As a result of his wide inquiries, PG&E, the parent of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which serves Northern California and is one of the nation s largest energy utilities, broke away from the industry pack to support sweeping efforts to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that are widely blamed for global warming. “The evidence in the scientific community is lopsided — it s not even close,” Mr. Darbee said. “Climate change is a problem.”

California is once again at the forefront of the nation s environmental policy, with a far-reaching pledge to curb carbon emissions by 2020. But the deal struck on Wednesday between Democratic legislators and the Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has divided businesses and industries in California.

While high-technology companies have lined up behind the move, arguing that it will put California at the forefront of alternative energy development, most of those representing basic industries contend that it will retard the economy, force energy-intensive businesses out of state and increase costs for all Californians.

Mr. Darbee, a former investment banker and financial expert who brings an outsider s perspective to the inbred utility industry, cuts across those lines, pointing to a potential advantage for business in California: predictability. “The incentives really aren t there for the creation of new technologies and investments to reduce carbon dioxide unless mandatory caps are put in place,’’ he said. “Now, that creates an element of certainty.” The California plan, which won final legislative approval yesterday but faces a battle in the courts before it can go into effect, calls for a 25 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020. It envisions controls on some of the largest industrial groups — including utilities, oil refineries and cement plants.

While many of the details remain to be worked out, the law will include a mixture of mandatory regulations, incentives and market-based mechanisms, including a so-called cap-and-trade system allowing companies to buy and sell carbon allowances. The California Air Resources Board has until 2009 to draft regulations that are to become mandatory in 2012.

“The United States is the world’s biggest carbon emitter, and California is a big part of it,” said Jim Marston, who runs the state global warming initiative at the activist group Environmental Defense, which has played a big role in California and elsewhere in promoting alternative energy use. “The key aspect of the law is that it’s multisector and it imposes hard caps.” Given a lack of national policy toward global warming, local and state authorities are increasingly taking the matter into their own hands, creating a patchwork of competing rules that will be potentially harder for businesses to navigate. Seven states in the Northeast, for example, have proposed to reduce carbon emissions from power producers 10 percent by 2019.

Mr. Marston acknowledged that a system adopted by the European Union in response to the Kyoto Protocol to curb global warming gases had not been very effective. “No system we have works perfectly,” he said. “The cap-and-trade system in Europe has some flaws because they didn’t do a great job with the baseline. California will learn from what went wrong in Europe.”

California has had a long tradition of leading the way in environmental regulations that in time are adopted by other states and cities across the country. The federal Clean Air Act of 1970, for example, originated in efforts starting in the 1960 s to limit smog in Southern California. In 2004, the state became the first to adopt regulations intended to limit greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles. Several states in the Northeast, including New York, have followed suit. A coalition of the world’s largest automakers, which opposed the regulations from the beginning, is suing many of these states to prevent the laws from taking effect.

The restrictions, scheduled to go into effect on 2009 model vehicles, roiled the global auto industry because automakers would have to increase fuel economy to meet them. Unlike smog-forming pollutants, carbon dioxide and other emissions from vehicle tailpipes that are linked to global warming cannot be filtered. Reducing those emissions would therefore require redesigning engines, which would increase the cost of building a vehicle.
(Por Jad Mouawad e Jeremy W. Peters,The N. Y. Times, 01/09/2006)