Western Climate Initiative Responds To Republican Criticism
A group of four U.S. Senators and fifteen U.S. Congressmen, all Republicans, recently sent a letter to the Western Climate Initiative criticizing the relative costs and benefits of the WCI's proposed greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program. Based on a study commissioned from the Western Business Roundtable, a Colorado-based property rights and deregulation advocacy group, the authors concluded that the WCI plan would cause significant job losses and new costs without making a significant dent in rising global temperatures. The WBR analysis also concluded that the WCI plan would prohibit any new fossil fuel or nuclear-powered electricity generation through 2020.
The WCI's initial response has been to declare the study "fundamentally flawed" because it misunderstood or mischaracterized several aspects of the WCI cap-and-trade plan, which is still under development. According to the WCI, the WBR report failed to recognize that many of the WCI's assumptions about new renewables are derived directly from the mandates of the participating states' renewable portfolio standards. Moreover, the WCI justified the exclusion of carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) technology from its projections because no commercially proven CCS technology yet exists and likely won't until 2020 at least. The WCI plan does encourage further research on CCS.
With respect to fossil fuel and nuclear power, the WCI notes that some individual states, like California and Washington, already have regulatory systems in place that effectively prohibit new coal-fired plants from being built, and there are no new nuclear proposals in the pipeline in any member WCI states that could conceivably be permitted by 2020. Thus, the WCI believes that exclusion of these options from its analysis of the likely 2020 energy mix is justified, but its plan "should not be construed as a policy that would limit the deployment of such resources."
The WBR study and the Congressional letter to WCI is much too premature. The authors of the letter would better serve our national interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by waiting to review the final WCI proposal for greenhouse gas controls in its member jurisdictions. By criticizing the plan in its formative stages, the authors come across as politically motivated to kill carbon regulation at the starting gate, rather than as genuinely interested in an economically effective solution to global warming.
Post authored by David J. Petersen, partner practicing in the Sustainability and Real Estate and Land Use Groups.
