climate policy

EPA at 40 — Doing an End-Run Around the Legislative Process

by Fran Smith on December 1, 2010 · 1 comment

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Regulation

The Environmental Protection Agency is 40 years old.  It came into being under a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, and opened its offices on December 2, 1970.  In January of that year, Nixon had signed the National Environmental Protection Act, and on the last day of December 1970, he signed the Clean Air Act of 1970.

Fast forward to the year 2010, with an EPA now with almost limitless powers in the environmental arena — regulating greenhouse gas emissions, policing carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and expanding the purview of the Clean Air Act, without congressional approval.  As CEI’s Marlo Lewis wrote,

. . . EPA has positioned itself to determine the stringency of fuel economy standards for the auto industry, set climate policy for the nation, and even amend provisions of the Clean Air act–powers Congress never delegated to the agency. The Endangerment Rule is both trigger and precedent for sweeping policy changes Congress never approved. America could end up with a pile of greenhouse gas regulations more costly than any climate bill or treaty the Senate has declined to pass or ratify, yet without the people’s representatives ever voting on it.

Here’s more from a coalition letter trying to roll back these expanded powers:

Is climate policy to be made by the people’s representatives or by politically unaccountable bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and activist judges?

Only one answer to that question passes constitutional muster. EPA has no authority to do an end-run around the democratic process. Climate policy is too important to be made by an administrative agency without new and specific statutory guidance from Congress.

Republicans are now in control of the House, and with six additional seats in the Senate, they, working with moderate Democrats, should be able to pass legislation suspending or overturning EPA greenhouse gas regulations. We, the People, can “take back our government” only if our representatives stop administrative agencies from legislating.

An Authoritarian Climate

by Iain Murray on January 6, 2010 · 2 comments

in Culture, Environment, Global Warming, Personal Liberty

Certain influential forces in the environmental movement – most notably James Hansen of NASA – have expressed disquiet with the inability of democracies to deal with their imagined “climate crisis,” leading to sentiments like this one from Australian authors David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith:

We need an authoritarian form of government in order to implement the scientific consensus on greenhouse gas emissions

Climatologists Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch discuss this argument at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog.  Thankfully, the demands for an “Ecologocracy,” for want of a better term, are not yet universal in the environmental movement.  They conclude:

Finally, the growing impatience of prominent climate researchers constitutes an implicit embrace of now popular social theories. We think in this context especially of Jared Diamond’s theories on the fate of human societies. Diamond argues that only those societies have a chance of survival which practice sustainable lifestyles. Climate researchers have evidently been impressed by Diamond’s deterministic social theory. However, they have drawn the wrong conclusion, namely that only authoritarian political states guided by scientists make effective and correct decisions on the climate issue. History teaches us that the opposite is the case.

Therefore, today’s China cannot serve as a model. Climate policy must be compatible with democracy, otherwise the threat to civilization will be much more than just changes to our physical environment.

Indeed.  In fact, there may be another reason for those who despise greenhouse gas emissions also to despise democracy. and it is precisely linked to the threat to civilization.  We know that the best indicator of low greenhouse gas emissions is poverty.  As Daron Acemoglu shows, rejecting Diamond, poverty is strongly linked to the lack of market institutions that democracy protects:

People need incentives to invest and prosper; they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep that money. And the key to ensuring those incentives is sound institutions — the rule of law and security and a governing system that offers opportunities to achieve and innovate. That’s what determines the haves from the have-nots — not geography or weather or technology or disease or ethnicity.
Put simply: Fix incentives and you will fix poverty. And if you wish to fix institutions, you have to fix governments.

To put it another way, the authoritarian solution to the global warming problem, in so far as it exists, is the imposition of poverty, for that is the inevitable result of the restriction of energy use that is the authoritarians’ sine qua non. Those of us who are trying to think of alternative solutions to the problem, however, are convinced that it is the same institutions that have delivered us from poverty that will deliver us from whatever ills a warmer world might impose. To see more on this, check out Marlo Lewis’ film Policy Peril, in particular this segment.

We don’t need no stinking safety valve!

by Marlo Lewis on October 17, 2008

in Energy, Global Warming

If elected President, Barack Obama will give EPA the green light to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act, Bloomberg.com reports. Bloomberg’s source is Obama’s energy adviser, Jason Grumet, who also serves as executive director of the self-styled National Commission on Energy Policy (NCEP).

This is all very odd. NCEP is the leading proponent of a price-cap “safety valve” to limit the energy and economic impacts of a carbon trading program (see p. 21 of this report). NCEP touts its safety valve proposal as the moderate middle between the regulate-at-any-cost Left and the regulate-under-no-circumstances Right. Supposedly, the safety valve would take the economic risk out of regulating carbon, because the government would commit in advance to sell as many permits as might be needed to keep carbon prices within a preset cost ceiling. Under the original NCEP plan, for example, the government would guarantee that carbon permit prices do not exceed $7.00 per ton in the first year, and do not increase by more than 5 percent annually.

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