The Western Climate Initiative (WCI, at http://www.westernclimateinitiative.org/Useful_Links.cfm) may not be perfect.  Nothing in the Western U.S. ever is.  But in its announcement of a new framework for a regional cap and trade program to control global warming emissions (and help toward a new energy economy), the WCI makes certain progress.

First, it commits to a serious new climate protection goal: a 15% reduction in 2005 global warming pollution by 2020.  More and faster might be better, but these are fast-growing states and they must start with turning their emissions trends around. 

Second, the agreement brings together seven governors (and a number of Canadian premiers) from disparate states and political persuasions.  Togetherness, of course, is not a result in itself.  But achieving change is more likely when a larger, more diverse group of elected leaders work together.  Has there been such a diverse band of climate protagonists anywhere else on earth?  Utah, Arizona - very conservative states.  California, Oregon, Washington - greenish-blue states.  New Mexico, Montana - top producers of coal, oil and natural gas.  Only when Russia joined the Kyoto Protocal several years ago has there previously been a similar meeting of strange bedfellows.

These states have all done state-level climate plans.  Now they are taking their work to the regional level, and setting up a market-based system to control emissions and create economic conditions encouraging energy efficiency and new technologies.  Unfortunately, the transition to a new energy economy isn't going to happen without this kind of mechanism.  It takes some foresight and some courage for these governors and premiers to try tackling this problem together when they could have just pointed fingers at each other.

Some of these governors and premiers will have trouble getting buyin at home, from industry, from legislative and regulatory bodies.  But they are stepping out instead of hiding behind the refrigerator.

Third, the WCI is a very encompassing proposal.  The northeast states include about a third of the region's emissions in their trading system; the European Union includes about 40% of its members' emissions.  The WCI will be the first to include transportation (in 2015, after a startup for other emitters such as electricity producers and oil and gas operations in 2012) and will include almost 90% of the region's emissions.  This sets a good example for would-be emissions trading systems all over the world.

The WCI proposal is also encompassing just for the sheer size of the emissions footprint in the participating states and provinces.  Taken together, these jurisdictions would constitute one of the world top six or seven economies. 

There are criticisms of the WCI - it has a horribly low threshold for the percentage of permits that will be issued by allocation rather than sold at auction.  This could allow some emitters actually to make a profit from their free permits which they could turn around and sell just by (for instance) deciding to shutter an old, dirty facility that was already destined for the dungheap.  It would be a far better thing to require everyone to buy permits at the beginning rather than let government decide who should have one.  The individual states can achieve these higher auction percentages, the way California's Public Utilities Commission recently proposed 100% auction of permits by 2016, creating revenue for consumer benefits and eliminating t he possibility of windfall profits for companies that might score unneeded emissions permits in a politically overseen free-permit allocation process.

The West is already experiencing some disturbing symptoms of global warming - heat, drought, wildfire.  NRDC's excellent report on western climate impacts, Hotter and Drier, released in March '08 (http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/west/west.pdf), gives a science-based sense of what is happening and what we can expect in the West.  It isn't a pretty picture.  Imagine Denver feeling like the Chihuahuan Desert, Phoenix being ten or fifteen degrees hotter on a typical summer day.  Imagine longer, hotter summers, with increased air conditioning demand.  Imagine rivers flooding heavily in the spring as the snow season shortens and the snowmelt is compacted into a much shorter timeframe. Imagine rising sea levels and damage to coastal infrastructure (ports, levees, sewer plants, roads), like a slow-motion West Coast tsunami.

These are basic changes affecting our lifestyle and our environment that will affect everything we know about our western communities.  In the Mountain West, where water already sets limits on activity, we will need to learn how to consume even less.  Storage won't do the job, either.  Longer summers will mean more evaporation, making surface water storage less and less practical.

Opponents of WCI who point to cost and science are wrong.  The science is clear and peer-reviewed.  It doesn't matter whether a political candidate or climate skeptic says he or she is not convinced about global warming, or whether they say there's no proof and a list of 30,000 scientists disagrees with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The world's leading climate experts - thousands of them - have done rigorous, conservative research and modeling over two decades, and they believe that global warming is happening, is accelerating, and is largely caused by human activity (mainly the combustion of fossil fuels, although warming itself will inevitably release vast amounts of methance from permafrost zones if we don't act to reduce emissions quickly).  As for cost, our current model of procuring and distributing energy is obviously very expensive.  In many cases, for everyday folks, it precludes consumer competition and choice (for instance, electric cars that could be operated at a small fraction of the cost and environmental impact of today's petroleum-based fleet).  These changes are going to save money over time.  And they will keep our dollars from turning into petrodollars overseas. 

No one says the Western U.S. can solve the international climate crisis by itself.  Instead, the West is protecting its own interests, and helping the nation achieve energy efficiency and self-sufficiency, by moving ahead with regional climate policy.  Someday, there will be leadership in Washington to take note of the states' progress, and we will see a national program.  Till that day dawns, the West is doing what it can.