Recently the green blogosphere has been engaged in an oddly vigorous defense of command and control style legislation. I’m not sure whether this trendlet grows out of environmentalists’ unfortunate habit of ranking and re-ranking and arguing over the ranking of various solutions to climate change; or out of pique that odious people like Charles Krauthammer are pretending to be proponents of carbon pricing; or, as I suspect, out of something else entirely, but I have some good news for supporters of mandates: Both the public and public officials love command and control style legislation.
To be sure, the term “command and control” is pejorative, but no congressperson ever introduced the 2008 Command and Control Environmental Protection Act. Nevertheless, virtually every single piece of environmental legislation ever enacted takes the form of a mandate. From renewable portfolio standards to CAFE to wilderness protection to the quality of our air and water to species protection to waste management to an endless stream of subsidies and tax credits (good, bad, and ugly)—they don’t call it environmental regulation for nothing.
Our new administration wasted no time in announcing a series of sweeping—and, make no mistake, welcome—environmental fiats. A coal plant in South Dakota quickly got whacked. California and 13 other states were finally let off their leash to impose stricter fuel economy standards on cars. And, in possibly the most dramatic new mandate, the House passed a stimulus bill that puts significant funds toward the goal of doubling U.S. production of clean energy in three years.
Command and control is so popular that Californians put not one but two environmental mandates on the ballot this year, one setting an aggressive new renewable portfolio standard and another promoting alternative fuel vehicles, solar energy, and energy efficiency. That both went down in resounding defeat illustrates an unfortunate aspect of command and control style legislation: the ballot measures were so badly drafted and skewed toward special interests that even environmental groups opposed them. But that’s a subject for another time.
Even in the realm of carbon legislation, command and control takes pride of place. In the scoping plan for AB 32, the most far-reaching piece of greenhouse gas legislation in the United States, cap-and-trade is just one of 18 proposed categories of emissions reduction measures. The other 17 are all good old command and control, ranging from building standards to high-speed rail to forest preservation. Carbon pricing may be the single biggest source of emissions reductions in the plan, but it still only accounts for about 20 percent of the total. (In fairness to the cap, though, it’s impossible to say how many of the mandated actions would have been brought about anyway by carbon pricing.)
Mind you, there’s nothing particularly wrong with this situation. Many environmental problems don’t lend themselves to price-based solutions, and regardless every style of legislation has its strengths and weaknesses. But the fierce defense of a style of legislation that clearly needs no defending is a bit dissonant, and even more so when this defense is couched as a criticism of carbon pricing. We’re simply not in an either-or situation. Given both the critic nature of carbon pricing to address climate change and the massively uphill political battle it still faces, perhaps now isn’t the best time to lose interest?
More thoughts on this topic to come.
‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science
Obama administration may (finally) offer greenhouse-gas targets
John McCain’s troubles are the world’s troubles
Comments
View as Flat
Gar Lipow Posted 3:12 am
31 Jan 2009
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Darrell Posted 7:41 am
31 Jan 2009
Four of five points in Adam Stein's "Grand Climate Plan" here last August are directive:
Carbon pricing
Efficiency standards
Carbon-free electricity
Smart electrical grid
Electric transportation
I illustrated my version here, without carbon pricing.
To use the World War II analogy, Roosevelt didn't seek to create market incentives for auto companies to build tanks. There was no time to waste; he just directed that they do it.
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Adam Stein Posted 8:00 am
31 Jan 2009
I'd also add that your example of freight trains does sort of reinforce the notion that, er, carbon pricing is the big missing piece. That one single thing is going to cost $400 billion? It seems pretty clear then that we're not going to remake our economy solely or even primarily through public spending, and in fact need to guide all investment, public and private, with price signals over a matter of decades.
But, really, I'm not the one insisting we have to choose.
www.terrapass.com/blog
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Russ Posted 8:03 am
31 Jan 2009
Hansen and Romm and others have said they think even more important than instituting a carbon price is establishing a regulatory ban on any new coal plants without CCS (i.e., any new coal plants).
Now that's a Command which should be issued, a Control which should be imposed!
(On the other hand, the aggrofuel mandates were a horrific mistake and need to be rescinded. But that doesn't look like happening anytime soon. They want to keep digging that hole deeper.)
Darrell says,
To use the World War II analogy, Roosevelt didn't seek to create market incentives for auto companies to build tanks. There was no time to waste; he just directed that they do it.
To be fair, FDR didn't need to create incentives - the war had already created a boundless market, since the army was going to snap up every tank they could churn out. (I point that out because that's probably what the enemy would reply, and since people like this FDR-Big Auto-tank example, they should be prepared for that response.)
But your basic point is right on - this is a war-level crisis, much more than just the "moral equivalent", and strong, fast action is needed.
All the requisite laws are in place already; just like with renewable energy tech, we don't need anything new.
We just need to rigorously enforce the laws we have.
If someone in power had the courage to do that, that's all we'd need to deal with carbon.
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Adam Stein Posted 10:37 pm
31 Jan 2009
This notion that we know how to fix climate change and we just have to do it is dangerously wrong. It also happens to be exactly what is underlying the new love affair with command and control. (The WWII analogy is pretty terrible. Building tanks is not the same as transforming the world's energy infrastructure.)
To be sure, we know a bunch of stuff we should do, and I'm totally on board with using mandates to tackle these issues. Of course, everyone is on board with using mandates to tackle these issues -- it's a completely banal observation to say that efficiency standards and transit investments are good things.
But this notion that they're all we need is a recipe for failure. Nor is it true that "we don't need anything new." We don't need any new breakthroughs in technology to make massive emissions reductions. That's a different thing entirely than not needing technological progress.
www.terrapass.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 12:04 am
01 Feb 2009
That's obvious. But the example of how mass production is key to winning the climate battle is similar. Could our side have won with "free" market production of war material?
Would pricing car production with taxes have caused industry to freely turn to war production?
"We don't need any new breakthroughs in technology to make massive emissions reductions."
We need breakthroughs in mass production of renewable/conservation energy devices (like plugin hybrids, ground source heating/cooling systems, smart grid devices, and solar cogeneration systems)to bring prices down.
"...it's a completely banal observation to say that efficiency standards and transit investments are good things."
Hmmm, I huess you better tell that to Summers then, he doesn't seem to get it, but seems to have the power to kill green infrastructure spending.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Russ Posted 12:20 am
01 Feb 2009
Yes, by now it is banal. But that doesn't prevent there existing enough reaction against this to effectively obstruct it so far.
I'm just as sick as you of the talk about mandates. Actually applying them is a different story.
This notion that we know how to fix climate change and we just have to do it is dangerously wrong. It also happens to be exactly what is underlying the new love affair with command and control.
The way I think we fix the cliamte crisis is by lowering emissions.
As for the love affair with command and control, the historical record tells me those who profit from denial and obstruction are simply dead-ending bunker-dwellers who will never compromise short of duress. I think dreaming of such compromise is doomed to be futile, and that appeasement does not work.
I also accept the urgency demanded by Hansen, Pachauri, and others. So if the idea is to wait for enough people to come around to reach a political critical mass where a good bill can be passed with bipartisan acclaim, I think that will simply take too long.
So it follows, if we really want effective mitigation, then C&C is our best hope. If that mean simply running over the opposition and leaving them as roadkill, so be it; we know damn well that's all they were ever willing to do.
I know this in itself won't help with the global compass of the crisis, and we still need something approaching a halfway decent carbon bill just to show China, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, the GCC and other major emitters not currently encompassed within Kyoto goals that we're no longer a rogue nation here, that we're working at it, and that they should too.
So I do believe we need the dual legislative/administrative track. But I think legislation, in the short run, will be more about symbolism than real, effective action. In the short run, only C&C can have real teeth.
By now, the short run is all we have.
We don't need any new breakthroughs in technology to make massive emissions reductions. That's a different thing entirely than not needing technological progress.
"Breakthroughs" is what I meant. I don't deny there's some fine-tuning to be done.
I was thinking more of those, including some ostensibly within the community, who insist that we need to seek breakthroughs, and implicitly say we shouldn't do much else until we find them.
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spaceshaper Posted 2:00 am
01 Feb 2009
And seven years of a comfortably outsourced arms-length war-level conflict in Iraq has demolished any sense of what war really means in any case. War metaphors have outlived their usefulness. They're a dead end.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:02 am
01 Feb 2009
The new deal stimulus didm't end the depression, it was actual war production that did that. Green technology mass production under government contract could end this depression, while it's still merely a deepening recession.
And don't forget this, is GHG climate emergency as potentially devestating as world domination by the Axis powers was? It's hard to tell, but it's a thought provoking comparison.
Billions fleeng drought and crop failure, wars, disease, total global economic collapse, not a pretty picture.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Gar Lipow Posted 3:23 am
01 Feb 2009
First, every post on the subject I've put up insists we need both. So you are attacking a red herring when you say that. And the whole idea that talking about setting priorities between C&C and price is new or unimportant seems kind of odd.
Examples of swipes at "command-and-control" include: Matt Yglesias bashing swipes CAFE in defense of gasoline taxes, the EPA describing "advantages of market-oriented policies over command-and-control approaches to controlling pollution", Pew's statement that "an emissions trading program, if designed and implemented effectively, can achieve environmental goals faster and at lower costs than traditional command-and-control alternatives". There is also the Environmental Defense Fund's claim that "Markets provide greater environmental effectiveness than command-and-control regulation because they turn pollution reductions into marketable assets". On the Gristmill blog, at almost the same time Stein was claiming comparing "command & control" to carbon pricing is something new done only by awful people,
Hannah McCrea and Doug Kendall were writing "The better approach to mitigating this risk is to attach a price to carbon emissions".
Obviously the perception of a conflict is not limited to C&C advocates.
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spaceshaper Posted 3:31 am
01 Feb 2009
The reality is we have effectively been conducting an increasingly vicious war against our mother planet for the last two hundred years, since the beginning of the industrial revolution. This conflict has escalated to the point where Gaia is no longer just irritated but is now positively annoyed and is getting ready to shake us off. Making peace with the earth is now the task that confronts us. War is not the way to that peace. Peace IS the way. We need to back off, calm down, stop our destructive behavior and put salve on the wounds we have inflicted.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Gar Lipow Posted 3:33 am
01 Feb 2009
I'd also add that your example of freight trains does sort of reinforce the notion that, er, carbon pricing is the big missing piece. That one single thing is going to cost $400 billion? It seems pretty clear then that we're not going to remake our economy solely or even primarily through public spending, and in fact need to guide all investment, public and private, with price signals over a matter of decades.
I wish you were right. But unfortunately freight rail is a perfect example of where price won't get us where we need. The problem is that freight rail is not losing the competition to trucking on price but on speed and reliabibility. And that is not something that can be fixed incrementally. So the price of trucking goes up, then shipper will try rail. And after more goods are lost or damaged or delivered so late they lose most of their value in a month than happened in a year with trucking, they will either return to trucking, or do without some of the long distance business, or perhaps go out of business. There are inexpensive fixes that can marginally improve rail speed and reliability, but only marginally. The big fix is one that has to be done all at once. If you want to rail to be in the same class and reliability as trucking most of the upgrade has to be done all at once, systematically - with benefits to the rail industry coming only after most of the money is spent. This is exactly the kind of thing that markets don't do well - taking big risk in 400 billion dollar chunks, with most of the payback only coming after the money is spent. And while I agree without you that in general there is a lot of room for technical improvement (as opposed to breakthroughs) electrified freight rail is a truly mature technology. We have 100% of the technology now.
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Darrell Posted 6:33 am
01 Feb 2009
The main components of that vision are efficiency, renewable electrcity, and electrfied transportation. Those technologies exist, although we'd all agree that they will be refined in mass-production.
Some of these are important but "binary" changes -- such as automakers beginning to make electric vehicles, electrifying railroads, or ending construction of new coal-fired power plants -- that especially need a Command and Control mandate to get underway.
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