Someone loves them, and no surprise, it’s the unelected legislatures themselves:
Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont came together in 2003 to form a coalition, known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, in order to explore a market-driven cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide emissions in the absence of mandatory emissions reductions at the national level.
Phil Cherry, policy director at Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources said the proposal, as it is currently written, caps emissions of carbon dioxide at 150 million tons a year starting in 2009. Under the proposed guidelines, emission reductions would be required starting in 2015, which would ramp up to a 10 percent cut in 2020.
“The proposal is a draft and some of the details have yet to be worked out,” Cherry told Reuters. He said that the document will be sent to power producers who will have a chance to comment on it formally at a meeting on September 21.
Once a final agreement is reached, legislatures or regulators in the nine states will have to approve it.
Not a state legislature and not Congress, but a “regional initiative” appoints itself to make laws for the states under its jurisdiction. I fail to see how this could pass an Interstate Commerce Clause challenge, but then again, it regulates interstate commerce and not individual states’ internal legislation.
Well, what else can the rulers do when the unwashed, power-loving masses elect people of the wrong mindset?
