ProPublica
By Lisa Song, ProPublica, and James Temple, MIT Technology Review
California’s Senate majority leader and two other legislators have urged the state’s Air Resources Board to review its forest offset program, citing reports from ProPublica and MIT Technology Review that showed it issued tens of millions of carbon credits that may not have provided real climate benefits.
The chief concern in the legislators’ Aug. 6 letter is that the landmark cap-and-trade program, which the board oversees as California’s top climate regulator, isn’t doing enough to drive down emissions as the state strives to meet ambitious climate goals by 2030. Senate Majority Leader Robert Hertzberg, a Van Nuys Democrat, as well as Sens. Josh Becker, a Democrat from Menlo Park, and Bob Wieckowski, a Democrat from Fremont, signed the letter. It was addressed to Liane Randolph, who was appointed chair of the board late last year.
The board projects that the cap-and-trade program will deliver nearly 40% of the climate pollution cuts required by California law this decade. The hope is that the market-based mechanism compels the state’s major polluters to find ways to reduce their emissions, by requiring them to buy or otherwise obtain increasingly scarce permits to emit greenhouse gases.
But the fear is the market price will remain too low to convince polluters to make other, more expensive changes to cut emissions. Among other issues, the industry has banked large numbers of credits during slow economic times, while the forest offsets program has offered a cheap way to obtain the right to emit carbon...
“We’re at risk of undermining the cap-and-trade market by allowing cheap, questionable offsets to substitute for real emissions reductions,” Becker said in an interview. “That keeps the market price artificially low and reduces the incentives for companies to make the change we need to drive down emissions."