The California Assembly is expected to vote this week on a bill that would limit the role of offsets in the state’s landmark global warming law.
The bill, AB 1404, has the support of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the California State Building and Construction Trades Council, and more than 60 health, labor, environmental, faith, social justice and civic organizations that say the bill would foster green jobs growth in the state, reduce smog-forming air pollutants that endanger public health and help the state meet its emissions-reduction goals.
The state’s landmark climate bill (AB 32) allows the California Air Resources Board’s (CARB) to establish a cap-and-trade program. The program proposed by CARB would set a declining limit on global warming pollution from sources covered by the cap, including electric power plants, fuel providers and industrial facilities. Polluters would need to obtain an allowance for each ton of global warming pollution they emit. Every year, the state would distribute fewer and fewer allowances, thus ratcheting down the amount of pollution emitted.
Offsets would offer polluters an alternative to obtaining allowances or cutting their own emissions. By using offsets, a polluter pays others to cut or sequester carbon instead of making the cuts himself. For instance, an electric utility in California might pay a business in Mexico to capture methane from a pig farm rather than build a wind farm in California or reduce its own global warming pollution by cleaning up one of its fossil-fuel plants. If a California utility bought such an offset, it would do nothing to reduce harmful air pollution in California or foster investment in local global warming solutions that create new green-collar jobs.
Offsets have become one of the most controversial features of cap-and-trade programs at the state, regional, national and international levels. Given that California is ahead of the rest of the nation in implementing an economy-wide cap-and-trade system for global warming pollution, the way the state approaches this thorny issue could impact other initiatives.
CARB has proposed that as many as half of all global warming emission reductions below the 2012 cap could be achieved through offsets. It is unclear whether CARB would impose any geographic restrictions on where offset credits could be generated.
Democratic Assemblymembers Kevin De Leon, Manuel Perez and Wilmer Amina Carter introduced the bill, which would explicitly limit the use of offsets in California’s cap-and-trade system and prioritize in-state offsets that provide local environmental and public health benefits.
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