Did Chris Christie just doom U.S. climate policy?

[n2doc]

by Brad Plumer

(Mel Evans - AP) Maybe that title’s a tad hyperbolic, but hear me out. Over the past five years, covering the climate debate in Washington, my working assumption (or delusion, if you’d prefer) has always been that some big shift in U.S. energy policy was inevitable — and soon. Maybe Democrats would use their big congressional majorities to pass a cap-and-trade bill or, at the very least, a renewable-energy standard. If not that, then Obama’s EPA could use its Clean Air Act authority to start cracking down on greenhouse-gas emissions. And if not that, well, circa 2008, a whole bunch of states were undertaking all sorts of notable climate initiatives — surely that would get things started, no?

Yet, one by one, all those assumptions have slowly evaporated in the past year. Congress, we know about. Nothing there. And now the states are steadily backing away, too. On Friday, Chris Christie announced that he would yank New Jersey out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a modest cap-and-trade program for electric utilities in the Northeast. Christie’s reasons for doing so weren’t particularly coherent: He called the program a crippling energy tax, but he also noted that, thanks to the recession, permit prices had fallen so low (to about $2 a ton) that the program wasn’t stringent enough to change utility behavior. Got that? It’s a tax, but not a big enough one, so it should be scrapped. Either way, it’s a big blow to RGGI, which was originally intended as a small backbone for a bigger carbon-capping program in the future.

We’re seeing state-level climate programs crumble elsewhere, too. Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, pulled out of the Western Climate Initiative, which had been studying a regional cap-and-trade program for various Western states, while Jon Huntsman’s successor in Utah has stopped showing up to meetings. There’s always been a free-rider problem inherent in these voluntary state programs, but nowadays there’s also a partisan hurdle. Republican governors and legislators are outright hostile to anything that so much as smells like climate policy. The once-notable exceptions are now either begging for forgiveness — like Tim Pawlenty — or total outcasts, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlie Crist.

Note that there aren’t many structural factors that can alter this dynamic at the moment. Look at New Jersey. Environmentalism isn’t particularly unpopular there. The state is home to some of the country’s most forward-looking utilities. The largest, PSEG, strongly supported the regional cap-and-trade program and has been experimenting with some innovative efficiency programs. In theory, there should have been plenty of internal pressure on Christie to stay in RGGI. But, like many ambitious governors, Christie has an eye on the national stage, and it’s hard to be a prominent Republican these days and give cap-and-trade a hug. (Note that Mitt Romney bolted out of RGGI back in 2005, despite ample enthusiasm in his state — presumably, the theory went, because you don’t want to irk Midwestern coal interests if you plan to run for president.)

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/did-chris-christie-just-doom-us-climate-policy/2011/05/31/AGQicWFH_blog.html?wprss=ezra-klein