Politics on the Hudson

New York, along with nine other Northeast states, today conducted an auction of credits to allow power plants to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The goal is to gradually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by limiting how much power plants can discharge into the atmosphere over time.
No results of the auction, where 12.4 million tons of credits were for sale, were available today, but officials hoped to raise as much as $40 million for energy-conservation programs.
Energy producers have complained that the cost of the credits is merely an add-on to the state’s already high energy costs (an average of 15.35 cents per kilowatt hour last year, 68 percent above the national norm) but state officials said today they see it as a way to eventually reduce emissions and slow global warming by giving the producers an incentive to emit less of the gas.
New York and its neighbors decided to band together to try to cut carbon-dioxide emissions after the federal government failed to act.