Regulation | Grist

OIRA we can believe in

Regulatory czar Sunstein’s first days 2
Posted 4 months, 1 week ago
Michael Livermore is right to suggest that environmentalists should be focused on Cass Sunstein’s first official day as regulatory czar for the Obama Administration. After months of delay over the Harvard professor’s eclectic and provocative writings, he will eventually take office if he can placate cattle ranchers concerned about his views on animal rights. Whatever their level of paranoia about Sunstein’s ability to grant animals standing to bring lawsuits, the likely character of his reign was more accurately predicted by the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, which applauded Sunstein’s devotion to cost-benefit analysis, the major weapon of Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II to smother health, safety, and environmental protections.
A Burning Concern

North Carolina governor calls for better regulation of coal ash dumps 0
Posted 4 months, 1 week ago
North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue (D) has endorsed legislation that would increase oversight of the state's coal ash dumps, the massive surface impoundments that power companies use to store the toxic waste left over after burning coal.
the sun'll come out tomorrow

The three things Cass Sunstein should do on his first day 1
Posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago
After some minor drama, it looks like Cass Sunstein is finally on the road to confirmation for director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) after being nominated by President Obama in January.
Green jobs: debunking the debunkers 5
Posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago
In response to my recent article digging into green jobs, a reader sent me a copy of a March paper by Andrew Morriss et al at University of Illinois that attempts to debunk green jobs myths. While I see major flaws in most green jobs papers I read, many of the myths cited by this paper are irrelevant to what I consider the most important questions.
Duelling diatribes

Hansen versus Romm 0
Posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago
For all of Waxman-Markey's faults, I think it gets two things right: (1) allowance set-asides to fund tropical forest conservation, and (2) a meaningful price floor...However, they leave W-M with no coherent policy foundation, because its other regulatory mechanisms -- the cap, trading, economy-wide linkage, banking, borrowing, and offsets -- all operate to achieve the converse objective of minimizing costs within limits of a predetermined (and unsustainable) emission cap.
Yes, we Kahn

Carbon trading: Worthy of Feinstein’s ire? 18
Posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago
"Deregulation shifts the major burden of consumer protection to the competitive market, and therefore, in important measure, to the enforcement of antitrust laws." - Alfred E. Kahn, Lessons for Deregulation: Telecommunications and Airlines after the Crunch.

I've always found the above to be one of the wiser quotes about deregulation. What does this have to do with commodities and Senator Feinstein? Recently, she announced a proposed amendment to the Senate climate bill, one that would commence federal oversight of CO2 markets "to prevent Enron-like fraud, manipulation and excessive speculation in the new federal, state and regional carbon markets that will be established by [a cap and trade] system."
Breaching the dams

How fast can the US electric sector reform? 8
Posted 5 months ago
Is the electric sector capable of rapid, large scale reform? Many policies implicitly assume the answer to that question is No, especially when it comes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emission control.

The result is a policy conversation that hinges on the assumption that it is hard to change. How much must we spend to accelerate new technology? How many decades should we allow for a phase-in of new regulations?

As it turns out, the industry can change -- and indeed, has changed -- at a much faster pace than you might think. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it turns out to be quick and fairly painless to replace meaningful fractions of our power fleet in very short time frames.
We don't want to know about your crap

Factory farms get the ultimate handout 5
Posted 5 months, 1 week ago
An amendment in the 2010 Interior and Environment spending bill will prevent the EPA from requiring factory farms to report their GHG emissions -- a move that represents a blatant handout to large factory farms.
Drinking the Kool-Aid of Corporate America

Why are milk prices plummeting? 10
Posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago
Dairy farmers are in deep trouble. Milk prices have fallen by half since last year, dropping to a 30-year low. Consumption has fallen in light of the slowing world economy and now there is a huge milk surplus, or so the “experts” tell us. But milk prices, like the rest of the world economy, crashed because of a globalized, unregulated free market system, not because of surplus product.
Do dirty coal plants make us more vulnerable to swine flu? 3
Posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago
Scientists have discovered that exposure to a common pollutant may make people more likely to experience severe symptoms from swine flu -- and it's a pollutant emitted in large quantities by coal-burning power plants and other industrial facilities.
Something Is Rotten on the NYT Op-Ed Page

A false choice from a familiar skeptic 5
Posted 7 months ago
Bjorn Lomborg -- Danish statistician, self-styled "Skeptical Environmentalist," and long-time Grist nemesis -- is back, this time courtesy of the New York Times op-ed page.
What baseball can teach policymakers 0
Posted 7 months, 1 week ago
Eat your spinach

Cap and trade works! 4
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago
Why do people keep saying it's impossible to properly regulate a cap-and-trade system? They exist, and we properly regulate them!
The making of a conventional wisdom

What explains the recent popularity of market-based environmental solutions? 2
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago
Despite the potential cost-effectiveness of market-based policy instruments like pollution taxes and tradable permits, conventional approaches -- including design and uniform performance standards -- have been the mainstay of U.S. environmental policy since before the first Earth Day in 1970.

Gradually, however, the political process has become more receptive to innovative, market-based strategies. What explains this relatively recent rise in the use of market-based approaches?
Patches for our patches

RPS, EERS and energy politics 3
Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago
What is the goal of renewable energy and efficiency mandates? You'd be hard-pressed to get consistent answers to that question, even from proponents. That should tell us something.
Moving beyond vintage-differentiated regulation 2
Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago
A common feature of many environmental policies in the United States is vintage-differentiated regulation (VDR), under which standards for regulated units are fixed in terms of the units’ respective dates of entry, with later vintages facing more stringent regulation. In the most common application, often referred to as “grandfathering,” units produced prior to a specific date are exempted from a new regulation or face less stringent requirements.

As I explain in this post, an economic perspective suggests that VDRs are likely to retard turnover in the capital stock, and thereby to reduce the cost-effectiveness of regulation in the long-term, compared with equivalent undifferentiated regulations.
Libertarian paternalism all up in the hizouse

Green nudges: An interview with Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein 1
Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago
Legal scholar and avowed environmentalist Cass Sunstein is President Obama's new "regulation czar." Americans should prepare to get nudged.
Myth: Climate policy is primarily about putting a price on carbon 9
Posted 8 months ago
Raising the price of carbon will lead to the cheapest, fastest emission reductions only if all else is equal, and in the real world, all else is not equal.
Cap-and-fish

Using markets to make fisheries sustainable 1
Posted 8 months ago
According to the United Nations Environment Program, fully 25 percent of fisheries worldwide are in jeopardy of collapse due to over-fishing. Clearly, something needs to be done.
It is conservatives, not environmentalists, who want to redistribute costs and burdens—to future 0
Posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago