More on California Greenhouse Legislation

The full statute can be found here. By 2020, the state must roll greenhouse emissions back to the 1990 level. The key provision is the mandate to "adopt rules and regulations in an open public process to achieve the maximum technologically feasible and cost-effective greenhouse gas emission reductions from sources or categories of sources." These regulations may (but need not) include "the use of market-based compliance mechanisms to comply with the regulations." The statute does provide some additional detail, but the entire law is only a few pages long. This is in stark contrast to federal legislation such as the Clean Air Act, which is hundreds of pages long. Rather, it seems more typical of New Deal-era federal legislation, which tended toward flexible delegation to agencies. For those with an interest in theories of administrative delegation, this might be an interesting case study.