It seems pretty likely that we won’t see anything signed on carbon emission restrictions (tax or cap-and-trade) at the federal level before January 2009, so once again we have the somewhat familiar situation of states leading the federal government on sticky issues.

You probably know about RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative formed by the New England and upper Mid-Atlantic states that sets a cap-and-trade system to reduce CO2 from power plants. You might have heard that the Guvernator recently corralled four other western state governors (OR, WA, AZ and NM) to join in to form their own cap-and-trade program, this one targeting not just electricity generators, but economy-wide emissions. And as the dominoes keep falling so come the other high population states like Illinois (thanks Jim A), who wants to join the CCX.

The environmental policy buzz is how this regionalism will, as usual, force federal action as businesses put hard pressure down on their duly electeds to create one system that they have to comply with instead of a patchwork of systems. The pressure seems to be coming hard already. In January, Alcoa and nine other companies formed the US Climate Action Partnership and yesterday

A dozen U.S. companies and dozens of institutional investors managing $4 trillion in assets have called on Washington to enact strong federal legislation to curb the pollution causing global climate change. The group outlined the business and economic rationale for climate action as they called for a national policy that reduces greenhouse gas emissions consistent with targets scientists say are needed to avoid the impacts of global warming.

Despite the pressure I’ll reiterate the first sentence of this post: having anything signed on carbon emissions before January 2009 is unlikely at best, a pipedream at worst. But I think this delay creates an interesting scenario: what if a federal cap-and-trade scheme becomes irrelevant by the time it can pass?

With the announcement of the western five-state partnership, Gov. Schwarzenegger all but dared the RGGI states to expand their program and join with the western states. The western five plus the RGGI states represents 39% of the U.S. population and the addition of Illinois brings it to 43%. It’s not hard to see other states falling in turn as the utilities and businesses in their states see the benefits to being part of the game and the drawbacks to being left out of it. Here we run into a couple of snags, though. First, the western and RGGI states, for the most part, represent a Democrat-heavy mix and today we saw fresh evidence of an unfortunate and widening D-R split within the voting public on attitudes about considering climate change a threat. Second, the southeastern (R-dominated) and Ohio Valley states (D-R mixed) that would be the next logical joinees in a regional-become-de facto national cap-and-trade system are coal-dominated, thus CO2-to-BTUs heavy.

Most curious to me is to track not only where the western state and RGGI partnerships take us on climate regulation, but what this regionalism does to the power structure in the U.S. as a whole. Robert Salladay on an LA Times blog covers the thoughts of Gar Alperovitz:

“The bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure.”

The United States, he says, is simply too big for meaningful democracy. Now, Alperovitz says, a new wave of regional devolution could also build on the more than 200 compacts that now allow groups of states to cooperate on environmental, economic, transportation and other problems. He adds:

“Governor Schwarzenegger may not have thought through the implications of continuing to assert forcefully his ‘nation-state’ ambitions. But he appears to have an expansive sense of the possibilities: this is the governor, after all, who brought Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to the Port of Long Beach last year to sign an accord between California and Britain on global warming.”

I’m not one for bold proclamations of radical changes or conspiracy theories or doomsday scenarios, but this is the kind of change that can happen subtly and slowly. And it would be fascinating to watch what should be a federal, nationwide system on carbon emissions instead be emplaced through decentralized but cooperative regional partnerships that work just as well or better than a federally-run system. If the feds wait too long on passing a nationwide system and the states have their own mechanisms in place covering more than 50% of the U.S. population by the time the feds get around to it, is that what will happen?

[UPDATE: as if on cue, I just got this news from Point Carbon: "The Climate Registry, an effort by members of existing US greenhouse gas registries in various regions, sent a letter to the governors of all 50 US states Friday requesting participation in the initiative to build a unified national registry for the entire US."]