A bipartisan group of Northeastern governors is expected to announce an historic agreement this week to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, a plan that would break sharply with Bush administration policy on global warming.
The agreement for mandatory greenhouse-gas emission caps could put the states on the road to compliance with the Kyoto climate-change treaty, an embarrassing rebuke to the president, who made a decision in 2001 to pull the U.S. out of negotiations on the pact. In another repudiation of Bush doctrine, the states say that their move away from fossil fuels and toward sustainable energy will not only benefit the environment but the economy as well.
"I think what you'll see is nearly every Mid-Atlantic and New England state agreeing to join in a regional
cap and trade regime," Bradley Campbell, commissioner of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, told Salon. Campbell said that Republican governors are expected to sign on to the plan despite backroom coercion by the White House. "Several of my counterparts in Republican-led states have reported active efforts by the Bush administration to pressure them to not participate in a regional program to implement greenhouse gas reductions," he said.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/21/emissions/index.html