[Update below]
Because you don’t get this stuff in the news coverage (and did you notice how the issue just shifted to “easing re-entry into RGGI”?), just a very brief note today just to let folks know what the rascals in Trenton are really up to and to provide an insight into how they think.
Yesterday, just prior to the vote on a Resolution that would block DEP’s proposed regulations to exit RGGI, Assembly Regulatory Oversight Committee Chairman Reed Gusciora (D-Mercer) said this (verbatim quote, and he was not joking):
To put this in perspective, cap and trade was initially envisioned by the Nixon administration after clean water and clean air, and first implemented by Ronald Reagan over leaded gasoline, and then George H. Bush (sic) over sulfur dioxide emissions. So it is a very good Republican program that has demonstrated its worth. So I am in favor of the cap and trade program and the concept.
Gee, I wonder who fed him that history?
I won’t go into detail here to lay out why I strongly disagree with that statement on policy grounds – you may want to read this Report “Bad Credit” by Food & Water Watch that examines some of those concerns.
However, politically, I will say that I am appalled when purportedly pro-environmental progressive Democrats – touting Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – try to be ideologically more free market and anti-regulatory than Republicans.
[Update – I thought I’d provide just a little history on my involvement in NJ with the pollutant trading concept (I was well versed in the economic theory, law and policy of trading, having taken numerous economics courses in undergrad and graduate school, so my opposition is longstanding and well thought through):
I did this work while at Sierra Club back in 2001:
When I went back into DEP as Commissioner Campbell’s adviser in 2002, in one of the first Whitman era policy reversals, we took delivery with this:
But we never got around to rescinding the pollutant trading rules that are in DEP NJPDES and TMDL programs.