Natalia Mesa, High Country News | 3/20/2024
Cap and Trade; False Solutions; Linkage
Here’s where there’s a bit of friction. In October, the Environmental Justice Council, a body of 16 appointees whose job it is to advocate for communities overburdened by pollution, signed a letter to the Washington Department of Ecology recommending against linkage. […] In its letter, the council wrote that the department had not done enough to guarantee that [frontline] communities would indeed benefit from Washington joining markets with California and Quebec in its initial assessment of the consequences of linkage.
If allowance prices go down, the council wrote, polluters might not be motivated to actually cut emissions, and less revenue in the program could make it harder to find sufficient funding for decarbonization initiatives. Polluters might also be more likely to hoard allowances, so the council suggested putting an expiration date on them. “We still haven’t seen a good answer for how linkage would actually lead to reduced levels of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Nico Wedekind, a public interest environmental attorney at the nonprofit Front and Centered…
Communities of color, Indigenous peoples, and people with lower incomes are on the frontlines of climate and environmental change.
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