And I'm not talking about the clown.
Michigan wants to cut mercury emissions past Bush admin goals (Granholm orders ...*):
Michigan electric companies are being ordered to slash mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants by 90 percent within nine years, a step toward cleansing the state's waters of a poison that has prompted fish consumption warnings.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm on Monday said the Department of Environmental Quality would develop a rule requiring utilities to achieve the reductions by 2015.
The state policy goes beyond mercury reduction standards announced by the Bush administration last year. The federal goal is to cut mercury pollution 70 percent nationwide by 2018, although the DEQ says Michigan probably would see little if any reduction until 2025 or later.
...
Unlike the federal plan, it won't let heavily polluting companies avoid cleanups by buying pollution allowances from plants well under the allowable limits.
But it also won't require 90 percent reductions at every power plant. Some plants can fall short — if the company's other plants exceed the standards enough to produce an overall 90 percent average. Companies won't be allowed to achieve that average by concentrating so much pollution at individual plants that they become toxic "hot spots," Chester said.
Cap and trade policies allow flexibility across firm-polluters. Bubbles allow flexibility within a business firm across plant-polluters.
Bubbles were the precursor to cap and trade. So is this one step backwards for economic incentives in environmental policy? Maybe not. Bubbles might be a solution/compromise to the real problem of hot spots (assuming a firm's polluterplants are more disperse [er, locational heterogeneity] than the firm-polluters that would end up not cutting back on mercury).
Check out Hahn's "doctor's orders" paper for a history of bubbles and other precursors to cap and trade.
*Hat tip: Daily Grist.
