Court Blocks Cap and Trade Plan in California

When will someone sue Delaware to save use from Delaware's Cap & Trade, otherwise known as RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Iniative?


A California judge ruled on Friday that state air regulators must stop carrying out a cap-and-trade plan until they examine alternatives to emissions trading to meet the state's aggressive greenhouse gas-reduction targets.

The judge, Ernest Goldsmith of the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, said that the California Air Resources Board should "take no action" to put its cap-and-trade plans into effect until it completes the analysis of the alternatives. "This includes any further rule-making and implementation of cap and trade," the judge wrote in his decision.

Last month, Judge Goldsmith said the A.R.B., the agency devising the state's cap-and-trade plan, had failed to adequately study alternatives to creating a carbon market.

This is the latest in a string of bad news for cap and trade supporters and another nail in cap-and-trade's coffin. AB 32 was a point of pride for both former Gov. Schwarzengger and California legislators. Indeed, one purpose of the statute was to place California "at the forefront of national and international efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases."

AB 32 became the much-vaunted "California model" that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) invoked during their multi-year campaign to sell cap-and-trade on Capitol Hill.

Cap-and-trade has been on the skids since its day in the Sun back in June 2009, when the House narrowly passed the Waxman-Markey bill. After passage, the bill became politically radioactive and never came to a vote in the Senate.

The December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference ended in failure, producing no agreement on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.

In February 2010, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer issued an executive order stating that Arizona would not implement the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) cap-and-trade plan, scheduled to begin on January 1, 2012. Aside from California, none of the other WCI states (Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Utah) is close to implementing cap-and-trade.

In November 2010 the Chicago Climate Exchange emissions trading pilot program announced it would shut down "for lack of legislative interest."

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