Arizona Legal Support

Arizona and four other Western states agreed Monday to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from utilities, cars, oil and gas operations, and other industries in an effort to curb global warming.

But Arizona officials sent out mixed signals about whether this state will use legal, enforceable regulations or set goals and timetables to cut levels of greenhouse gases. The reductions would most heavily affect power plants and motor vehicles in Arizona, because those are the state’s biggest sources of greenhouse-gas emissions. Residents’ electric bills probably would rise, although a retired utility executive said Monday that he thought the increases would come gradually.

Seven Eastern states, including New York and New Jersey, are in the process of adopting formal regulations to establish mandatory cap-and-trade programs to curb carbon dioxide emissions. Under such programs, due to take effect by January 2009, emissions from power plants will be capped at about their current levels until 2015, with emission reductions of 10 percent kicking in that year and goals due for completion by 2019.

Under a cap-and-trade program, individual companies can buy and sell credits enabling them to keep stable or increase the amounts of greenhouse gases they emit if other companies have reduced their emissions enough so states meet overall goals. In the Eastern program, states predict that the effects on electric bills are likely to be minimal — increases of $3 to $21 per year.

The Western agreement requires states to set regional greenhouse-gas-emission goals within six months, with specific reductions for each state. In 18 months, the states would set up a system of caps and trades to achieve the goals. Others signing on are California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington.

But on Monday in Phoenix, a spokeswoman for Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano said the Western goals are more aspirational than enforceable. Napolitano’s top environmental-policy aide, Lori Faeth, said the goals are different from regulations.

She said that last September, Napolitano issued an order to have greenhouse-gas emissions cut to 1990 levels by 2020, and she has challenged the state to push the timetable up to 2012.

Because emission goals will vary by state, the agreement allows 18 months for officials to meet with interest groups in each state to map out strategies, Faeth said.

Steve Owens, the chief of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, said the state will ultimately issue regulations to carry out the agreement’s goals, but he acknowledged that the state may not have enough legal authority to do everything that’s needed and may require additional legislation. The caps will be legally enforceable, but the specific actions to be taken to carry out the caps may need more legal underpinnings, he said.

“You have to start with aspiration,” said gubernatorial press aide Jeanine L’Ecuyer. “As the states work together, the goals — and how they’ll be enforced — will be fleshed out.”

Jack Camper, director of the Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, said there’s no question that reducing greenhouse gases is a good idea, but this is a federal problem and should be handled by the federal government.

Camper said he doesn’t believe there should be any new state regulations until the states figure out who would be affected by new rules and what the rules would do to the economy.

“There’s a whole lot of things you need to do before you put in regulations that may be so onerous that business can’t comply and it disrupts the economy,” Camper said.

But an Arizona environmentalist said that without regulations with legal teeth, Monday’s agreement would amount only to window dressing.

“It is a step in the right direction. We need to put pressure on elected officials to make sure this is translated into law,” said Erik Magnuson, program associate for Environment Arizona.

Napolitano and the other Western governors said they were taking these measures because the federal government has failed to act. Meanwhile, the states are suffering from climate change: extended droughts, excessive heat waves, reduced snowpacks, decreased spring runoff and severe wildfires, the governors said.

According to Napolitano’s Climate Change Advisory Group, greenhouse-gas emissions have increased by 56 percent in Arizona since 1990.

Monday’s agreement “sets the stage for a regional cap-and-trade program, which will provide a powerful framework for developing a national cap-and-trade program,” California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a statement. “This agreement shows the power of states to lead our nation addressing climate change.”

The head of the University of Arizona’s business school, as well as a former top utility executive and retired Arizona State University official, greeted the five-state agreement warmly, saying that it represented a major step forward for state governments to act where the feds have not.

States have taken similar measures to improve health care and combat illegal immigration because of federal failures to handle those issues, said Jack Pfister, a retired ASU vice president for institutional advancement and a former Salt River Project general manager.

“The realities of the world are that leadership fills vacuums,” Pfister said. “Whenever you have an ongoing vacuum, as I think you do with the federal government, it will get filled. This is almost an inevitable result of the polarizing state of federal affairs. Even if we had a Democratic president, I don’t think the results would be much different.”

Paul Portney, dean of the UA’s Eller College of Management, said he thinks it’s great that the Western states are taking on this issue, but he added that it’s definitely inferior to the federal government approaching it comprehensively.

“It is important that trading be able to take place not just within California or among the other states Arizona just joined, but across the country if we are to meet a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions as inexpensively as possible,” said Portney, a former president of Resources for the Future, a nonprofit, Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

But any emissions-reductions program probably would cost consumers more in utility bills, Portney and Pfister said, although Pfister said he thought that bills will increase gradually, over 10 to 15 years.

“In total, it will probably be a substantial amount of money,” Pfister said. “I think it will be something that people will adjust to over time — not rate shock.”