www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/letters/bal-ed.le.greenhouse12apr12,0,3827885.story

Aiding the economy, protecting the planet
April 12, 2008     Letter to the Editor

As The Sun has reported, lobbyists representing industry and labor succeeded in smothering a bill before the General Assembly that would have committed Maryland to reducing the state's greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020 ("Panel kills bill to fight warming," April 8).
With the death of this bill went Maryland's opportunity to be on the forefront of the greenhouse gas mitigation movement.

Regardless of the outcome of November's election, Congress is likely to enact a greenhouse gas bill of some kind in the next year or two.

The upshot for Maryland businesses is that the defeat of the state's greenhouse gas reduction bill does little more than postpone the inevitable.

The precise terms of a federal policy would likely differ from those of the bill that was under consideration by the General Assembly. But both would surely require some degree of greenhouse gas reductions, and thus their impact on Maryland businesses would be similar.

The real difference, however, is that by undertaking greenhouse gas mitigation efforts now, Maryland businesses would have had a head start on reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by the time a federal policy is enacted.

Maryland businesses could have used this head start to examine their operations and find ways of achieving energy efficiency and other means of cost-effective, relatively pain-free emissions reductions.

This learning opportunity would give Maryland businesses a significant competitive advantage over businesses in other states, many of which would not begin reducing their greenhouse gas emissions until a federal policy was enacted.

The defeat of Maryland's carbon emissions bill is just another rendition of the tired old tale of pitting economic progress against environmental protection. Contrary to the rhetoric of industry and labor lobbyists, however, these two objectives need not be mutually exclusive.

And the fact is that as the environment's capacity to withstand further economic development is being pushed to a breaking point, it will be necessary to find ways to pursue economic progress and environmental protection in mutually reinforcing ways.



James Goodwin
Baltimore



The writer is an environmental lawyer and a graduate student at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.