Grist: “Pennsylvania Bailed on a Carbon Market to Appease Republicans”
RFF Senior Fellow Dallas Burtraw shares his thoughts on Pennsylvania’s exit from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
“‘This decision [on RGGI] doesn’t feel final to me,’ said Dallas Burtraw, a senior fellow at the research nonprofit Resources for the Future.
In early 2025, Shapiro unveiled his ‘Lightning Plan,’ a jobs-and-energy proposal that included something called the Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction program. Known as PACER, it’s essentially a Pennsylvania-specific version of RGGI — a cap-and-trade program that gradually reduces emissions, creates tradable carbon credits that would (theoretically) be interchangeable with those of RGGI member states, and reinvests the profits toward lowering consumer electricity costs. ‘Pennsylvania is an elephant compared to the rest of RGGI,’ said Burtraw, explaining the reasons that the state would want to create its own program and later link it to RGGI.
‘It would have been amazing to see Pennsylvania join RGGI,’ he said. ‘But I think that we might be setting down a pathway that’s turned out for the better.’”
