Serious economic and grid reliability concerns surfaced Wednesday in a business-backed report that challenges a climate change action plan backed by seven western governors. The Western Climate Initiative (WCI) is an outline for limiting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and implementing a cap-and-trade system.

The study paid for by the Western Business Roundtable raises the possibility that WCI could turn out to be counterproductive and actually harm — not stimulate — the economy.

The report’s author, Management Information Services, Inc., specializes in economic analyses and has worked for both renewable and fossil fuel industry clients. The firm analyzed and came up with some harsh conclusions about WCI’s proposed regional GHG emissions mitigation program that was unveiled last year.

Western Business Roundtable CEO Jim Sims suggested the report confirms that the WCI approach would “throttle back” the nation’s economy rather than “turbocharge it with new technologies.”

Sims stressed three major conclusions of the work by Management Information Services: (1) WCI’s assumption of no new traditional baseload power generation in the next decade; (2) WCI’s recommendation that almost all future electric demand growth be met by intermittent renewable power sources, and (3) the fact that internationally accepted measures indicate the WCI plan would result in “a virtually immeasurable reduction of future global temperatures” during the next century.

When announced last September, the WCI proposal was promoted as having the opposite effect that the Roundtable study now says it would have. It was said to “slash climate-changing GHG emissions, spur growth in new green technologies, help build a strong clean-energy economy, and reduce dependence on foreign oil.” And a key element of achieving these goals, WCI and its supporting states said, was the cap-and-trade design by WCI, a collaborative launched two years ago by the governors of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington, later to be joined by a half-dozen other western states and Canadian provinces.

“The new, multi-sector program will be the most comprehensive carbon-reduction strategy designed to date,” WCI said.

However, Sims said his business group’s independent analysis predicts that the WCI approach would “disadvantage” the West by limiting energy resources and “discouraging employment of new technologies” that are needed to grow a more low-carbon economy.

“On the contrary, the West needs all the resources we can develop in order to power our way out of this recession and create millions of new high-paying jobs. We need a climate action plan that helps our economy grow while we continue to reduce emissions through cutting-edge, 21st century technologies,” SIms said.

“The key to creating new jobs while reducing emissions is not to throttle back our economic engine, but to turbocharge it with new technologies that allow it to run faster, cleaner and more efficiently.”

The assessment of the research firm is that WCI’s plan fails to address four basic objectives that the Western Business Roundtable articulated:

Instead, the research firm’s findings said the WCI plan “could impose significant new costs on consumers and retard job creation in the western United States during the coming decade, while delivering no scientifically measurable benefit in terms of reduced global climate temperatures as far out as the year 2100.”

©Copyright 2009Intelligence Press Inc. All rights reserved. The preceding news reportmay not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, in anyform, without prior written consent of Intelligence Press, Inc.