Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Both the NY Times and the Washington Post had lead stories Wednesday on the politics of climate change legislation. The Post’s story centered on the increasing focus of the debate on the economic impact of climate legislation and on the difficulty of establishing the facts:
In anticipation, groups on the left and the right — as well as government outfits such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Congressional Budget Office — have issued a spate of analyses projecting the costs and, sometimes, the benefits of congressional climate legislation. But the fine print in many of these projections reveals that they are based on assumptions that could easily turn out otherwise, meaning lawmakers will have to take a leap of faith about how a cap-and-trade program — which would control pollution by providing economic incentives to reduce emissions — might affect the economy.
It seems to me that the “high cost” estimates are implausible on political rather than economic grounds — if the legislation turns out to cause large unemployment or price spikes for consumers, it will be speedily modified. In addition, history shows that all environmental legislation has been accompanied by similar alarmist warnings, which haven’t come to pass.
The Times lead with a story about the Obama Administration’s increased efforts to advance legislation. Opponents complain about the cost of the legislation, but also that the bill is so complex and that Congress is being asked to acted too quickly. (If this were not a serious academic blog, I would had “haha” or a smiley face at this point.)
I have some sympathy with complaints that the bill is too complex and needs more study — but only a limited amount. The bill is so complex largely because of the need to accommodate the same parochial interests that are now whining about its complexity, and we would never pass any legislation on any subject if waited until we had finished studying the problem.
There is something to be said for the approach that California took with AB 32 — identify the goal, provide a bit of guidance about means, and turn the details over to an administrative agency. But I don’t see anyone in Congress advocating that way of cutting the Gordian knot.
It’s very hard to gauge the legislative situation from the outside. How many of the complaints are real, and how many are simply bargaining ploys? No way of knowing, really. But I have the sense that much of what we are hearing in public is only loosely connected with whatever serious deal-making is takng place behind the scenes.
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Daniel Farber | October 29, 2009
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post had lead stories Wednesday on the politics of climate change legislation. The Post’s story centered on the increasing focus of the debate on the economic impact of climate legislation and on the difficulty of establishing the facts: In anticipation, groups on the left […]
Ben Somberg | October 27, 2009
Super Freakonomics, which came out last week, has been critiqued thoroughly (UCS has a good library of their own critiques and links to others) for its embrace of geoengineering as the cheap fix to that problem called global warming, and the book’s methods generally have also been critiqued as lacking. But yesterday brought a new […]
Catherine O'Neill | October 26, 2009
Three recent developments in the saga of efforts to regulate mercury emissions from coal-fired utilities are significant. Early last week, Michigan became the twenty-third state to require coal-fired utilities within its jurisdiction to reduce their mercury emissions. Michigan’s regulation requires these sources to cut mercury emissions by 90% by 2015. Then, on Thursday, the EPA […]
Shana Campbell Jones | October 23, 2009
As climate change legislation awaits action in the Senate, serious and complicated legal and policy questions about the tools designed to reduce carbon emissions remain. Truly, the climate change debate operates in two distinct worlds. The first is becoming increasingly hysterical, consisting of sensational and camera-ready protests and attacks underwritten by groups such as the […]
Matt Shudtz | October 22, 2009
In Wednesday’s Federal Register, EPA unveiled a new, streamlined process through which agency scientists will systematically review old chemical profiles in the IRIS database and update them with the latest toxicological information. With everything from Clean Air Act residual risk determinations about hazardous air pollutants to Superfund site cleanup standards to Safe Drinking Water Act […]
Ben Somberg | October 22, 2009
CPR President Rena Steinzor and board member Robert Glicksman sent a letter today to White House Science Adviser John Holdren and OIRA Administrator Cass Sunstein regarding OMB's role in EPA science decisions. The letter concerns two recent episodes involving OMB that we wrote about this week: one regarding the EPA's Endocrine Disrputor Screening Program (EDSP) […]
Christine Klein | October 21, 2009
As the recession grinds on, financial news continues to grab front-page headlines. The national deficit is a central flashpoint for controversy, triggering debate on the appropriate balance between spending today and increasing our children’s growing mountain of debt. In the midst of this battle, it is easy to overlook another looming problem: the growth of […]
Matt Shudtz | October 20, 2009
Greenwire and the Los Angeles Times ran pieces last week shining a light into a dark corner where staff at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs once again meddled in scientific regulatory programs where they do not belong, second-guessing EPA’s administration of the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP). The program, mandated by Congress under […]
Rena Steinzor | October 19, 2009
Before Cass Sunstein had spent much more than a week as the official director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), he invited us over to the White House to talk about how he wanted to shape his small office of economists and statisticians into a strong force for progressive policy within the […]