9 States in Plan to Cut Emissions by Power Plants
By ANTHONY DePALMA, NY Times
Officials in New York and eight other Northeastern states have come to
a preliminary agreement to freeze power plant emissions at their
current levels and then reduce them by 10 percent by 2020, according to
a confidential draft proposal.
The
cooperative action, the first of its kind in the nation, came after the
Bush administration decided not to regulate the greenhouse gases that
contribute to global warming. Once a final agreement is reached, the
legislatures of the nine states will have to enact it, which is
considered likely….
California,
Washington and Oregon are in the early stages of exploring a regional
agreement similar to the Northeastern plan. The nine states in the
Northeastern agreement are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. They
were brought together in 2003 by a Republican governor, George E.
Pataki of New York, who broke sharply and openly with the Bush
administration over the handling of greenhouse gases and Washington's
refusal to join more than 150 countries in signing the Kyoto Protocols,
the agreement to reduce emissions that went into effect earlier this
year.
In recent years, New York and other Northeastern states have aggressively tried to reduce power plant emissions. Several
have joined together to sue coal-fired power plants in Midwestern
states that produce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that drift across
state borders and cause acid rain in the Northeast.
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