Summary
Against the sparkling backdrop of sailboats bobbing on San Francisco Bay, Gov. Jerry Brown last month signed a bill extending California’s cap-and-trade program, assuring that the most high-profile piece of the state’s fight against climate change persists for another decade.
In a Sacramento hearing room two days later, the California Air Resources Board approved a paragraph, tucked within a 17-page resolution, that will likely result in benefits worth hundreds of millions of dollars for the oil and agriculture industries. It was the first domino to visibly fall as a consequence of behind-the-scenes dealmaking that produced a cap-and-trade program acceptable to both key environmental groups and major polluters.
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“If the Legislature comes in and says, ‘We don’t care what experts say about allocations, we still want to give away more,’ that’s a political decision and that’s a big part of the politics of (the cap and trade bill),” said Danny Cullenward, who works at Near Zero, a climate policy think tank at Carnegie Institution and teaches at Stanford’s law school.
“But this is specifically going against what, at least as of a couple of months ago, was what the air board said was the right way to approach this.”
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How cap-and-trade gets implemented will help determine whether the state has a shot at reaching its 2030 climate targets “an ambitious accomplishment that most people believe (the cap-and-trade extension) has just delivered,” said Cullenward, the economist. He noted that a $300 million “transfer of wealth from the general public to a special interest is a notable development, but I’m not claiming this particular episode will make or break the whole cap-and-trade program.”
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