Idaho's efforts to become a leader in green technology took a great leap forward Monday when the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality issued a permit to a company with limits to how much carbon dioxide it could emit from its fertilizer plant.

The permit, issued at the company’s request after negotiations with the Sierra Club and the Idaho Conservation League, is the first of its kind in the nation and sets the bar for future coal plants that want to build anywhere. It’s the result of Southeast Idaho Energy’s long term business plan and the environmental groups’ willingness to walk away from the “no coal” agenda of some groups.

What will be hard for some Idaho lawmakers to accept is that this arrangement, tougher rues for an industry than the federal government has mandated may bring 1,300 construction jobs and 150 permanent positions to the state at a time when we can really use them. But Gov. Butch Otter, has always believed his own rhetoric about the 10th amendment.

States rights not only meant the right not to have to do something but also the right to do something. The 10th amendment says that all powers not delegated to the federal government or prohibited from the states are; "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Since the 1980s, Idaho industry has pushed the idea of what they call the stringency clause. It required that no environmental rules written for the state be more stringent than federal environmental laws, without the Legislature’s clear approval.Industry needed only invoke to the stringency clause to stop new environmental regulations that may be tapped to specific conditions in Idaho.

The stringency clause gives Idaho agriculture and industrial community its most powerful tool for limiting the scope of environmental regulation in the state. Industry lawyers simply had to show that the federal government in some other state allowed an exception to some environmental or health regulation, to prevent Idaho’s environmental regulators from writing tougher rules. The lowest common denominator meant that if Mississippi was allowed to pollute something, then Idaho could.

But with this permit, Idaho will now be the example that the coal industry in other states will have to meet. We’re not Mississippi anymore we are Wisconsin.

In the 1970s Wisconsin placed the strongest standards in the nation on its papermaking industry to clean up its rivers. The industry howled but paid the price.

In the 1980s when papermakers in other states were forced to follow suit with clean-up investments Wisconsin’s papermakers thrived.

Legally, Idaho industries would have a tough case challenging the permit since federal and state laws don’t allow challenges of permits based on the argument they are too tough. And DEQ clearly says in the permit it has no plans to issue rules to regulate carbon dioxide emissions until the federal government makes them.

The question now is whether any state industry or lawmaker wants to risk the jobs and the tax revenues in the state to make a point about stringency.

Southeast Idaho Energy spokesman John Burk didn’t want to get involved in policy discussions. It just wants to open a plant and start creating jobs and making money in a responsible way.

The agreement and the permit brings them one step closer.

Southeast Idaho Energy is only getting started with its $1.5 billion to $2 billion plant near American Falls. Its commitment to remove 58 percent of its carbon dioxide is its floor.

With a pipeline to Wyoming’s nearby oil and gas field it could economically remove 90 percent of its C02, essentially turning it into a valuable product for increasing the amount of oil and gas that can be retrieved.

The coal gasification technology also has the potential to make transportation fuels like diesel. If a pipeline were built it might attract even more industries ready to turn a world-threatening byproduct into cash.