Roundup: California's anti-global warming plan costly

California's ambitious plan to curb global warming has led to worries in the business circle as it will be costly to businesses as well as consumers.

As a result of the plan, the state's basic industries, including utilities, oil refineries and steel mills, can expect to make major changes in how they do business, according to the Los Angeles Times on Friday.

"And consumers may face higher bills for electricity, gasoline and other goods that use energy," the paper added.

California reached an agreement to combat global warming on Wednesday, the first such action in the nation.

The agreement marks a clear break with the Bush administration and puts California on a path to reducing its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by an estimated 25 percent by 2020.

The bill is likely to use mandatory emissions caps on power plants, refineries and other heavy industry as well as energy efficiency measures and an emissions trading program.

The law mandates that California will need to eliminate 174 million metric tons of emissions to reach 1990 levels of greenhouse gases. California had earlier passed an earlier car tailpipe emissions law that has been challenged by automakers in court.

California could do little if anything to curb climate change on its own because of the global nature of the problem, experts stressed.

"California's ambitious plan to curb global warming will be costly to businesses and consumers ... and its effect on the climate could be negligible - unless other states and nations follow," the report said.

"The actual effect on California's climate of reducing the state's carbon dioxide emissions will be negligible," Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology at Stanford University, said. "It will only be successful if the rest of the world follows."

But Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California Energy Institute in Berkeley, said, "My view is that in the end, this is going to be costly, but it's a cost that we have to be willing to pay because the alternative is potentially very bleak."

Other experts were optimistic that once it is proven that California can slow greenhouse gases and grow its economy, other states and other nations will follow.

Although the economic effects of a mandatory cut in emissions could be sweeping, California has a lot at stake in the battle against global warming, perhaps more than any other state, climate experts say.

Its water supplies, its top industry - agriculture - and its most popular recreational activities all depend on a healthy climate, as do forests, deserts, ocean ecosystems and the species that inhabit them, said the Los Angeles Times.

California is the world's 12th-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, responsible for 10 percent of the carbon dioxide produced nationally and 2.5 percent globally, according to the paper.

Source: Xinhua