When RGGI was first implemented, I heard Ian Bowles, then
Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs in Massachusetts, say
more than once that the purpose of RGGI wasn't really to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions or jump start the clean energy economy.
Instead, the goal was much more modest; it was simply to
demonstrate that a trading regime could work. The RGGI states were
to serve as a model, to be the laboratory of a GHG allowance
system. The hope was certainly that RGGI would succeed its way into
obsolescence. Surely, by 2016, there would be a federal statutory
basis for GHG regulation.
It's now September 2016 and a federal statutory basis for a
GHG trading system remains a seemingly distant hope (this post is
definitely not about the Clean Power Plan). We may still be
waiting, but we do at least have substantial data from the
laboratory that is RGGI. In fact, yesterday, RGGI released its
analysis of
The Investment of RGGI Proceeds through 2014.
