Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota has been complaining and grumbling about the cap and trade provisions in the Obama budget. Such resistance to starting the real fight against global warming is both disheartening and short-sighted. Conrad insists that polluting industries will need aid, but his state has unrivalled potential to reap a bonanza from a cap-and-trade system.
Senate Budget Chair Conrad is expressing resistance to plans for the cap-and-trade plan. According to the Hill "Conrad said that it would be a "distant hope" to expect the climate change plan to pass unless it includes help for industries that would be hit hard by limits on carbon emission production." (http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/obama-budget-lacks-votes-2009-03-10.html)
Conrad asserts the need for aid for North Dakota’s oil and gas companies. Well the whole point of cap-and-trade is to shift energy usage form such companies to companies that provide clean energy. From all of Senator Conrad’s complaining it might be difficult to guess which state has the greatest wind energy potential: no it’s not any of the environmental leaders. California ranks only seventeenth in an An Assessment of the Available Windy Land Area and Wind Energy Potential in the Contiguous United States, Pacific Northwest Laboratory, 1991. (http://www.awea.org/newsroom/pdf/Top_20_States_with_Wind_Energy_Potential.pdf)
The number one state is none other than Senator Conrad’s North Dakota. So why so much angst, Senator Conrad, about cap-and-trade? Your state is uniquely well situated to make the shift to clean energy and to nurture green utilities that can sell power elsewhere and profitable green businesses that can manufacture with green energy.
Among other states with Democratic Senators who have sometimes displayed cold feet on this issue South Dakota ranks fourth. Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota voted against bringing the Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act forward in 2008, and Senator Conrad did not vote at all. (http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&sessi
on=2&vote=00145)
In South Dakota’s case, there’s even less reason to oppose cap-and-trade because unlike North Dakota, South Dakota is not a coal producing state. (http://www.teachcoal.org/aboutcoal/articles/states/sd.html)