On July 17, 2020, a California federal judge challenged the Trump administration`s latest challenge against the California cap-and-trade agreement with the Canadian province of Quebec. The Trump administration`s Complaint in October 2019 in the Eastern District of California claimed, among other things, that the California-Quebec agreement wrongly violated the federal government`s exclusive power to stop foreign policy. Now that President Trump has tried to impose his constitutional authority on cross-border agreements to combat climate change, can President Trump bring down California`s cap-and-trade agreement with Quebec? Probably not. In 2003, New York State proposed that nine Northeast states commit to a CO2 program for electricity producers called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). The programme was launched on 1 January 2009 with the aim of reducing the carbon budget of each state`s electricity generation sector by 10% compared to 2009 quotas by 2018. [149] The program was born out of a goal set in 2005 in an executive order of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger: that the state reduce its CO2 emissions by 25% by 2020. The following year, The Legislature appointed the Air Resources Board on how to do so. Europe had already introduced a market solution and, a few years later, a coalition of northeastern US states followed. In 2013, California launched its cap-and-trade program. Cullenward said the reality of society`s dependence on fossil fuels has put regulators in a dilemma – between knowing what it will do to deal with climate change, but adopting a market solution that is too weak. Any attempt to seriously strengthen them risks a consumer response that makes them ”politically toxic,” he said.
[28] See Ladies – Moore v. Regan, 453 U.S. 654, 686 (1981) (maintaining an executive agreement after the Iran hostage crisis, which destroyed pending claims in federal and state courts on the basis of long-standing customs and approvals of Congress). In the United States, the emissions trading system for acid rain was designed primarily by C. Boyden Gray, a lawyer with the G.H.W. Bush government. Gray worked with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), which worked with the EPA to draft the bill that became an integral part of the Clean Air Act of 1990. The new emission cap for NOx and SO2 gas came into effect in 1995 and, according to Smithsonian magazine, these acid rain releases have decreased by 3 million tonnes this year. [36] In 1997, the CoP approved the Kyoto Protocol, which marked a turning point in the international environmental agreement, in which 38 industrialized countries (Annex 1 countries) committed to achieving targets and timetables for reducing greenhouse gases. [37] These targets for developed countries are often referred to as allocated amounts.
