EPA Studying Own Carbon-Trading System, Official Says

Bloomberg

EPA Studying Own Carbon-Trading System, Official Says (Update1)
March 15, 2010, 1:01 PM EDT


By Simon Lomax

March 15 (Bloomberg) -- The Obama administration is considering a carbon-trading system under existing law if Congress doesn’t pass cap-and-trade legislation that allows companies to buy and sell the right to pollute, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official said today.

The existing Clean Air Act “could enable us to include emissions trading” within agency regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide and other gases that scientists have linked to climate change, Anna Marie Wood, a senior policy analyst at the EPA, said at an event in Washington hosted by the American Bar Association.

“We’re considering all that right now and thinking about what might make sense,” Wood said. While the agency “strongly prefers” that Congress pass new laws dealing with greenhouse gases, “we think that there’s a lot of progress that can be made using certain tools under the Clean Air Act.”

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said last week the agency has no plans to independently set up a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. Jackson said she believed Congress will establish a national program. Cap-and-trade legislation that narrowly passed the House last year is stalled in the Senate.

Emissions trading for greenhouse gases might be set up under part of the Clean Air Act that lets the agency set “new source performance standards” for large polluters such as power plants, oil refineries and cement plants, Wood said.

--Editors: Richard Stubbe, Charlotte Porter.

To contact the reporter on this story: Simon Lomax in Washington at slomax@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dan Stets at dstets@bloomberg.net.