How CBO estimates the costs of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions

Original publisher: Washington, D.C.: U.S. Congressional Budget Office, [2009] OCLC Number: (OCoLC)319424491 Subject: Greenhouse gases -- Economic aspects -- United States. Excerpt: ... baselines. Examples include reducing emissions emanating from landfills, sequestering GHGs on croplands and rangelands, altering tillage practices, planting winter crops, or reducing the use of nitrogen fertilizer. Through such actions, entities could earn allowances that could be sold to and submitted by entities that were covered under the primary allowance program ( that is, that were required to submit allowances for their emissions ). Covered entities could thus, in effect, emit more gases than they would be allowed to otherwise, but those higher emissions would be offset by reductions else-where in the economy. S. 2191 limited the number of such offset allowances that could be submitted in place of emission reductions to no more than 15 percent of the total allowances submitted by a covered entity in any given year. S. 2191 also would have allowed covered entities to purchase emission allowances from the greenhouse-gas regulatory programs of other countries, as long as the Administrator of EPA determined that the foreign program imposed mandatory quantitative controls on greenhouse-gas emissions and that the program was of " comparable stringency " to that proposed under S. 2191. As with offset allowances, S. 2191 would have limited the submission of international allowances to no more than 15 percent of total allowances submitted by a covered entity in any given year. All recent legislative proposals would mandate a gradual decrease over time in the number of emission allowances allocated or sold annually - or, what is largely equiva-lent, a gradual increase in the tax rate on emissions. In the case of S. 2191, the number of allowances allocated under the main program would have declined from 5,775 million metric tons of CO e in 2012 to 1,732 million metric tons of CO e ...