For those who care to know, the Senate is expected to vote on the Climate
Stewardship Act today (Saturday.
(For those who don't care, feel free to stop reading right here.)
If I've made myself too clear, you must have misunderstood me.
--Alan Greenspan, Chairman, US Federal Reserve Board
--------- Forwarded message ----------
>From the NY Times, October 29, 2003
The Warming Is Global but the Legislating, in the U.S., Is All Local
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 Motivated by environmental and economic
concerns, states have become the driving force in efforts to combat
global warming even as mandatory programs on the federal level have
largely stalled.
At least half of the states are addressing global warming, whether
through legislation, lawsuits against the Bush administration or
programs initiated by governors.
In the last three years, state legislatures have passed at least 29
bills, usually with bipartisan support. The most contentious is
California's 2002 law to set strict limits for new cars on emissions
of carbon dioxide, the gas that scientists say has the greatest role
in global warming.
While few of the state laws will have as much impact as
California's, they are not merely symbolic. In addition to caps on
emissions of gases like carbon dioxide that can cause the atmosphere
to heat up like a greenhouse, they include registries to track such
emissions, efforts to diversify fuel sources and the use of crops to
capture carbon dioxide by taking it out of the atmosphere and into
the ground.
Aside from their practical effects, supporters say, these efforts
will put pressure on Congress and the administration to enact
federal legislation, if only to bring order to a patchwork of state
laws.
States are moving ahead in large part to fill the vacuum that has
been left by the federal government, said David Danner, the energy
adviser for Gov. Gary Locke of Washington.
"We hope to see the problem addressed at the federal level," Mr.
Danner said, "but we're not waiting around."
There are some initiatives in Congress, but for the moment even
their backers acknowledge that they are doomed, given strong
opposition from industry, the Bush administration which favors
voluntary controls and most Congressional Republicans.
This week, the Senate is scheduled to vote on a proposal to create a
national regulatory structure for carbon dioxide. This would be the
first vote for either house on a measure to restrict the gas.
The proposal's primary sponsors, Senator John McCain, Republican of
Arizona, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut,
see it mainly as a way to force senators to take a position on the
issue, given the measure's slim prospects.
States are acting partly because of predictions that global warming
could damage local economies by harming agriculture, eroding
shorelines and hurting tourism.
"We're already seeing things which may be linked to global warming
here in the state," Mr. Danner said. "We have low snowpack,
increased forest fire danger."
Environmental groups and officials in state governments say that
energy initiatives are easier to move forward on the local level
because they span constituencies industrial and service sectors,
Democrat and Republican, urban and rural.
While the coal, oil and automobile industries have big lobbies in
Washington, the industry presence is diluted on the state level.
Environmental groups say this was crucial to winning a legislative
battle over automobile emissions in California, where the automobile
industry did not have a long history of large campaign donations and
instead had to rely on a six-month advertising campaign to make its
case.
Local businesses are also interested in policy decisions because of
concerns about long-term energy costs, said Christopher James,
director of air planning and standards for the Connecticut
Department of Environmental Protection. As a result, environmental
groups are shifting their efforts to focus outside Washington.
Five years ago the assumption was that the climate treaty known as
the Kyoto Protocol was the only effort in town, said Rhys Roth, the
executive director of Climate Solutions, which works on global
warming issues in the Pacific Northwest states. But since President
Bush rejected the Kyoto pact in 2001, local groups have been
emerging on the regional, state and municipal levels.
The Climate Action Network, a worldwide conglomeration of
nongovernment organizations working on global warming, doubled its
membership of state and local groups in the last two years.
The burst of activity is not limited to the states with a
traditional environmental bent.
At least 15 states, including Texas and Nevada, are forcing their
state electric utilities to diversify beyond coal and oil to energy
sources like wind and solar power.
Even rural states are linking their agricultural practices to global
warming. Nebraska, Oklahoma and Wyoming have all passed initiatives
in anticipation of future greenhouse-gas emission trading, hoping
they can capitalize on their forests and crops to capture carbon
dioxide during photosynthesis.
Cities are also adopting new energy policies. San Franciscans
approved a $100 million bond initiative in 2001 to pay for solar
panels for municipal buildings, including the San Francisco
convention center.
The rising level of state activity is causing concern among those
who oppose carbon dioxide regulation.
"I believe the states are being used to force a federal mandate,"
said Sandy Liddy Bourne, who does research on global warming for the
American Legislative Exchange Council, a group contending that
carbon dioxide should not be regulated because it is not a
pollutant. "Rarely do you see so many bills in one subject area
introduced across the country."
The council started tracking state legislation, which they call son-
of-Kyoto bills, weekly after they noticed a significant rise in
greenhouse-gas-related legislation two years ago. This year, the
council says, 24 states have introduced 90 bills that would build
frameworks for regulating carbon dioxide. Sixty-six such bills were
introduced in all of 2001 and 2002.
Some of the activity has graduated to a regional level. Last summer,
Gov. George E. Pataki of New York invited 10 Northeastern states to
set up a regional trading network where power plants could buy and
sell carbon dioxide credits in an effort to lower overall emissions.
In 2001, six New England states entered into an agreement with
Canadian provinces to cap overall emissions by 2010. Last month,
California, Washington and Oregon announced that they would start
looking at shared strategies to address global warming.
To be sure, some states have decided not to embrace policies to
combat global warming. Six Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Oklahoma,
West Virginia and Wyoming have explicitly passed laws against any
mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
"My concern," said Ms. Bourne, "is that members of industry and
environment groups will go to the federal government to say: `There
is a patchwork quilt of greenhouse-gas regulations across the
country. We cannot deal with the 50 monkeys. We must have one 800-
pound gorilla. Please give us a federal mandate.' " Indeed, some
environmentalists say this is precisely their strategy.
States developed their own air toxics pollution programs in the
1980's, which resulted in different regulations and standards across
the country. Industry groups, including the American Chemistry
Council, eventually lobbied Congress for federal standards, which
were incorporated into the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments.
A number of states are trying to compel the federal government to
move sooner rather than later. On Thursday, 12 states, including New
York, with its Republican governor, and three cities sued the
Environmental Protection Agency for its recent decision not to
regulate greenhouse-gas pollutants under the Clean Air Act, a
reversal of the agency's previous stance under the Clinton
administration.
"Global warming cannot be solely addressed at the state level," said
Tom Reilly, the Massachusetts attorney general. "It's a problem that
requires a federal approach."
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