Policy Innovation Application Paper - Essay Example

who took a more aggressive and innovative policy in implementing greenhouse emission controls. As an example we will take the case of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and the California vehicle emission standards. The California vehicle emission standards require a limitation on the amount of pollutants that an automobile releases in the atmosphere. This also applied to other powered vehicles that include industry, small equipments (such as lawn mowers and diesel generators) and power plants where their greenhouse emission is also strictly regulated.

The Federal Government of the United States regulates the emission standards of all carbon emitting motors through its agency named Environmental Protection Agency. The state of California however has a permission to implement a more stringent regulatory emission standards compared to the Federal Government’s regulatory standard. The regulatory rules are crafted by the California Air Reserve Board or “CARB”. . It was a four year court challenge that “resulted from the California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District’s (SCAQMD) Fleet rules that required various public and private operators of fleets of 15 or more vehicles in the SCAQMD basin (Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Orange and Riverside) to purchase alternative fuel vehicles or certain cleaner fuel vehicles authorized under the California’s emission standards program (Osenga, 2004).

The RGCI or the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is an initiative by the states in Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic part of the United States (includes Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont) who committed to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector by capping it to 10 percent by 2010. It is a carbon cap and trade program whose proceeds from its emission permit auctioning will be used to promote energy conservation and use of renewable program (Anon., 2007). II.

Which policy is more effective? The California vehicle emission standards whose rule and regulations are set by the California Air Reserve Board or “CARB” is more effective and responsive to pressing issues of pollution and climate change in the short term. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative however is more effective for a longer term solution of the Greenhouse problem as it caps emission and has a component of raising funds to increase the use of renewable energy which intends to replace the carbon emitting power plants.

For a more effective policy implementation of addressing the carbon emission and climate change, the combination of the two is more