Word: capping
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...governments can do about climate change, and it couldn't come at a more appropriate time. While Washington under President George W. Bush all but ignored climate change, California - with the Republican Schwarzenegger sometimes leading and sometimes following - embarked on its own green path, passing a landmark carbon-emissions cap for the state in 2006 and aggressively promoting renewable energy. Today, California's clean-tech sector is a rare bright spot in a state that is struggling with economic problems. California is where "technology met policy," said Terry Tamminen, the former secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency...
...small part to prodding by California and other states with progressive governors, attitudes have changed in Washington. But Congress continues to dither over cap and trade, and California is moving ahead. On Sept. 15, Schwarzenegger signed an executive order requiring that the state get 33% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 - well above the 15% national standard that current climate bills circulating in Congress would require. California is not alone: more than half the states in the U.S. have similar renewable energy standards, and states in the West and the Northeast have begun to form regional carbon cap...
Congress is one of them. The Kerry-Boxer bill is only one of several pieces of legislation that the Senate will need to consider as it takes on cap and trade - about which the Finance Committee is only one powerful group that will have its say - and the chances that any kind of carbon cap will pass seem vanishingly small. As long as the Senate is stuck on other business, like health care, Obama and his negotiators will have their hands essentially tied at the U.N. climate-change summit in Copenhagen three months from now. They can't commit...
...bill with a tighter short-term emissions-reduction target. But the bill still has plenty of holes for a piece of legislation that has been in the works for months, saying little about how allowances for carbon emissions would be distributed among polluting industries - a key part of any cap-and-trade bill. And with natural gas fans blaming the bill for having too little support of natural gas and nuclear fans saying there's not enough support of nuclear, gathering up support from Republican Senators and even Democrats will be an uphill challenge. The negotiations are just beginning...
...their part, more-radical environmental groups, including Greenpeace, withheld support from the Kerry-Boxer bill - as they did the House cap-and-trade bill - saying its carbon cuts were far too modest to save the climate. Scientifically, they're probably right - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that developed nations like the U.S. need to cut carbon emissions 25% to 40% by 2020 to keep global warming within what is hoped are safe limits. Politically, however, that seems out of question for Congress. Which is why Obama's speech at the U.N. last week was an exercise...