Authored by Leo Pyman, TeamCain

On January 12, 2012 at the WCI Emissions Trading Program Update meeting in San Francisco California, the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) unveiled their strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote a clean energy economy.

The benefits of adopting this strategy include creating green jobs, protecting public health, providing incentives for clean-energy technologies and overall reducing the costly impacts that climate change will have on water resources, natural ecosystems, air quality and environment-dependent industries, like tourism.

This strategy will create the largest carbon market in North America and provide a model that can guide future efforts to establish a roadmap for national approaches in both Canada and the U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

At the meeting, the WCI demonstrated how they will continue to work closely with federal governments and other climate initiatives to ensure coordination and promote national and international action. For example, jurisdictions that are actively pursuing a cap-and-trade program is helping to streamline the process of developing an effective clean energy economy program while still allowing other jurisdictions to join when ready. We recently revealed in our Sustainability Blog that Quebec will be adopting the Regulation respecting the cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emission allowances in 2013.

The next steps in emissions reporting include coordination with final EPA oil and gas methods, while maintaining cap-and-trade quality data as well as maintain harmonization among partner reporting requirements.

This marks a significant step forward in our efforts to fight climate change and establish WCI as a leader in the effort to reduce our dependence on petroleum and move toward a clean energy future.

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Question: How do you think the Emissions Trading Program will help your business in the next 3 to 5 years? Comment below.