Yesterday, California announced the blueprint it will use to roll back greenhouse gas emission levels to 1990 levels by 2020.  Remember, in 1990, MC Hammer released “U Can’t Touch This,” Home Alone was the top-grossing film of the year, and there was still a USSR.   So, yeah.   Kind of a while ago.

Anyhow, the state had announced this goal two years ago in a piece of climate change legislation, and now we’re starting to see how this all might happen.    From the story on Marketplace, the business show on NPR,

A cap-and-trade system with other Western states would let businesses buy and sell the right to pollute.

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The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA to friends, relatives, and close neighbors, is being taken to task for caving in to pressure from the White House when it denied California’s effort to set the strictest auto emission standards in the nation.   Of course, I may have had some problems with the EPA in the past, but this time, we have, you know, testimony and subpoenaed documents and all sorts of fun things.   From the San Francisco Chronicle:

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, said the new details - revealed in sworn testimony from top EPA officials - showed that the White House “played a decisive role in the rejection of the California motor vehicle standards” in December.

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