EPA: Cap and Trade Program Lowers Smog Levels in Eastern United States/…cost-effective reductions…

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/d0cf6618525a9efb85257359003fb69d/0c5cd8c04b5624f98525764f0053585f!OpenDocument

Cap and Trade Program Lowers Smog Levels in Eastern United States/Market based program allows cost-effective reductions of harmful air pollution

Release date: 10/14/2009

Contact Information: CONTACT: Cathy Milbourn/[e-mail] 202-564-7849/202-564-4355

WASHINGTON – EPA released a report showing that more than 103 million Americans breathe cleaner air thanks to a cap and trade program that reduces smog-forming emission of Nitrogen Oxides (NOx). The 2008 NOx Budget Trading Program Annual Report, covering 20 eastern states and the District of Columbia, shows the summertime NOx emissions from power plants and large industrial sources were down by 62 percent compared to year 2000 levels and 75 percent lower than in 1990.

Highlights of the report show that:

The reduction of NOx has helped reduce smog levels by 10 to 14 percent in the NBP region – largely in the eastern parts of the country;

There is a strong association between areas with the greatest reductions in NOx emissions and downwind sites that show the greatest improvements in smog; and

The program contributed to improvements in air quality in 97 percent of nonattainment areas in the east, with 85 percent of these areas now below the smog standard.

The NOx Budget Trading Program is a partnership between federal and state governments to reduce the regional transport of NOx from power plants and industry in the eastern U.S. This market-based cap and trade program was created to cost-effectively reduce NOx emissions during the ozone season. This program provides facilities flexibility to choose their control options including installing control technologies, replacing existing controls with more advanced technologies, optimizing existing controls, and switching fuels. This flexibility and an active NOx allowance market have led to near perfect compliance since the start of the program in 2003.

More information on the report: http://www.epa.gov/airmarkets/progress/NBP_4.html

[kestrel91316]

1. But I thought cap-and-trade was a horrible thing that only served to line

the pockets of wealthy and had no redeeming value whatsoever........

I'm sure no one could have imagined any benefit like this.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Speaking from downwind, Cap and Trade has been a good thing™

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Mind-Blue-Sky-Thinking.html

The Political History of Cap and Trade

How an unlikely mix of environmentalists and free-market conservatives hammered out the strategy known as cap-and-trade

By Richard Conniff
Smithsonian magazine, August 2009

John B. Henry was hiking in Maine's Acadia National Park one August in the 1980s when he first heard his friend C. Boyden Gray talk about cleaning up the environment by letting people buy and sell the right to pollute. Gray, a tall, lanky heir to a tobacco fortune, was then working as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, where environmental ideas were only slightly more popular than godless Communism. "I thought he was smoking dope," recalls Henry, a Washington, D.C. entrepreneur. But if the system Gray had in mind now looks like a politically acceptable way to slow climate change—an approach being hotly debated in Congress—you could say that it got its start on the global stage on that hike up Acadia's Cadillac Mountain.

People now call that system "cap-and-trade." But back then the term of art was "emissions trading," though some people called it "morally bankrupt" or even "a license to kill." For a strange alliance of free-market Republicans and renegade environmentalists, it represented a novel approach to cleaning up the world—by working with human nature instead of against it.

Despite powerful resistance, these allies got the system adopted as national law in 1990, to control the power-plant pollutants that cause acid rain. With the help of federal bureaucrats willing to violate the cardinal rule of bureaucracy—by surrendering regulatory power to the marketplace—emissions trading would become one of the most spectacular success stories in the history of the green movement. Congress is now considering whether to expand the system to cover the carbon dioxide emissions implicated in climate change—a move that would touch the lives of almost every American. So it's worth looking back at how such a radical idea first got translated into action, and what made it work.

The problem in the 1980s was that American power plants were sending up vast clouds of sulfur dioxide, which was falling back to earth in the form of acid rain, damaging lakes, forests and buildings across eastern Canada and the United States. The squabble about how to fix this problem had dragged on for years. Most environmentalists were pushing a "command-and-control" approach, with federal officials requiring utilities to install scrubbers capable of removing the sulfur dioxide from power-plant exhausts. The utility companies countered that the cost of such an approach would send them back to the Dark Ages. By the end of the Reagan administration, Congress had put forward and slapped down 70 different acid rain bills, and frustration ran so deep that Canada's prime minister bleakly joked about declaring war on the United States.

…

[excess_3]

3. not going to work for, a fundamental reaction product, such as CO2

for trace pollutants, such as NOx,
might be workable

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. It's a bold statement

Can you back it up with any evidence?

[Massacure]

5. Not that I want to discourage CO2 reduction, but...

It seems to me that reducing NOx and SOx is a bit easier than reducing CO2. NOx and Sox tend to be point source pollutants. While CO2 certainly has point sources, it also has non point sources in the melting of permafrost and the (intentional or not) burning of forests.

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. Right. So, let's get the point sources to the extent that we can

There were non-point sources long before we started burning fossil fuels. That was a good thing too! (Otherwise Earth would be much colder.)

[excess_3]

6. it depends on what is called 'success'

consider Norway.

depending on whose numbers you believe,
it could be argued that Norway has done an
excellent job in reducing CO2.

but in my opinion, all the reductions
were years ago, in the course of converting
from coal to natural gas, (something they would have done anyway,
with or without a push from environmentalists)
and was done before CO2 became an issue.