The Department of Justice filed its civil complaint against California, state officials, the California Air Resources Board, and the Western Climate Initiative Inc for entering into a cap and trade agreement on greenhouse gas emissions with the Canadian province of Quebec.
“The state of California has veered outside of its proper constitutional lane to enter into an international emissions agreement. The power to enter into such agreements is reserved to the federal government, which must be able to speak with one voice in the area of U.S. foreign policy,” said Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark said in a statement, according to Reuters.
The DOJ is claiming that all the participants in the cap and trade deal, properly called the Western Climate Initiative, entered into the deal with Quebec in 2013 without congressional approval.
What is the Western Climate Initiative?
Cap and trade is simply a method where a government caps the total amount of carbon emissions allowed. The government then issues permits to companies specifying how much carbon they can burn. These allowances are sold quarterly at public auctions so consumers know what regulated companies are paying.
And basically, this is what the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) is doing. The WCI is a non-profit corporation that administers the shared emissions trading market between the American state of California and the Canadian province of Quebec as well as separately administering the emissions trading market of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.
WCI was originally founded in 2007 by the governors of five western states with the express purpose of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The WCI was reincorporated into its current form in 2011. By the year 2008, the WCI grew to include four Canadian provinces – British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec.
This confrontation between the Trump administration and California is only the latest episode in an ongoing dispute between the president and a state that refuses to cave in to his asinine plans to do away with controlling greenhouse gas emissions.
Trump – who questions the science behind climate change, has eased regulations on the oil, gas and coal industries and intends to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change.
Calling the Trump-California dispute a “feud,” hundreds of former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees are urging Congress to officially look into whether the agency’s fight with California represents retaliation for the state’s failure to support Trump’s political agenda.
