Tag: energy imports

May Provinces (or States) Limit Imports on the Basis of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Elsewhere?

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By James Coleman & Martin Olszynski

Screen Shot 2015-04-15 at 9.03.54 AMLast week, a group of economists known as “Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission” issued a much-discussed report that urged Canada’s individual provinces to drive Canadian climate policy by adopting their own carbon pricing schemes. But the report barely touched on one of the key challenges for provincial or state regulation without the support of the national government: what may places that price carbon do to avoid losing industry to places that don’t?

This is an urgent question across North America because, for different reasons, Canada and the United States are unlikely to adopt uniform nationwide climate policies in the near future.[1] Instead, climate regulation will be somewhat different in each state and province. But states and provinces lack a key power that national governments use when they adopt climate regulation: the power to adopt trade regulations that control imports. The nation is an economic union so provinces can’t limit trade across their borders.

Climate and trade policies often go hand-in-hand because nations that limit carbon emissions worry they will lose industry to nations that do not. After all, if emissions merely shift to other nations, a phenomenon known as “carbon leakage”, a single nation’s carbon policies won’t do much to help the global climate. One way around this problem is to charge a “carbon tariff” on imports that were produced in nations that do not have similar limits on carbon emissions. This charge is calculated by estimating how much carbon was emitted to produce the imported product and then multiplying that quantity by the importing country’s carbon price. These tariffs are sometimes called “border adjustments” because, in theory, they are supposed to level the playing field between domestically regulated producers and unregulated foreign ones.

You can’t set up a customs house between Manitoba and Ontario, so provinces can’t charge a regular carbon tariff. But states and provinces have found a roundabout way to do more-or-less the same thing. For instance, California and Quebec both have cap-and-trade systems that force power plants to purchase a permit for each ton of carbon that they emit into the atmosphere. Crucially, these cap-and-trade systems also apply to power plants in other states that export electricity to California and Quebec. The effect is the same as the customs house: when a purchaser imports electricity into California or Quebec it must pay a charge for all the carbon that was emitted elsewhere to produce that electricity.

So can states and provinces place a charge on imports that accounts for how much carbon was emitted elsewhere to produce them? It’s a crucial question because such charges could apply to all kinds of goods, not just to electricity. Provinces like British Columbia and states like California are already setting standards for motor fuels that effectively charge imported fuels for the greenhouse gases that were emitted elsewhere in their production. And in theory the same charges could apply to any kind of good. You would just add a surcharge to every item based on the greenhouse gases that were emitted elsewhere to produce it: television sets, fruit, toys, you name it.

In fact, state and provincial climate regulations across North America are increasingly adopting exactly these kind of controls, adding urgency to the underlying legal question: may energy importers export their regulation to cover emissions outside their borders? In the absence of national action on climate change, provinces are looking for creative ways to make sure that they don’t lose industry to provinces that don’t regulate, so they’re regulating imports based on carbon emissions elsewhere.

Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission is recommending provincial action on climate but it has little to say on this crucial topic, and what it says is confusing. The report’s section on “competitiveness” has a subheading titled “Border adjustments could level the playing field,” which sounds promising. It then says “border adjustments could not be implemented by a single province, but would require involvement by the federal government,” which is a major qualification. But then it states that, after all, such adjustments are possible for “specific emissions that fall under provincial jurisdiction” and cites the example of Quebec’s electricity imports. For this proposition it cites a white paper on a U.S. cap-and-trade system written by U.S. law students.

This issue is too important to gloss over. If states and provinces are going to lead the fight against climate change, many legal decisions and many academic pieces will be written on the topic before it is resolved. This post merely flags some of the key rules and arguments that will be in play.

The normal rule has been that states and provinces may not adopt regulations for pollution emitted in other states. These forbidden rules are known as “extraterritorial” regulations. In Interprovincial Co-Operatives Ltd. v. Dryden Chemicals Ltd, the Supreme Court of Canada held that Manitoba could not make a law punishing companies that lawfully emitted pollutants in Saskatchewan and Ontario, even if those pollutants made their way into Manitoba. The rule in the United States is more complicated, but under what is known as the “dormant commerce clause”, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that states cannot adopt a law “if the practical effect of the regulation is to control conduct beyond the boundaries of the State.”

One important reason for the normal rule is that if provinces or states began banning products that were produced elsewhere in ways that they didn’t like, they would quickly run afoul of international trade laws. For example, if Ontario banned all products made by laborers that were not paid its $11 per hour minimum wage that would, as a practical matter, end imports from the developing world. It would also conflict with the General Agreements on Tariff and Trade that govern international trade.

On the other hand, the traditional rule against extraterritorial regulation is on somewhat tenuous footing. In Canada, Interprovincial Co-Operatives involved a 3-1-3 split, which makes the primary ruling open to debate. The decision is also four decades old and has been heavily criticized, including by one of Canada’s leading constitutional scholars. See Peter Hogg, Constitutional Law of Canada, 5th ed., (2007) at 13-10. Similarly, in the United States, scholars and judges have suggested that limits on extraterritorial regulation should be abandoned.

Suffice it to say that import regulations may have a better chance of being upheld where their extra-provincial effects are deemed incidental to their primary purpose, or “pith and substance” in Canadian jurisprudential terms. Reference re Upper Churchill Water Rights Reversion Act, [1984] 1 SCR 297. See also Shi-Ling Hsu and Robin Elliot, “Regulating Greenhouse Gases in Canada: Constitutional and Policy Dimensions” (2009) 54 McGill L.J. 463.

And perhaps the normal rule should bend in the case of provincial climate regulation. For one thing, even if carbon emissions occur in Alberta, they still affect the global climate, which could harm Ontario, Quebec, and every other place in the world. For the same reason, it is vital that climate regulation doesn’t just shift carbon emissions to other provinces: few will want to regulate if the provinces that do lose jobs without securing any net benefit for the climate. If we want provinces to set a model for eventual national regulations, maybe they need the same trade powers.

States and provinces also have long-standing authority to manage the mix of sources providing power to their electrical grid, which includes regulating contracts for electricity imports. This helps to ensure that power will always be available at reasonable prices. But there are limits to this authority as well: a province certainly could not prescribe the wages or working conditions for employees at power plants in other provinces. Can provinces prescribe carbon standards for power plants elsewhere under their traditional authority over electricity markets? That remains an open question.

So far, the U.S. courts are divided on whether states may regulate based on carbon emissions elsewhere. An appellate court said that California could regulate fuels based on emissions elsewhere and a district court said that Minnesota could not regulate electricity based on emissions elsewhere. The Canadian courts have not yet addressed the question. And the first two Canadian cap-and-trade systems are poor test cases because both Quebec and Ontario import far less electricity than they export. But the question will become unavoidable as more provinces adopt the kind of policies recommended in the Ecofiscal Commission’s report.

Finally, these questions will grow more pressing as long as national governments delay action to address climate change. As with recent provincial efforts to improve environmental impact assessments of interprovincial pipelines, the federal policy vacuum is pushing provinces to act on their own. In the United States, one interim solution could be for the federal government to allow non-discriminatory state regulation of energy imports. If Canada’s government is serious about sticking with provincial climate policy, it may have to consider similarly creative solutions. In the meantime, these policies will continue to present difficult and novel legal questions about the boundaries of state and provincial authority.

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[1] In Canada, the conservative government has repeatedly delayed federal climate regulations and the leader of the liberal party has pledged to leave the provinces in charge of carbon pricing. In the United States, congressional inaction has pushed President Obama to rely on a rarely-used Clean Air Act provision that requires states to adopt their own regulations for power plant carbon emissions.

Federal Court Strikes Down Minnesota’s Limits on Coal Power Imports: A Critical Moment for State Regulation of Imported Fuel & Electricity

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State of North Dakota, et al., v. Beverly Heydinger, et al., Case No. 11-cv-3232, (D. Minn., Apr. 18, 2014).

On April 18, the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota struck down the State of Minnesota’s restrictions on importing electricity from coal power plants in other states. The court held that these restrictions improperly regulated electric generators and utilities outside the state. The decision sets a precedent that could threaten state regulations of imported fuel and electricity, such as the numerous renewable power standards and California’s low carbon fuel standard. These regulations have been a flashpoint for conflicts between in-state and out-of-state interests, including Canadian energy producers who believe that the standards discriminate against them.

Minnesota adopted the restriction on electricity imports in its 2007 Next Generation Energy Act, which placed a moratorium on construction of new coal power plants within the state. The point of the moratorium was to limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal burning, which contributes to climate change. Without the import restriction, Minnesota’s moratorium might have little effect: companies looking to build a new coal plant could simply build in neighboring states, exporting electricity to Minnesota and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. So Minnesota declared that “no person shall . . . import or commit to import from outside the state power from” new coal plants or “enter into a new long-term power purchase agreement that would increase statewide power sector carbon dioxide emissions.” Minn. Stat. § 216H.03, subd. 3. New coal plants could only avoid this ban if they paid to reduce emissions elsewhere or qualified for an exception.

North Dakota and utilities with coal power plants brought a lawsuit alleging that Minnesota’s restrictions unconstitutionally regulated outside of Minnesota’s territory, and the court agreed. The U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause gives the federal government the authority to regulate interstate commerce and implies that states cannot “discriminate against or unduly burden interstate commerce” without congressional authorization. This rule is called the “dormant commerce clause” because it applies when congress has not authorized state regulation. One aspect of this rule is that states cannot adopt a regulation that “has the practical effect of controlling conduct beyond the boundaries of the state.”

The court held that the import restriction necessarily regulated out-of-state conduct because electricity on the grid “does not recognize state boundaries.” Electricity is not like a package that is shipped from a seller to a buyer. Instead, the interstate electric grid creates a pool of power. Electric generators contribute electricity and consumers withdraw electricity. It is as though one group was emptying buckets of water into a lake and another group was filling buckets of water from a lake. Companies may talk about purchasing electricity “from” a specific utility, but that is an accounting convention, not a description of a physical process—the electricity purchased comes from an undifferentiated pool. Thus, when a North Dakota utility sells to a North Dakota customer some of the electricity might be diverted into Minnesota, violating Minnesota’s import restriction. So Minnesota’s law regulates out-of-state conduct, and the court held that it violated the U.S. Constitution and enjoined any enforcement.

The decision raises two potential problems for state regulation of imported electricity and fuel. First, more than half of the fifty states have renewable power standards that apply to imported electricity. Under the court’s decision these standards would be invalid unless they exempted incidental imports from out-of-state utilities serving out-of-state customers. The Harvard Environmental Law Program’s Policy Initiative’s Energy Fellow Ari Peskoe has suggested some ways that states could try to insulate their regulations from a similar challenge.

Second, the court suggested that there may be strict limits on a state’s ability to regulate imported fuel and electricity through renewable portfolio standards or low carbon fuel standards. The usual rule under the dormant commerce clause is that states “may not attach restrictions to exports or imports to control commerce in other states” or otherwise “project” their regulation into other states. But the entire point of state restrictions on imported fuel and electricity is to affect out-of-state greenhouse emissions. States want to regulate imported fuel and electricity because they are concerned that out-of-state energy producers are contributing to climate change—they don’t want to import oil from places where it takes a lot of greenhouse gas emissions to produce oil and they don’t want to import electricity from states that are producing it using a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. And that concern makes sense: even if those greenhouse gas emissions take place in other states or countries, they’re just as bad for the entire world’s climate. As a result, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently suggested that the dormant commerce clause’s prohibition on extraterritorial regulation is only meant for extraterritorial price-regulation, so it doesn’t threaten California’s low carbon fuel standard or, presumably, state renewable power standards.

The Minnesota court, however, rejected the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning, noting that the Supreme Court and several appellate courts have held that states may not project their regulation into neighboring states, even when the regulation was not about prices. This conflicting reasoning comes at an important moment for state regulation of imported fuel and electricity. There is still no legal consensus on the validity of these regulations, which are being challenged in several lawsuits around the country. Statepowerproject.org, a website created by the Harvard Environmental Law Program’s Policy Initiative, is tracking these lawsuits.

Second, there is no consensus on whether these state import restrictions are a wise way to make climate policy. Although states have good reason to be concerned about the fossil-fuel industry in their trading partners, other states and countries worry that these import regulations are aimed at burdening out-of-state industry. Canada doesn’t think California should tell it how to produce oil, and is concerned that California’s regulation has been rigged to harm it. Quebec believes that state renewable portfolio standards discriminate by refusing to credit its hydropower exports as renewable. And states like North Dakota have the same concerns about Minnesota’s regulation. These conflicting interests may create conflicting regulations and state-to-state trade wars that would splinter interstate energy markets. In a forthcoming article in Fordham Law Review, titled “Importing Energy, Exporting Regulation,” I argue that the federal government should address this problem by supervising state regulation of imported energy, exempting non-discriminatory regulations from dormant commerce clause review.

No one yet knows how this legal and policy debate will be resolved. The Minnesota decision frames the legal debate through its searching dormant commerce clause review and clarifies the stakes by striking down a closely watched state electricity regulation. The one certainty is that the debate will continue.