Utah is joining 30 other states in a new effort to get a handle on the pollution blamed for climate change.

Belonging to The Climate Registry means that businesses and government agencies in Utah will take part in a standardized, nationwide and voluntary system to measure greenhouse gasses. Through it, states are stepping into a leadership role that the federal government has so far refused.

Many scientists say those gasses are trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere, disrupting the global climate and probably triggering, among other things, more drought in the West and social and economic impacts worldwide.

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. called it "Earth-friendly and business-friendly" and "a positive step in building collaborative and responsive options for addressing the issue."

"This is great progress," said Laura Nelson, Huntsman's energy adviser, calling it the nation's "largest effort to date" in moving forward on climate change.

Registry members include states led by both Democrats and Republicans, those on both coasts and those that already have set greenhouse gas reduction plans, including California. In addition, Indian tribes, Mexican states and Canadian provinces are expected to participate.

In effect, the registry will act like a bank, helping participants create a common currency based on pollution produced and pollution avoided.

This "bank" will help participants measure their liabilities (basically the carbon dioxide and other gasses that contribute to accelerated global warming) and their assets (such as reductions in carbon dioxide emissions accomplished through energy conservation and the use of clean-burning fuel).

"It doesn't force anyone to do anything they don't want to do," said Rick Sprott, the director of the Utah Division of Air Quality and a member of Huntsman's climate-change task force.

Huntsman's announcement that Utah will join the Climate Registry comes about a year after the Western Regional Air Partnership, of which Utah is a member, set out on a 2-year study of carbon trends.

It also comes a month after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Bush Administration's arguments against requiring the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. Utah, through an amicus brief signed onto by Attorney Gen. Mark Shurtleff, was one of nine states that sided with the administration.

Joining the registry is also a sign that states - and the businesses in them - see a future in which carbon dioxide emissions face government controls or are traded, like stocks, in an open market. Businesses and government agencies want to be ready to deal when the carbon trading begins.

"Unless you have a common currency, [the market] won't work," said James Holtkamp, a Salt Lake City lawyer and professor at the University of Utah School of Law.

Holtkamp, a climate change specialist in the national firm of Holland & Hart, said businesses generally favor the initiative because it will provide a consistent system for determining carbon dioxide emissions that works from state to state.

"This is another example of the states getting ahead of the federal government in dealing with climate change," he said.

The registry also has been called "a free-market Kyoto," referring to the global treaty to reduce greenhouse gasses in which the federal government has refused to participate.

Meanwhile, several local government agencies have embraced a carbon-measured world. Led by climate change activist Mayor Rocky Anderson, Salt Lake City has reduced its greenhouse gasses by 31 percent since 2001.

And, in December, the Wasatch Integrated Waste Management District in Davis County became the first Utah member of the Chicago Climate Exchange, a kind of stock market for the pollution blamed for accelerating global warming.

fahys@sltrib.com