Local climate solutions constrain federal options

By Doug Struck
for the Daily Climate

When the new Administration and Congress arrive in Washington to face their campaign pledges to address climate change, they will find themselves playing catch-up with the states.

State legislatures, governors and citizens groups that saw the environmental threat more urgently than the federal government for eight years have pushed full throttle to pass laws to reduce greenhouse gases, boost renewable energy and set up carbon trading systems.

Those laws will help shape a national program, analysts say, but also may complicate federal efforts to set nationwide standards. Many of the state laws are boldly ambitious, and Congress will be pressed not to undercut those goals.

“The states set the bar at a certain level, and the federal program will have to be at least as good,” said Dan Sosland, executive director of Environment Northeast, a non-profit that works to shape state policies.

Twenty states have passed mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, mimicking  the Kyoto Protocol.  Almost half the states and four of the most populous Canadian provinces are constructing regional carbon cap-and-trade programs. Ten northeastern states started selling tradable carbon allowances this fall to power companies.  Twenty-nine states have adopted laws setting deadlines for their utilities to meet stiff quotas for providing renewable energy.

“They decided they could not wait. The federal government was not doing enough,” said Judi Greenwald, director of innovative solutions at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Washington.

“I think Barack Obama will certainly adopt and expand on some of the states’ strategies,” said Joseph Romm, a former Department of Energy official in the Clinton Administration and an author of books on climate policy. Obama has said, for example, he wants to adopt California’s tough vehicle emission standards nationally.

But states are likely to resist if they see the federal government setting different environmental standards from theirs.

“The state and regional initiatives are pushing the feds to act.  Who knows where we would be on climate legislation if these hadn’t passed,” said Kate Probst, a senior fellow at the Washington-based nonprofit Resources for the Future. 

“There are people horrified from a legal perspective who want to protect states rights” to set higher standards, said Probst.  And “there are some people who think it would be really bad if states could meet or exceed the federal cap. Nobody knows how this will fall out.”

The state track record will rein in some of the options of the new administration.  Economists still are debating whether the best national policy to put a price on carbon emissions is a uniform carbon tax, or a cap-and-trade program that allows companies to buy emission allowances.  But the three regional cap-and-trade programs already being created by 24 states have largely preempted any federal decision. The northeastern regional program has begun auctioning carbon allowances; states in the West and Midwest are in the process of drafting rules and regulations to begin their regional programs within a few years.

When the northeast states started selling allowances in September, advocates predicted it would help force the federal government’s hand.

Ned Raynolds, a policy coordinator for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the program’s significance was not its potential to slash emissions. “The much greater significance,” he said, “is in the precedent-setting and teaching value for a national policy.”

Other state initiatives are likely to spur the federal government to quickly boost development of renewable energy sources and adopt a national mandatory goal for renewables, or risk watching the states forge ahead with a hodge-podge of quotas.

Such quotas, called Renewable Portfolio Standards, have been a favorite of states. The quotas vary widely from state to state.  For instance, New York will require that 24 percent of its power come from renewable sources in five years; Arizona set the limit at 15 percent by 2025, and Maryland at 20 percent by 2022.

On last week’s state ballot, California’s Proposition 7, which would have required fully half the state’s electricity come from renewable energy sources by 2025, represented the highwater mark. It failed with opposition even from environmental groups, who found it overreaching and poorly drafted. Missouri voters, meanwhile, approved a quota of 15 percent renewable energy by 2021.

According to the most recent data collected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from power stations for 2005, about 2 percent of our nation’s electricity comes from wind, solar, biomass or geothermal. Meeting the state quotas will require overcoming enormous obstacles in technology, infrastructure, economics and opposition to the sites of large projects, analysts say. 

Some utilities and big business call for uniform national rules and argue that tackling a global problem like climate change is best left to the federal government.

“A national program definitely would be much better.  It would deal with the economic disadvantages” of having differing regional or state laws, said Radmila Miletich, an official of the Independent Power Producers of New York, a trade industry group.  “A national program is coming. They know climate change is a serious issue.  Given that, a cautious approach (by the states) would be best.”

Proponents of a national policy also argue that federal laws could provide an extra push where state initiatives are bogged down by local opposition.  In Massachusetts, for example, a state where go-green stickers abound on bumpers, the legislature has passed a requirement increasing by one percent per year indefinitely the proportion of the state’s electricity that must be provided from renewable sources.

But when investors proposed erecting 170 wind turbines off the coast of Cape Cod in 2001, locals — including the lion of liberals, Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy — blanched at the proposal.  Seven years later, the scaled-down project still is slogging through the bureaucracy against that opposition.

In the West, to meet California’s already tough mandates, utility companies are now rushing to embrace projects that would put solar collectors over tens of thousands of acres of southern California desert.  But those applications are opposed by critics who say the desert is not a wasteland devoid of life.

Romm, the former Clinton energy official, predicts that a bolder federal administration will remove some of the steam from the state initiatives.

“The only reason the states have had to do so much is that for eight years … we have had anti-leadership –  a president who denied the reality,” he said. “Once we have a president who is taking serious action, the states are going to feel less imperative to act.”

Doug Struck covered global warming issues for The Washington Post. He is now a freelance writer and adjunct professor of journalism in Massachusetts.