The California Air Resources Board has approved the creation of the nation's first broad-based program to put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions and to begin charging large emitters for the excess carbon dioxide they put in the air.
After an all-day meeting on Thursday, the board voted 9-1 for the proposal, which will take effect in 2012 and means California is once again moving forward with climate-change policy while efforts on the national level have stopped.
"The comment 'the world is watching' is sometimes an idle comment. It's not idle this afternoon," said Air Resources Board member Ronald Loveridge.
Cool! We're a buncha exhibitionists out here anyway. We do it with the shades up!
Cap-and-trade will be remembered as a plan introduced by the Repugs which they were for before they were against because Obama and the Dems wanted it and which the Repugs now lie about.
This part is of local interest to me:
Several people and environmental organizations also called for changes in the offset program involving forests, arguing that the rule as written could encourage clear-cutting of forests on land that might be eligible for tree-planting credits, leaving swaths of forests with trees of the same age, which ultimately would be harmful.
I don't think that's much of a problem. I live in the middle of a pine forest where all the trees for fifty miles around are about the same height. All second growth. The area was clear-cut in the 1860s and '70s for railroad ties and Deidesheimer Square Sets to shore up the mines in Virginia City. Things in the forest seem to be OK with it. So far.
Just as an aside, we would usually think mines are maybe a little ways out of town. Not in Virginia City. They're right on, or under the main street. When yer havin' a beer in the Bucket of Blood or enjoying the Julia C. Bulette Red Light Museum, there's a coupla thousand feet of nothing but rotting timbers underneath you. In my heart of hearts I just know there's one that's going to snap one of these days and they can go change the elevation on the city limits sign.
I'm a little amazed that a drunken, spirited Saturday night buck dance or Klingon-like dalliance with one of Julia's girls by Hoss Cartwright didn't do it already. Heh.
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