Morning Bell: California Cap and Trade Tripped Up By Pollution Rhetoric
Conn Carroll /
The economic harms of carbon cap-and-trade policies are so well established that even a state as reliably leftist as California has never been able to pass a plan through their legislature. Instead, environmentalists in the Golden State have relied on the California Air Resources Board (CARB), whose appointed governing board is democratically unaccountable, to develop and impose carbon regulations by bureaucratic fiat. And this past December, much to the delight of many environmentalists, CARB passed the first carbon cap-and-trade scheme in the United States. Everything looked ready to go … until a San Francisco Superior Court judge issued a ruling, just made public last week, that, if made final, would stop CARB from implementing its plan. The plaintiffs in the suit? The Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment.
So why is a group called the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment suing to stop carbon cap and trade? The New York Times reports: “Poor communities, particularly in Southern California, have been leery of market-based systems of pollution control, believing that industries nearby would be able to pay for extra pollution allowances and continue to send dangerous chemicals into their neighborhoods.” And what is this “dangerous” pollutant the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment says will be pumped into their neighborhoods? Carbon dioxide. The same chemical compound that you and I are exhaling right now.
The Times goes on to report that “no one maintains that carbon dioxide is a hazardous pollutant dangerous to local communities.” Oh, but they have. The Obama Administration’s own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that poses a “danger to public health and welfare.” As a result EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is moving ahead with plans to regulate carbon as a “pollutant” under authority granted her by the Clean Air Act. (more…)