Swell Swine(subscription)

North Carolina's global-warming activists are in hog heaven. Late last month, Gov. Mike Easley, a Democrat in his second term, signed legislation mandating that more electric power in his state come from "green" sources such as wind, solar energy, and hog and chicken waste. Today, North Carolina gets about 2% of its electricity from "renewable resources." By 2021, under the new mandates, Progress Energy and Duke Energy will have to find 12.5% of the power that they sell to Tar Heel residents from renewables. Hog-waste-generated power -- as required by the new law -- will nearly triple to 0.2% of the electricity used in the state over the next decade as farmers capture and sell the methane gas given off from tons of decomposing manure. It's gone largely uncovered outside the state, but there is an energy revolution underway in the Tar Heel State that will cost residents more for the energy they use in the name of cutting greenhouse gases. Even while they make little headway in Congress, advocates of heavy-handed regulations to head off global warming are working to enact laws on the state level. They're succeeding in North Carolina. The immediate cost to consumers will be higher electric bills. For residential customers, an annual fee will eventually reach $34, and for industry the annual fee will grow to as much as $1,000. The new hog mandate is only the beginning. The state has set up a special commission -- the Climate Action Plan Advisory Group -- to study ways to cut CO2 emissions. It's already adopted a list of 53 recommended new mandates and is drafting a report for the state legislature. A few ideas the commission will recommend in its report next month include mandates for "higher-density" housing developments, something thought to reduce suburban "sprawl," and, of course, new subsidies for farmers to produce biodiesel. It will also recommend imposing new costs on the driving public. One thought is to force drivers who put more miles on their odometer to pay higher car-insurance premiums than those who drive less. And it will recommend a CO2 tax or a cap-and-trade system, assuming such a system could be worked out on a state level. These ideas don't come out of thin air. They are in part the product of a five-year effort by the Center for Climate Strategies -- a global warming group funded by several well-known foundations -- that first got active in North Carolina under the auspices of a law enacted in 2002 aimed at reducing emissions from coal-fired power plants. Under that law, the state's Division of Air Quality was required to study ways to reduce CO2 emissions. That mandate led to the creation of the special commission that will soon hand over its list of recommended new mandates to the legislature. To conduct its studies, the Division of Air Quality turned to the Center for Climate Strategies....