Is The Real Action On Climate Policy In The States?

You don't usually hear a whole lot about what individual states are doing to tackle climate change. Surely those efforts, however noble, are just too small to matter—too local, too patchy. The only people who can really make a dent in U.S. energy policy are wandering around Capitol Hill, right? It's Congress or bust? Well, maybe. But that option's not looking too bright these days, given the fog around whether Congress will even pass a climate bill this year (or next year, or…). So maybe it's time to figure out if the states really could get together and pick up the slack. The person to ask would be Terry Tamminen, who advised Arnold Schwarzenegger on climate policy back when California was drafting its plan to reduce carbon emissions 25 percent by 2020. Since then, Tamminen has traveled around the country trying to convince other governors to adopt their own climate plans—Florida's Charlie Crist was another early convert. When I asked him whether states could step up if Congress didn't pass a bill, he laughed and said I had the premise all wrong. "What they're doing is already genuinely significant," he explained. "You have thirty-three states with climate plans. These aren't just vague aspirational plans like you saw under the Kyoto Protocol, but concrete goals on efficiency, renewables—tangible things that are being written in law." Seven different states, for instance, are considering bills to set hard emissions targets, ala California's AB 32. Indeed, looking around at everything being done on the state level, it does start to add up...read more