Lara Abrams Communications

18 Governors Call for Federal-State Climate Change Partnership w/Signing of Governors’ Declaration on Climate Change

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Climatewire, by Debra Kahn - NEW HAVEN, CONN. — Governors from 18 states representing more than half of both the country’s population and its greenhouse gas emissions signed a statement Friday asserting their desire to partner with the federal government in capping emissions.

The question of what to do with the existing state programs to combat climate change is key as federal legislators and administration officials try to put together a national policy. As state programs proliferate, the issue of whether a federal program should pre-empt them — which many corporations are pushing for — becomes more complex and difficult.

There are several regional market-based systems in the works, as well as numerous state-level programs encouraging energy efficiency, green building, smart development and other programs.

At Yale University in Connecticut, four of the governors — Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.), Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.), Jodi Rell (D-Conn.) and Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) — made an appearance. Also attending were officials from two Canadian provinces, the United Kingdom, Mexico and the Czech Republic, which is the next country to hold the rotating European Union presidency.

The governors’ declaration invoked President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 Conference of Governors, which established a federal-state partnership on forest conservation.

Washington is ‘asleep at the wheel’

But the signatory states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia and Washington — addressed their efforts to Congress and the incoming administration, ignoring President Bush almost completely except to malign his call last week for stopping emissions growth by 2025.

“Today, we recommit ourselves to the effort to stop global warming and we call on congressional leaders and the presidential candidates to work with us — in partnership — to establish a comprehensive national climate policy,” the declaration said. This policy should include continued support for state-based climate action plans, including incentives from existing federal energy, transportation and agriculture programs as well as auction revenue from a federal cap-and-trade system, the governors said in their statement.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said he was discouraged by the rhetoric of the United States’ federal government, but applauded states such as California for their initiative.

“I am always able to provide comfort by saying, look at California, look at Connecticut,” he said. “Otherwise I’d have to say something critical about the administration, and I’d get in trouble for doing that.”

“Don’t wait for Washington; Washington is asleep at the wheel,” Schwarzenegger said.

In an interview the previous evening, Czech Environment Minister Martin Bursik said he was observing the proceedings with an eye toward having discussions with a new U.S. president prior to the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, where attendees will attempt to draft a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

“Whoever will become president of the United States, we expect the policy will definitely change,” he said.

Federal cap-and-trade bill not paramount, states say

In a panel discussion at the Yale Law Center, state-level environmental officials said the current leading emissions-capping proposal on the federal level was essentially good, but negotiations should be conducted with an eye toward realistically passing a bill through both houses next year.

“I don’t think any dramatic, historic legislation happens in Congress this year,” said Ian Bowles, secretary of Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. “Resist the notion that this is the most important thing we can do — we should keep doing what we’re doing” with regard to state-level programs, he said.

Connecticut Environment Commissioner Gina McCarthy said she was working on several possible mechanisms for easing the transition from regional cap-and-trade to a federal system. “We are not entertaining the question of pre-emption,” she said in an interview. “States don’t intend to have dual systems, but they need to preserve stringency” — the right to implement their own stricter-than-federal standards — and “the goals are pretty good” in the bill submitted by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.) that would reduce emissions about 80 percent by midcentury.

California Air Resources Board Chairwoman Mary Nichols said she would press for any federal program to allow states to retire allowances early, as well as get credit for current emissions reductions.

Quebec Premier Jean Charest took the occasion to announce his province would join the Western Climate Initiative, the agreement among six states in the United States and three provinces in Canada to reduce emissions 15 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

Sebelius unleashed some rhetoric at the Kansas Legislature, whose attempts she has been blocking to allow two coal-fired power plants to be built in the southwest corner of the state. On Thursday, she vetoed the latest bill, which would have reversed Kansas Health and Environment Secretary Rod Bremby’s decision against the plants. Bremby, who was also at the conference, cited last year’s Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court decision in denying Sunflower Electric Power Corp.’s permits based on the plants’ expected CO2 emissions.

“We need a set of rules that can allow our utilities, our legislatures to make decisions,” Sebelius said. The vacuum at the federal level, she said, allows state legislators to draft bills “tying Kansas to a nonexistent federal policy.”

States concerned with delays caused by state-level issues

And Schwarzenegger used his appearance to push his own state to streamline environmental permitting processes to get new technology online faster. Solar projects are being delayed by environmental concerns, he said.

“It’s not just businesses that have slowed things down, it’s not just Republicans that have slowed things down, it’s also Democrats and also environmental activists sometimes that slow things down,” he said. The California Department of Fish and Game is slowing approval of a solar facility in Victorville because of an endangered squirrel that might not even live there, he said. “So a squirrel that may not exist is holding up environmental progress on a larger and more pressing fight against global warming. What they have here is a case of environmental regulations holding up environmental progress. I don’t know whether this is ironic or absurd. But, I mean, if we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, I don’t know where the hell we can put it.”

While Schwarzenegger pointed to the decreasing cost of other proven technologies like electric cars and cell phones as evidence that technology would save the day, the United Nations’ Pachauri was not so confident in capitalism’s qualifications.

“We are told that technology is going to provide the answers, yes, but technology can only follow policies. You need a set of policies,” he said. “I come from a developing country and have been saying they shouldn’t emulate what the developed countries have done.”

But Pachauri said skeptics’ arguments that action will wreak economic havoc should be addressed. “The myth that there will be a loss of jobs and economic output needs to be exploded,” he said. As an example of how environmental goals and economic needs can be met at the same time, he mentioned a project in India that he has backed, called “Lighting a Billion Lives.” The project provides solar-powered lanterns and flashlights to villages by the Ganges River, creating a business for flashlight chargers and distributors and allowing workers to labor and children to study later into the night.
More here, including event transcripts.

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