Washington, 22 May (Argus) — Quebec and California plan to lobby other US states and Canadian provinces to join their Western Climate Initiative (WCI) greenhouse gas (GHG) cap-and-trade program, Québec's environment minister said today.
The two jurisdictions will look to quickly “seduce” other jurisdictions into joining or re-joining WCI, Québec environment minister Yves-Francois Blanchet said at a Resources For the Future forum in Washington, DC.
Blanchet also said that the province may increase its GHG-reduction target from 20pc from 1990 levels by 2020 to 25pc. Any decision to increase the target will likely wait for signs of how well the province's current efforts are performing.
Blanchet said that Quebec and California are looking to build a much broader “bottom-up” carbon market in North America. While Blanchet was coy about which states or provinces they would lobby, he said that the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative states in the northeast US would be “prime targets” because they already have a less ambitious cap-and-trade program in place for their electricity sector.
Blanchet also said that he would like Ontario to join. Ontario issued a discussion paper in January on what the province could do to reduce its emissions, including an emissions trading system.
Ontario may want to wait a few years to see how the WCI program fares, Blanchet said, so it will be his challenge to get other provinces and states to act more quickly.
The first compliance period of the California and Quebec programs started in January. But the two will not formally link their carbon markets until January 2014.
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