green house gases

SACRAMENTO — In the Rocky Mountain States and the fast-growing desert
Southwest, more than 20 power plants, designed to burn coal that is
plentiful and cheap, are on the drawing boards. Much of the power,
their owners expected, would be destined for the people of California.

But such plants would also be among the country’s most potent producers of carbon dioxide, the king of gases linked to global warming.
So California has just delivered a new message to these energy
suppliers: If you cannot produce power with the lowest possible
emissions of these greenhouse gases, we are not interested.

“When your biggest customer says, ‘I ain’t buying,’ you rethink,” said
Hal Harvey, the environment program director at the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, in Menlo Park, Calif. “When you have 38 million
customers you don’t have access to, you rethink. Selling to Phoenix is
nice. Las Vegas is nice. But they aren’t California.”

California’s
decision to impose stringent demands on suppliers even outside its
borders, broadened by the Legislature on Aug. 31 and awaiting the
governor’s signature, is but one example of the state’s wide-ranging
effort to remake its energy future.

The Democratic-controlled
legislature and the Republican governor also agreed at that time on
legislation to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions by 25 percent
by 2020, a measure that affects not only power plants but also other
large producers of carbon dioxide, including oil refineries and cement
plants.

The state’s aim is to reduce emissions of
climate-changing gases produced by burning coal, oil and gas. Other
states, particularly New York, are moving in some of the same
directions, but no state is moving as aggressively on as many fronts.
No state has been at it longer. No state is putting more at risk.

http://www.nytimes.com/

Personal opinion:  We had this clean energy programs in the 1970’s during ther Carter administration.  But it was Ronald Regan who got rid of all the tax ensentives and burried all inovations, so the oil companies could make a profit.  Now it has taken 30 years to catch up.

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