Some noted that large utilities had reaped windfall billions in profits under a similar cap-and-trade program in Europe. Several said those communities already have higher asthma rates among children, increased respiratory problems and other illness linked to air pollution. In a videotaped message to the Beverly Hills climate confab on Tuesday, Obama vowed to “set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020.” Obama also said, “That will start with a federal cap-and-trade system.”Īt Thursday’s hearing, representatives of municipal utilities, nurses and other public health professionals, public policy researchers and the board’s own environmental justice committee all joined the chorus in speaking out against market based mechanisms, charging they would harm the state’s poorest communities. The vocal opposition to California’s plan suggests that a nearly identical proposal by President-elect Barack Obama will face big political hurdles when it comes up for debate. He said a similar pollution credit program had already allowed a sooty power plant to be shut down in wealthy Kern County, while allowing large new plant to built in a dirt-poor Fresno area. “No to cap and trade! There is a better way,” said Ray Leone, who said he was raised in a migrant worker community in the state’s smoggy Central Valley, and now heads a Fresno-based environmental policy institute. Residents of poor, highly polluted communities say that will leave them eating dust once again.

Under such trading programs, polluters’ greenhouse gas emissions are capped at a certain amount, but the companies are allowed to pay for reductions elsewhere, possibly in other states and countries, and continue to spew out high levels of both greenhouse gases and traditional air pollution locally.Ĭalifornia’s proposal would allow such market-based reductions by refineries and power plants. A standing room only crowd of Latino farm workers, inner city residents, dozens of cities and air district officials, small businesses and major manufacturers gave the air resources board an earful about the plan.īy far the loudest complaints at the marathon Sacramento hearing were about the use of cap-and-trade to reduce some emissions, rather than tough, mandatory regulations applied to refineries, power plants and others. One day after being applauded at a climate change summit in posh Beverly Hills, California officials faced a different kind of reception during a Sacramento public hearing on the state’s monumental greenhouse gas reduction plan.

Grist by Heather Waldorf