Cap-And-Trade

Canada’s chief fossil fuel-producing province on Wednesday set a target of next Thursday (May 30) for scrapping its carbon tax at age 29 months.

Oregon lawmakers have sparked tensions between the retail natural gas and electricity sectors over a proposal to launch a cap-and-trade program, House Bill (HB) 2020, which currently favors power over gas customers.

California and Quebec held a joint cap-and-trade auction earlier this month, selling all of the current and future vintage greenhouse gas emission allowances and garnering about $813 million for the state’s GHG reduction fund that supports climate mitigation programs statewide.

In his final state-of-the-state speech on Thursday, four-term California Gov. Jerry Brown broke sharply with President Trump’s nationalistic “America First” agenda, emphasizing that the state would continue on “a bolder path forward” tied to reversing the adverse impacts of climate change.

The Trump administration may plan to withdraw the United States from the United Nations global climate accord, but California is going its own way, with government, industry and environmental leaders entering 2018 with the shared understanding that they have accelerated efforts to mitigate climate change and reduce overall carbon emissions in the nation’s most populous state.

California’s much-debated cap-and-trade carbon emissions program, now extended to 2030, could experience significant price spikes for the carbon credits over the next 12 years, according to a recent discussion paper by The Brattle Group.

California air regulators and oil/natural gas industry representatives are lauding the state’s recent cap-and-trade auction, which sold out air emissions credits at historically high prices.

While political leaders are hailing it as a bipartisan accomplishment, environmental groups are critical of California’s recent extension to 2030 of the state’s precedent-setting cap-and-trade program, which the oil/natural gas industry has supported.

California lawmakers in a bipartisan vote late Monday extended the much-debated multi-billion-dollar cap-and-trade program for another decade. The carbon emissions trading system was set to expire in 2020.