Transportation and Climate Initiative - Technical Workshop

Last December, nine states, including Massachusetts, agreed to develop a program that would limit carbon emissions for the transportation sector in the region, using a cap and trade system. It’s called the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) and it will likely resemble the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which has governed over the electricity sector since More simply, what that means is that gasoline and diesel would be taxed at some point in the supply chain, and the price of that tax would be determined by an auction of allowances on the carbon that is embedded in those fuels.

The devil is in the details, of course. Today, I attended a workshop on the TCI, hosted by the Georgetown Climate Center. It was an interesting workshop but what it really highlighted is how much work still needs to be done to make it happen.