The one bright spot amid the generally gloomy news about climate change, and the Trump administration’s resistance to doing anything about it, is the determination of a number of state governments to take action on their own.
California, as usual, has commanded the headlines on this score, having just strengthened its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Now the nine Northeastern states that form the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative have done much the same, in a further rebuke to the know-littles and do-nothings like Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who are now calling the shots on climate policy in Washington.
The nine states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York, last week agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants an additional 30 percent by 2030, on top of the 40 percent cut they have already achieved since the program began in 2009. R.G.G.I., as the initiative is known, was the nation’s first multistate greenhouse gas initiative. From the beginning (and despite the defection of New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie), it has had the backing of governors from both parties. More important, it has quietly achieved substantial emissions reductions at little cost to the states’ economies or to their consumers.
The nine states require power plants to buy permits to pollute. Over time, these permits decline in quantity. The idea of such cap-and-trade systems is to put a price on emissions, giving utilities an incentive to figure out ways to reduce emissions. Utilities can trade permits with one another. Since it began, the initiative has raised $2.7 billion, which the states have invested in energy efficiency, in helping low-income people pay electricity bills and in renewable sources of power like wind and solar. (The other R.G.G.I. states are Delaware, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.)
Even as emissions have come down, electricity rates have fallen by an average of 3.4 percent in the nine states, according to the Acadia Center, an energy research and advocacy organization. And the economies of the nine states have grown faster than the economy of the rest of the country. The program has had the added benefit of reducing ground-level pollution that causes respiratory illnesses and other diseases, providing nearly $6 billion in public health benefits, according to Abt Associates, a research company.
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