Last month, San Francisco became the largest city to try to mandate recycling. This week, Bay Area regulators approved the nation's first pollution fee for businesses. And in Washington D.C., President Bush's "regulatory trainwreck" nightmares just got a little worse.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District's board of directors approved the unprecedented new rules by a 15-1 vote yesterday. The new measure will assess a fee on businesses of 4.4 cents per ton of carbon dioxide emitted.

Officials expect to collect about $1.1 million per year from the fee, with most of that coming from the 10 largest polluters, who together will pay more than $800,000. The largest Bay Area emitter -- a Shell oil refinery -- would have to pay $195,355 based on its 2005 emissions of 4.4 million metric tons.

The majority of businesses will pay less than $1 per year for their CO2 emissions.

"It doesn't solve global warming, but it gets us thinking in the right terms," Daniel Kammen, a renewable energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told the AP. "It's not enough of a cost to change behavior, but it tells us where things are headed. You have to think not just in financial terms, but in carbon terms."