Climate change: Regional strength

The regional Western Climate Initiative will give this state and others considerable power to address global warming and fossil-fuel dependence. The states and their partners in four Canadian provinces must aim to make the biggest possible difference.

The initiative's leaders should strengthen their draft plans for a regional cap-and-trade system. The keys will be to spur as many economy-powering innovations as possible, weight the rules to favor real emissions reductions over squishy, hard-to-verify offsets and to favor the public over corporations in setting emissions allocations.

Last month, the climate initiative announced a plan to meet aggressive 2020 emission reductions goals. The leadership took an encouragingly broad approach that attempts to account for major emissions at key distribution points.

But the draft leaves too much opportunity for polluters to rely in a broad way on offsets - tree plantings, for example - rather than emission reductions. Much tighter limits on allowable offset percentages would still encourage real forest protection while doing much more to get the region's economy up to world speed in energy innovations.

A critical challenge will come in the fall, when the initiative begins to decide how much of the emissions should be auctioned and how much should be allocated on the basis of existing emissions. There's one fair starting point: Sell 100 percent of the credits and use reasonable shares of the revenue for such causes as energy efficiency and helping low-income consumers of energy adjust. That would incorporate lessons from Europe's often-rocky cap-and-trade experimentation.