Regional Climate Plan Could Stimulate Economy

Regional Climate Plan Could Stimulate Economy. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. An economic report released indicates that Washington's economy would grow by 3.3 billion dollars and add 19,300 jobs if a regional plan to address climate change goes into effect starting in 2012. Janice Adair is the climate policy advisor to Washington State Ecology Director Ted Sturdevant. ADAIR: Well the study looks at the impacts of the cap and trade program that's been designed by the Western Climate Initiative and what the economic implications would be for Washington State if that program were implemented here and what the study found was overall there's a net cost savings to the economy and there's about 20-thousand or so jobs that would be created throughout various sectors of the economy by 2020. The WCI is a coalition of seven states and four Canadian provinces working together to limit climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions and Adair talks about how that would affect agriculture. ADAIR: There are credits that someone who has to reduce their emissions and maybe they can't or they can't do it as cheaply as paying a farmer or a forest land owner something like that to increase the carbon storage on their property like through different soil management techniques through different types of what they might grow, how long they might grow it because plants as you know, you remember this from elementary school, store carbon and so there are things a landowner can do to increase that carbon storage on their land. The landowner then sells that ability to take on more carbon thus creating an income stream. Oregon released a very similar study last year and Adair says they are still looking for politicians to take up this issue. ADAIR: We're all still hoping that Congress does something about energy and climate and we haven't given up yet. We're really continuing to push at the Congressional level because I think that we all recognize that a national program is preferable to a regional program. If this Congress runs out and their time runs out and they haven't acted then there's a number of elections and I think all of the WCI jurisdictions with the exception of Washington and Montana have governors that are up for re-election this year. You can view the entire report online at westernclimateinitiative.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.