Molly Peterson
May 21, 2009
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A congressional committee is considering wide-ranging legislation that would set new national limits on emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases. KPCC's Molly Peterson says a new report aims to identify how much greenhouse gas households in each state produce.

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Molly Peterson: Economist Kristen Sheeran works for Ecotrust, an Oregon-based think tank that studies environmental issues. She says while Congress has been working on legislation to limit global warming, she's been looking over policy papers and attack ads that claim new laws to limit carbon pollution will kill the economy. So Sheeran started looking at where states get their energy, and how carbon-intense it is.

Kristen Sheeran: We tried to answer a very real applicable policy question that at this point has legislators stumped, and the question is, how differentially will impacts across the, be distributed?

Peterson: Sheeran says states can have similar average incomes but widely different impacts. Cold-weather states need more heat for houses in the winter – so they have much heavier carbon footprints. New laws may not be able to solve that problem. But Sheeran says states that encourage renewable energy, efficiency measures, and other conservation already live lighter on the climate.

Sheeran: We can't prove conclusively that energy efficiency measures in those states lead to lower emissions per capita in those states. But what we can say is they're strongly correlated. And certainly the evidence suggests that there's something going on vis-a-vis their willingness to tackle energy efficiency as an untapped resource for dealing with the climate problem.

Peterson: By this reckoning, California's doing pretty well. According to Sheeran and her co-authors from Tufts University, the state's energy-related emissions – even counting in coal-fueled electricity transmitted to California from other places – are among the lowest in the country. And in their homes and on the road, Californians emit less greenhouse gas than the national per capita average.