California’s goal to roll back greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the end of this decade… [T]he program is expected to produce at most, 20% of the hoped-for reductions in carbon emissions. The rest will come from other measures… under or related to the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, more widely known as AB 32. Those other measures include stricter standards for tailpipe emissions, a “low-carbon fuels standard” (still being worked on), and the ambitious-but-attainable goal to get a third of the state’s electricity from renewable energy sources, also by 2020. The next major milestone will come late next year, when the state begins meting out permits or “allowances” to release carbon dioxide into the air. At first, 90% of those permits will be given away but analysts have estimated that within a few years, at least half will be auctioned off at a price estimated by Thomson Reuters Point Carbon analytical service to be about $36 a ton. To most of us, that doesn’t mean much by itself, but for a refinery pumping out a few million tons a year… that adds up to some serious revenue for the state. How those “carbon dollars” will be spent is one aspect of the program that has yet to be worked out.
Market fundamentalist interventions like Cap and Trade are far from an adequate response to climate change, but the inability to implement even such conservative and comparatively painless regulations have come to function in my view as a larger drag and obstacle to America's capacity to mobilize the collective will to deal with environmental problems in more effective ways that will demand far more radical changes to our accustomed way of life. Doing something at last, even if it is not enough, will free us to do more, and eventually enough more to be enough.

As things have stood for so long now, an endlessly frustrated and frustrating inability to conjure a will the least bit equal to conspicuous shared problems has become an obstacle to reasonably radical education, agitation, and organization that has inspired in too many otherwise informed and conscientious people either dangerous descents into cynical and acquiescent despair on the one hand or dangerous leaps into megalomaniacal futurological wish-fulfillment fantasies of techno-fixes and authoritarian "geo-engineering" boondoggles.

It is encouraging that in California the cap and trade program is one piece in a suite of regulations and programs. As you see, key details are still being struggled over even as elements of the program are being implemented, but given the role of committed environmentalists in the process (else this would not be happening here at all, after all) it remains to be seen how strong this suite of regulations and programs can be made to be how soon.

It is also encouraging to remember that California is one of the ten largest economies in the world, and so forcing institutions into compliance here will have a wholesome effect across the country even as comparable efforts at federal regulations have so far been less successful (that's why it is so important for California to be a leader in providing a healthcare public option and, better, a single-payer system as soon as we can).

Never underestimate the capacity of Eurozone environmental and fair trade and transparency regulations in conjunction with comparable regulations from California to form a pincer pressuring America as a whole toward greater sustainability, fairness, and sanity simply by making the costs of selective noncompliance a nuisance not worth bothering over (especially given the fact that a more sustainable, fairer, more transparent world is simply an incomparably better world to live in and work in even if you are a stupid shortsighted greedy asshole who has to be dragged into sense kicking and screaming every inch of the way).

When it comes to California, State politics are often functionally national politics -- this is one of the special responsibilities of being a California citizen, one of the reasons why it is so important for California citizens who would be politically active to be as aware of and as active in Sacramento as they are Washington.

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