Back to the States

The federal climate bill has been declared dead.  What do we do now? 

We turn back to our federalist roots.  We make the states the laboratories of innovation while the federal government tries to get its act together.  The World Resource Institute just issued a report analyzing possible progress towards meeting our emission reduction goals under existing state and federal authority.  There’s some bad news:  with our current set of tools, we can’t do enough to solve the problem.   But there’s also good news: if we pursue our existing state and federal policies aggressively enough, we can stay on a reasonable path for the next five years, buying time to implement a comprehensive national plan.  This is the “Go-Getter” scenario in the figure below.

 This scenario reflects both state and federal policy; the following scenario  shows how much state policies alone can achieve.  (My colleague, David Doniger, has blogged on the significance of the federal policies.)

Certainly, state policies alone are not enough to combat climate change.  But the bottom line for the “Go-Getter” scenario is this: every state statute, executive order, and regional cap-and-trade program must be implemented if we hope to stay on a stable path.

The states colored in the map above are  leading the way in the march towards climate stabilization and energy independence. It is up to them to demonstrate that sustainable energy laws can not only save lives by cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink—they can also grow the economy by moving us away from increasingly expensive fossil fuels to cleaner and cheaper alternatives.  China is figuring this out.  Let’s hope that through aggressive, “go getter” policies the states can help the U.S. Senate come to the same realization.