Casten Introduces New CO2 Cap-And-Trade Bill
Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Congressman Sean Casten (IL-06) introduced the Tradeable Energy Performance Standards (TEPS) Act, legislation to eliminate the net emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from power plants and large industrial thermal energy users by 2048 in the most economically-efficient way possible.
“Carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and large industrial users of thermal energy make up nearly 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions,” said Rep. Sean Casten. “I spent 16 years building companies that had a mission of profitably reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Tradeable Energy Performance Standards Act accelerates private companies’ ability to do just that and puts us one step closer to achieving our goal of a net-zero economy by 2050.”
The TEPS Act uses a market-based cap-and-trade program that covers the CO2 emissions of power plants and large industrial thermal energy users. The program will be administered, tracked and overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Under the Act, each year, each covered facility will receive from the EPA a certain number of allowances to emit CO2 based on the amount of electricity or useful thermal energy produced that year. This output-based allowance allocation method will ratchet down each year so that by 2048, 20 years after the beginning of the program, no more allowances will be distributed.
The allowances will be fully tradeable. A facility that has more allowances to emit CO2 than it actually emits will be able to sell those additional allowances to a facility with emissions in excess of its allowances. The pricing and terms of those sales will be determined on a bilateral basis, and the allowances will ultimately be submitted to the EPA to ensure that no facility emits in excess of its allowed level.
A one-page summary of the bill can be found here.
A section-by-section of the bill can be found here.
Text of the bill can be found here.
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