As Gov. Chris Gregoire (D) struggles to find ways to make the "cap and trade" bill to control greenhouse gases palatable, consider a story from Business Week about the European Union's vaunted program.
"Germany's renewable energy companies are a tremendous success story. Roughly 15 percent of the country's electricity comes from solar, wind or biomass facilities, almost 250,000 jobs have been created and the net worth of the business is €35 billion per year.
But there's a catch: The climate hasn't in fact profited from these developments. As astonishing as it may sound, the new wind turbines and solar cells haven't prohibited the emission of even a single gram of CO2.
Even more surprising, the European Union's own climate change policies, touted as the most progressive in the world, are to blame. The EU-wide emissions trading system determines the total amount of CO2 that can be emitted by power companies and industries. And this amount doesn't change – no matter how many wind turbines are erected.
Ever since the introduction of the emissions trading system, the Renewable Energy Law had become "an instrument of structural change, but not an instrument to combat climate change. That means: wind turbines and solar energy plants are revolutionizing Germany's mix of power sources, creating jobs and making the country more independent from imports. But they aren't helping in the fight against climate change.
In the worst case scenario, sustainable energy plants might even have a detrimental effect on the climate. As more wind turbines go on line, coal plants will be able to reduce their output. This in itself is desirable – but the problem is that the total number of available CO2 emission certificates remains the same. In other words, there will suddenly be more certificates per kilowatt of coal energy. That means the price per ton of CO2 emitted will fall. That is exactly what happened in recent trading. A certificate to emit a ton of CO2 cost almost nothing. As a result, there was very little incentive for big energy companies to invest in climate friendly technologies.
On the contrary. Germany was able to sell unused certificates across Europe – to coal companies in countries like Poland or Slovakia, for example. Thanks to Germany's wind turbines, these companies were then able to emit more greenhouse gases than originally planned. Given the often lower efficiency of Eastern European power plants, this is anything but environmentally beneficial."
So, if Washington, which is one of 11 participants in the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), joins California in passing a "cap and trade" bill along the lines suggested in the WCI accords and neighboring Idaho, only an observer of WCI, takes a pass, will the same thing happen here?
Don C. Brunell, President (DonB@awb.org)
