The Feds Take On Climate Adaptation
On October 14, the White House’s Climate Change Adaptation Task Force released its recommendations to President Obama for how agencies can better prepare the United States to respond to the impacts of climate change. Once again we are reminded of how important it is to have an Administration that takes climate science seriously.
According to the scientists, even if we curb emissions, global temperatures will continue to rise for decades, bringing along with them rising seas, more heat waves, more severe flooding, and more serious droughts. The Task Force’s report is a solid step forward in preparing the U.S. to deal with the challenges of climate change. There are five key recommendations.
1. Mainstream adaptation as a standard part of agency planning. Agency adaptation plans should prioritize the most vulnerable people, places, and infrastructure. The plans should utilize ecosystem based approaches. Getting agencies to prepare these plans may be hard enough, but getting them to implement the plans is the crucial step.
2. Ensure that scientific information about the impacts of climate change is easily accessible. Without solid scientific information, public and private sector decision-makers cannot build adaptive capacity into their plans and activities. This effort would …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Imagine a problem: it’s global; it stems from an extremely complex, interconnected system; it has major economic implications. Sounds like climate change, or in other words, like the kind of problem that the world can’t seem to address effectively. But no, it’s not Global Climate Change, it’s Global Economic Change. And the world seems to be coalescing without much fuss around major regulatory initiatives.
From the NY Times, a story about how the major governments came together and adopted tough rules to deal with potential global crises:
BASEL, Switzerland — The world’s top bank regulators agreed Sunday on far-reaching new rules intended to strengthen the global banking industry and shield it against future financial disasters.
The new requirements more than tripled the amount of capital banks must hold in reserve, an effort to bolster their financial strength and provide …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Administrative agencies sometimes issue regulations that have the effect of overruling state law — and sometimes that is the sole effect of the regulation. This proved quite controversial during the Bush Administration, which used agency rulemaking efforts to cut back on state tort law. The ABA has a adopted a new resolution dealing with this issue. The resolution reads:
RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges Congress to address foreseeable preemption issues clearly and explicitly when it enacts a statute that has the potential to displace, supplement, or otherwise affect state tort law by:
(1) clearly and explicitly stating when it intends to preempt state tort law; and,
(2) clearly and explicitly setting forth the extent of the preemption of state tort law it intends, and the extent to which, through a savings clause or other means, it intends not to preempt state tort …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
A key figure in behavioral economics recently issued a warning about over-reliance on its findings. In a NY Times op. ed, Dr. George Lowenstein raised questions about some uses of behavioral economics by government policymakers:
As policymakers use it to devise programs, it’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked to solve problems it wasn’t meant to address. Indeed, it seems in some cases that behavioral economics is being used as a political expedient, allowing policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics.
Behavioral economics should complement, not substitute for, more substantive economic interventions. If traditional economics suggests that we should have a larger price difference between sugar-free and sugared drinks, behavioral economics could suggest whether consumers would respond better to a subsidy on unsweetened drinks or a tax on sugary drinks.
But that’s the …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
According to Thursday's NY Times, Senate Democrats have agreed to include a utilities-only cap-and-trade program in their energy bill. That’s certainly not ideal — it excludes a large number of industrial sources, which limits its environmental effectiveness. The utilities-only program will also be less economically efficient, since it precludes taking advantage of possible low-cost reductions available in the industrial sector.
Opinions will always differ about how much you can compromise before the game isn’t worth the candle. I’m generally inclined toward the view that half a loaf is better than none. In particular, passing any kind of federal climate legislation would be important as a first step toward something bigger. It would help reestablish momentum and would be an important symbolic recognition of the seriousness of the problem. In more concrete terms, it would bring the coal states into the …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
On Thursday, the Senate voted down a resolution from Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) to halt EPA regulation of greenhouse gases. The vote was 53 to 47. What are we to make of the vote?
The resolution was offered under the Congressional Review Act, which provides a fast-track mechanism for Congress to override agency regulations. (The CRA, which was part of the Contract with America in the 1990s, is a substitute for the kinds of “legislative vetoes” that the Supreme Court has found to be unconstitutional. There’s a detailed discussion in this law review note.) You may recall that EPA’s endangerment finding was made after the Supreme Court held that, if climate change endangers human health or welfare, EPA has a duty to make a finding to that effect and to regulate greenhouse gases. In effect, the Murkowski resolution would amend …
Rob Verchick’s new book, “Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World,” might help avoid future disasters like the Deepsea Horizon blowout.
Verchick views wetlands, lakes, forests, and rivers as a kind of infrastructure, providing ecosystem services that are just as important as the services provided by other infrastructure, such as roads and dams. For instance, Gulf Coast wetlands provide a buffer against storm surges (protecting not only people but key oil facilities), and nurtures vast numbers of birds and sea creatures (including a fifth of all U.S. seafood). He makes a compelling case that we need to do more to preserve this crucial infrastructure.
Too often, Verchick says, we rely on cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to guide our decisions about preservation. Like many critics of CBA, he argues that it shortchanges such important values as preservation of human life and natural wonders; undercounts the interests …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
We’ve known all along that offshore drilling in the Gulf placed at risk exceptionally valuable and sensitive coastal areas. We need look no further than a forty-year-old court decision on Gulf oil drilling, which made the dangers abundantly clear.
In 1971, President Nixon announced a new energy plan involving greatly expanded offshore drilling. In a landmark early NEPA decision, the D.C. Circuit held that the environmental impact statement gave insufficient consideration to alternative energy strategies. The opinion begins with a discussion of the risks of oil spills, drawn largely from the EIS. The language is startlingly relevant today:
Adjacent to the proposed lease area is the greatest estuarine coastal marsh complex in the United States, some 7.9 million acres, providing food, nursery habitat and spawning ground vital to fish, shellfish and wildlife, as well as food and shelter for migratory …
Cross posted from Legal Planet.
A couple of key observations about the oil rig blowout, based on my work on disaster issues.
First, “human error” is a cop-out when you’re dealing with major technology. It’s not like human fallibility is a surprise. Training, good management, and smart design should be the responses, not whining after the fact that the workers weren’t perfect. Or, if human error is unavoidable and the outcome would be catastrophic, you’d better rethink the project.
Second, it’s probably true that this was a very unlikely way for an oil rig to go wrong, but that doesn’t mean much. Suppose this was an eight-thousand-year event at any given oil rig. That is, you’d expect to have such an accident at that rig once in eight thousand years, or to put it another way, the odds in any …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Libertarians are, of course, deeply suspicious of government regulation. This may lead to a reflexive rejection of climate change mitigation. But Jonathan Adler, who provides a refreshingly distinctive view of environmental law from the Right, argues otherwise. In a forthcoming article (only the abstract is available on SSRN), he contends that libertarians are making a mistake in opposing climate mitigation:
Even if anthropogenic climate change is decidedly less than catastrophic – indeed, even if it net beneficial to the globe as whole – human-induced climate change is likely to contribute to environmental changes that violate traditional conceptions of property rights. Viewed globally, the actions of some countries – primarily developed nations (such as the United States) and those nations that are industrializing most rapidly (such as China and India) – are likely to increase environmental harms suffered by less developed nations – nations that have not (as of …
