While there will be no capping and trading in President Bush’s government, 10 northeast states are taking emissions into their own hands. On Thursday, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, bypassing the federal government, started its permit auction, creating the first mandatory cap-and-trade program in the United States.

The initiative involves Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont. The auction gave 12.5 million permits for CO2 emitters, with each worth one ton of carbon dioxide. The group will then offer 188 million permits a year for three years, according to a Reuters article.

The group hopes for emissions to be stabilized from the region’s power companies by 2012, and then they’ll lower the emissions cap by 10 percent of current levels by 2019. The intiative is setting modest goals to begin with – probably a good idea, considering it’s not caught on so much at the federal level yet. Best to start low and meet those goals than to show the feds that a cap-and-trade program doesn’t work.

There is still question about what how the states will spend their auction money. The official doctrine says they’ll spend it on alternative energy – but who knows yet if that’ll actually come to play and how exactly they’ll do that. I think the states should use that money as subsidies to residents and local businesses who use, say, expensive solar panels in their homes and other green technology. Hopefully the money won’t just go into budgets or big corporations.

And hopefully this cap-and-trade trend will expand across the country. Other regions are carefully watching the results of this auction and the next in December – maybe our new president will start paying attention, too.

But it may take awhile. RGGI has been on discussion tables since 2003…and finally five years later we’re seeing this first auction. It took until 2007 for Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maryland to definitively sign onto the intiative. And who knows if capping and trading is even the right way to go. But it’s a step in the right direction.

Photo Credit: Wigwam Jones at Flickr under a Creative Commons License

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