California pushes on with plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

VOTING to extend California’s cap-and-trade programme an extra decade to 2030 was a tough decision for Devon Mathis, a Republican assemblyman who represents a large swathe of the state’s fertile Central Valley. Though once embraced by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, cap-and-trade schemes have come to be seen by Republicans as exemplifying government overreach. On the other hand, agricultural business owners in Mr Mathis’s district flooded him with letters in support of cap-and-trade, which they thought would be better than the state’s alternative plans for reducing CO{-2} emissions. Mr Mathis was so torn about the choice he sought out his pastor to pray about it. On July 17th when the vote was held, he opted to support the extension.

Cap-and-trade programmes work by setting a limit (or cap) on how much CO{-2} individual companies can emit. Businesses that pollute less than the cap can sell (or trade) their excess allowance to those that pollute more. The roots of California’s scheme, which is the world’s third largest after the European Union’s and South Korea’s, go back to 2006, when Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32) was passed. In that measure, legislators committed to cutting California’s greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020—a reduction of roughly 30%, to 431m metric tonnes of emissions. To meet that goal, the state’s Air Resources Board (ARB) pushed a number of initiatives that included a cap-and-trade programme, which it implemented in early 2013.