In sharp contrast, CO2, a greenhouse gas and a major contributor to climate change, has been the subject of a range of hopeful government initiatives and pleas, none mandatory, and -- surprise, surprise -- emissions of the pollutant rose by 25 percent between 1991 and 2002.

The report shows that "this notion that voluntary programs alone will work to address global warming in the utility sector is a farce," said Dan Lashof, science director of NRDC's Climate Center.

But, said Lashof, even more important conclusions can be drawn from the study, which found little correlation between the rate of emissions from utilities and the amount of electricity they produced.

Take this statistic: Fewer than one-fifth of the companies studied account for half of the utility sector's total emissions output -- including SO2, NOx, CO2 and mercury. And those companies' emissions are not proportional to the amount of electricity they generate. For example, explained CERES spokesperson Nicole St. Clair, though Southern Company generated just four times more electricity than its smaller competitor Calpine, the former belched a shocking 6,300 times more SO2 than the latter. Likewise, American Electric Power generated 28 times more juice than Panda Energy, but pumped out 436 times more NOx emissions along the way.

What does this tell us?

"Good news and bad news," David Gardiner, senior advisor to CERES and a former assistant administrator of the U.S. EPA under Clinton. He told Muckraker, "The bad news is that the regulations aren't working uniformly: There's a major discrepancy between the way our federal regulations are being implemented among different companies and in different states." But, he said, "the good news is that companies like Calpine are making great strides in economically viable ways, and that if we implement stronger regulations uniformly nationwide, we will see deep cuts in these emissions."

It's no small issue: The EPA itself has estimated that NOx and SO2 emissions from power plants still cause some 30,000 premature deaths each year. This -- combined with the EPA's troubling announcement last week that more than 474 counties do not meet updated health standards for ground-level ozone, directly linked to NOx emissions -- demonstrates, one might think, a need for some firm discipline.

Thankfully, there's more good news, according to Gardiner: "More and more, polluting companies -- and their shareholders, especially -- are beginning to realize that dirtier power plants face disproportionate financial and legal risks compared to their cleaner competitors." In the case of CO2, investors are starting to accept that caps are inevitable down the line, and they don't like the uncertainty of wondering when it will happen and how much time they will have to prepare, he added.

This unease is prompting a growing number of shareholders to push corporations for more disclosure of environment-related data and a lowering of emissions, and even to call for more uniform federal enforcement of emission standards for a full spectrum of pollutants.

In other words, children can learn to behave, but it sometimes takes more than asking nicely.

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