The Center for Public Integrity

A sampling of power players:

With the global economy in meltdown, and faith in Wall Street wizardry at a low — to say the least — it’s perhaps an odd time for a push to put the fate of the planet into the hands of the market.

But that’s the solution for fighting global warming already in practice in Europe, and the one with the most traction in Congress and the White House. When President Obama, soon after the election, promised “a new chapter” in American leadership on climate change, he said, “That will start with a cap-and-trade system.”

In cap-and-trade, Uncle Sam would either hand out or sell tradable “permits” that would allow power plants and other businesses to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and no more. The idea is that the permits would become a valuable commodity, and companies that can cut emissions quickly can profit by selling their permits to companies that are having a hard time. It’s a way of giving businesses flexibility, while creating incentives for innovators to figure out the lowest-cost solutions.

The idea of creating a “carbon market” is based on the hugely successful 29-year-old program that curbed U.S. acid rain pollution far more quickly and cheaply than industry anticipated. But the acid rain market deals with only one pollutant — sulfur dioxide — and one kind of polluter: the coal power plant. Carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases like methane are so much more prevalent that an effort to limit them would involve every sector of the economy.

“It’s the most important thing we have never done,” Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Bart Chilton said in a recent speech. Within five years, he anticipates that a carbon market would dwarf any of the markets his agency currently regulates — from livestock and corn to oil and natural gas. “I can see carbon trading being a $2 trillion market. The largest commodity market in the world.”

Public transit advocates were almost nowhere to be found when the Senate debated climate change back in 2003. But today, transit agencies and their allies are among many new players jumping into the climate debate, as the stakes grow higher, and the prospective benefits — a cleaner world and cold cash — grow clearer.

An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity shows that last year at least 25 transit groups, cities, and counties engaged in climate lobbying focused on public transit.

Measures to reduce transportation emissions are a growing part of the climate change debate on Capitol Hill. “Between [2003] and now I think what you saw was a clearer understanding of transit’s role in reducing greenhouse gases,” said Paul Dean, director of government relations at the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). “We began to get some traction in the latest debate [in 2008].”

Environmental Protection Agency figures show that the transportation sector — cars and trucks, mostly — accounts for 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. So any climate change legislation will probably aim to get people out of their cars and on to mass transit, be it trains, light rail, or even buses.

But close observers of the debate say transit advocates are concerned not just with doing good, but with doing well. Under the “cap-and-trade” concept at the core of most legislative proposals, the federal government would raise billions in revenue by selling emissions “permits” to private companies; some of those billions would then be doled out to projects that could reduce greenhouse gases, such as mass transit projects.