Venable partner Bill Sloan was quoted on July 20, 2017, by Law360 in an article on the 10-year extension of California's landmark cap-and-trade program scheduled to be signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown. The program would be extended to 2030 and would avoid existential legal tests the original program endured. It still faces regulatory and legal hurdles however to meet California's goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030.
To keep up with California, nine other Northeastern states part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative have been compelled to strengthen their regional cap-and-trade program. "In California, the next gulf we need to cross is going to potentially involve a lot more reliance on innovation and the offsets space," said Sloan. "If new technologies and new approaches to how we run our society are developed through that regulatory program, then those technologies could very well ripple outside the state and might not actually require another regulatory regime to bang other states over the head with."