It’s hard to argue with the basic premise behind Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s Tuesday order on greenhouse gas regulation. Carbon dioxide emissions contribute to global warming and need to be curbed, somehow. Is the governor’s approach the best one? That’s a different story.
McAuliffe has directed the Department of Environmental Quality to draw up rules targeting only one source of CO2 emissions, albeit a big one: power plants. What’s more, they haven’t been written yet. So aside from a general sketch that looks vaguely like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative there’s little to praise or condemn.
Not that Republicans have held back. House Speaker Bill Howell accused the governor of overreaching, and another legislator trotted out the shopworn “war on coal” complaint. While it’s true that CO2 regulations fall heavily on coal-fired power generation, that’s because burning coal emits a great deal of CO2. Complaining about that looks a bit like complaining that restrictions on second-hand smoke are a “war on cigarettes.” For similar reasons, it’s wrong to label CO2 regulation an attack on ratepayers. To the contrary, carbon limits are simply an effort to make consumers internalize the actual, but until now unpriced, cost of their fossil-fuel consumption.
The optimal solution is a carbon tax (offset by equivalent tax cuts elsewhere) — the most efficient and market-friendly way to address the negative externalities of energy use. But that approach is highly transparent and less susceptible to manipulation by special-interest lobbying than complicated regulatory schemes. No wonder it never gets any traction.
