Slashdot Mirror
How California's Carbon Market Actually Works
Lasrick writes: Almost 10 years ago, California's legislature passed Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. AB 32 set the most ambitious legally binding climate policy in the United States, requiring that California's greenhouse gas emissions return to 1990 levels by the year 2020. The centerpiece of the state's efforts — in rhetorical terms, if not practical ones — is a comprehensive carbon market, which California's leaders promote as a model policy for controlling carbon pollution. Over the course of the past 18 months, however, California quietly changed its approach to a critical rule affecting the carbon market's integrity. Under the new rule, utilities are rewarded for swapping contracts on the Western electricity grid, without actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. Now that the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants, many are looking to the Golden State for best climate policy practices. On that score, California's experience offers cautionary insights into the challenges of using carbon markets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But nuclear would also work. Massive wind and solar farms are not commercially viable - when compared to natural gas. If you compare them to coal, they sometimes make sense.
But solar's real benefit is not massive farms, but instead point of use installations in high sunlight areas. This save the transmission wastage (use lose significant amount of power per mile transmitted), which can often just make it viable. The only real thing holding that back is the utilities, as the people that use it often need a utility hookup for times when the sun is not shining, like night time.
In Florida, the utilities have successfully sued people over installing solar power, but that is beginning to change as the laws were altered to stop them from doing this.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If the value of pi was largely driven by human activities, and those human activities were within their jurisdiction, then yes it would be like Indiana.
Actually zero emissions makes sense for many vehicles in Los Angeles, Santiago and other places where the air can be trapped for weeks filling the place up with smog. If you can get the pollution shifted to the top of a smokestack on the other side of a mountain range you win. Of course the sensible thing would be a lot of trains, trams or some other way to move a lot of people about instead of getting the consumers to put up a big capital cost for personal electric vehicles, but that would cut into the cocaine budget or whatever it is that they have Californian legislators on.