carbon reporting proposal denied

Scooped by my own paper! Here's a good story by my colleague on a failed request by green groups that the state's Department of Environmental Conservation require big emitters to report how much they're emitting.

. . . The department did not disagree with the premise of the petition, but argued that adopting regulations now would interfere with plans already in place to inventory and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The timing of your petition, arriving before we have a fully developed plan, would have us making decisions we simply are not yet prepared to make,” Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Larry Hartig wrote in a letter to Mike Frank, senior staff attorney with Trustees for Alaska.

In the letter, Hartig said the department agrees that warming trends in the poles are “alarming,” that “there is a need for government leadership” to instigating change and that “an inventory of greenhouse gas emissions is among the logical first steps” in addressing the human causes of climate change.

However, the letter argues that the department needs to continue working with other states to develop more reliable and compatible methods for calculating greenhouse gas emissions.