Nearly a dozen northeastern states are ramping up efforts to squeeze more carbon emissions from the nation’s first cap-and-trade program amid increasing pressures to steer more of its revenues and focus to long-neglected and disadvantaged communities.
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is heading into the final stretch of a multiyear revamp of the program, which has halved regional power sector emissions from 2005 levels. The pact has generated billions of dollars to states, benefiting low-income households through weatherization efforts and shielding ratepayers from higher electricity costs.
But environmental justice groups say RGGI needs a significant overhauling to ensure communities that have long borne the brunt of pollution and climate impacts get improved air quality and other efforts they say are long overdue.
RGGI “must do more to ensure that reinvestment is targeted and prioritized to remediate anticipated impacts” on low-income and other disadvantaged communities, Madilyn Keaton, energy justice coordinator for the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project, said at a RGGI public meeting held Wednesday.
“A just transition towards decarbonization requires policy that is radically inclusive of the needs of frontline communities and seeks solutions advocated for and created by those experiencing the most harmful impacts of climate change,” she said.
The demands from environmental justice groups come amid uncertainty around whether the pact’s most recent additions—Pennsylvania and Virginia—will still be aboard when the RGGI overhaul is completed over the next year or so. The pact also includes Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont
Under RGGI, the states together set a gradually declining cap on power sector emissions, requiring power plants to acquire allowances through an auction for each ton of carbon dioxide emitted.
Stronger Emissions
Cap How revenues are distributed isn’t the only issue being discussed as part of the program evaluation. The states are also eyeing whether to tighten the current emissions cap, which calls for curbing power sector carbon emissions 30% between 2020 and 2030.
Several RGGI states have set net-zero emissions goals by 2050, but no state is on track to reach those targets and won’t get there “without heading towards zero on electricity emissions,” said Amanda Barker, policy advocate for the Green Energy Consumers Alliance based in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Given increasingly dire climate warnings by scientists, Barker said, “we really need RGGI now more than ever.”
Environmental justice groups argue that climate policies need to target the inequitable impacts of climate change on disadvantaged populations vulnerable to flooding, severe weather, and rising temperatures. But RGGI and other emissions trading approaches thus far have fallen short in addressing other local impacts, including poor air quality from power plants, said Chris Tandazo, statewide environmental justice organizer for the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance.
The goal should be “not only to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also to lower emissions of locally harmful” emissions, the advocate said. Particulate matter and other pollutants from fossil fuel power plants must also be reduced because they add to the cumulative health impacts of pollution in disadvantaged populations, Tandazo said.
Model Rule Coming
RGGI is on pace to unveil a model rule in late 2023, after which the individual states are expected to move to implement the agreement, said RGGI Chair Katie Dykes.
The program has gotten a range of input from environmental justice groups “for how we can better incorporate environmental justice considerations” into the regional program, including calls for more funding of environmental justice boards, Dykes said in an interview.
“Some of those recommendations relate to the investment in proceeds establishing EJ advisory boards that can govern or give input on how proceeds are invested,” said Dykes, who also serves as commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
But “each state in RGGI is committed to pursuing principles of equity and environmental justice in its own way and within its existing legal authority.”
The RGGI program has thus far provided about $6 billion in revenues used by states for investments in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other actions, she said.
Virginia Status Whether Pennsylvania and Virginia will be part of the program going forward is unclear. Pennsylvania’s participation is caught up in a court battle, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) is moving to withdraw his state via a regulatory action.
A Virginia representative told RGGI officials Wednesday that the state remains committed to that withdrawal.
“The regulatory process to repeal our carbon trading rule is ongoing and it is expected to be completed by the end of the calendar year and therefore our participation in RGGI would end at that time,” said Tom Ballou, director of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of Air Data Analysis and Planning.
But the state’s withdrawal may ultimately be decided in the courts.
“As far as any legal aspects of that, that’s to be determined. That’s about all I can say on that one,” he said.