Category: Natural Resource Policy

Delighted and Depressed

I’m pleased to announce that my blog website – An Economic View of the Environment – has been thoroughly cleaned and purged of the malware that had plagued it since the website was attacked in January.  That’s the source of my being delighted.

It’s probably not necessary to state that the source of my “depression” is the ongoing attack by President Trump and his administration on sensible public policy – in the environmental and energy realm, as well as so many others.  In nearly every case, the administration’s combination of incompetence and malevolence has been breathtaking.

Goodbye to the Malware Attack

As for the malware attack on my blog website, which occurred shortly after I had written and posted two blog essays that were harshly critical of Presidential candidate and then President-Elect Trump, quite a few of you wrote to me suggesting that the timing was not a coincidence and that the attack was probably from supporters of the administration (if not from people in the administration).  I do not believe that was the case, although I honestly don’t know.  Rather, I believe it was simply an attack intended to drive traffic to particular websites.  I’m hoping that the outside firm we hired to clean the site may be able to give us the answer.  Stay tuned for that.

Back to Business

Much has transpired since I announced the hiatus in my blog posts (An Explanation and Apology, February 5, 2017) and even more has transpired since I last wrote a regular essay here before the presidential inauguration (Trying to Remain Positive, January 3, 2017).  It would take more time than you or I have — for you to read and for me to write – about all that’s transpired in this policy realm since Inauguration Day, including:

Saving Us Time

Happily, I can save you time for reading – and myself for writing – by referring you to two new audio recordings:

Speaking of saving time, if you have time for only one of these, I suggest the second one, which is both briefer (about 17 minutes) and more comprehensive.

The Path Ahead

With my blog website having been purged of its contamination and with my feeling that I’ve more or less caught up, I will return to my usual approach with a brief essay in my next posting at this blog.  In the meantime, thanks for your tolerance of the recent hiatus and your interest in what transpires here.

Share

An Explanation and Apology

I have been writing essays at this blog for more than seven years, and until recently, through 100 essays, I tried very hard to keep politics at bay, and to view each and every issue I discussed from a politically neutral, yet analytical economic perspective.

But in October, 2016, as the U.S. presidential election approached, I found it difficult – for the first time – to remain neutral, and in a blog essay, “This is Not a Time for Political Neutrality,” I carefully explained why I feared what the consequences would be for the United States and the world if Donald Trump were elected president.  I followed that up with a post-election essay in November, “What Does the Trump Victory Mean for Climate Change Policy?”  (I am not providing hyperlinks to those essays at my blog’s website for reasons that will be clear as you read on.)

For anyone who harbored hopes that Mr. Trump would change as an individual after his inauguration and/or that a Trump administration would not be as problematic (in so many dimensions) as many of us feared, the first two weeks have shown that the concerns were fully justified.

So, I have been eager to post a new essay, because the early days of the new administration have been very disturbing, along at least three dimensions:

First, the introduction and the announcement of plans to introduce public policies that are not simply conservative (which would be acceptable, given that the Republican candidate did win the election – no matter how problematic the methods of the campaign may have been).  Rather, these policies come from the extreme “Alt-Right,” including its base of xenophobia, veiled racism, and unapologetic sexism.  One, but only one set of these misguided policies has been in the area of my interest and expertise – environmental and natural resource policy, including climate change policy.  The combined intentions of the Administration and the Congress to turn back so many environmental and natural resource policies, ranging from climate change to water pollution, deserve a full assessment (at my blog and elsewhere).

Second, there is the glaring presence in the most important office in the land of an individual who – given that the nature of that office – should be serving as a positive and inspiring role model for others, including our young people, but instead repeatedly displays the basest of human traits.

Third, and of greatest concern to me, this President and his Administration – with the tacit support (for the time being) of majorities in both houses of Congress – increasingly represent the greatest threat to American democracy I have witnessed in the past half-century.  Gratuitous and unapologetic lies and distortions, total disregard – indeed, expressed contempt – for the separation of powers that is so key to the endurance of the U.S. constitution, demonization of the essential role played by the news media, and much more – all of this combines to represent a threat to the republic unlike anything we have experienced in our lifetimes.

For all of these reasons, I have been eager to write yet another essay – focused on my area of expertise and experience – but shortly after posting my essays on Mr. Trump, my blog website was attacked and digitally contaminated with “malware,” as some of you know.  I believe this is nothing more than a coincidence of timing, but it is a challenge nonetheless.

I’m pleased to say that emails directly from me and emails from my blog will present no problems whatsoever, but links to my blog website can produce automated warnings of the presence of malware.  Our information technology people have been working very hard to clean the website thoroughly; and we are cautiously optimistic that this has now been accomplished.  However, until Google, Firefox, and any other services have removed all warnings, I will cease from sending messages that would direct readers to the website.

So, I apologize for the recent hiatus in communications from “An Economic View of the Environment.”  I would not want you to think that the reason for my silence is satisfaction with recent developments in environmental policy (and the larger body politic).  Far from it!  I hope to be back with essays – blog posts – in the very near future.

Share

What Does the Trump Victory Mean for Climate Change Policy?

 

Those of you who have read my previous essay at this blog, “This is Not a Time for Political Neutrality” (October 9, 2016), know that my greatest concerns about a Trump presidency (then a possibility, now a certainty), were not limited to environmental policy, but rather were “about what a Trump presidency would mean for my country and for the world in realms ranging from economic progress to national security to personal liberty,” based on his “own words in a campaign in which he substituted impulse and pandering for thoughtful politics” … and “built his populist campaign on false allegations about others, personal insults of anyone who disagrees with him, and displays of breathtaking xenophobia, veiled racism, and unapologetic sexism.”

That’s a broad indictment, to be sure, but whatever real expertise I may have is actually limited to environmental, resource, and energy economics and policy, and so that has and will continue to be the real focus of this blog, “An Economic View of the Environment.”  With that in mind, I return today from last month’s brief immersion in partisan politics to discuss climate change policy.

Yesterday, an editor at The New York Times asked me to write a 500-word essay giving my view of what the Trump victory will mean for climate policy.  This morning, my very brief essay was published under the headline, “Goodbye to the Climate.”  Given the brevity of the piece, it does not touch on many issues and subtleties (I come back to that at the end of today’s blog post), but rather than take the time to expand it, I want to get this to you quickly, and so I am simply reproducing it as it first appeared in the Times (along with an interesting group of other essays, under the overall heading, “What Happened on Election Day:  How the election and Donald Trump’s victory looks to Opinion writers.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The New York Times

Goodbye to the Climate

By Robert N. Stavins

Donald J. Trump once tweeted that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” Twitter messages may not be clear signs of likely public policies, but Mr. Trump followed up during the campaign with his “America First Energy Plan,” which would rescind all of President Obama’s actions on climate change.

The plan includes canceling United States participation in the Paris climate agreement and stopping all American funding of United Nations climate change programs. It also includes abandoning the Clean Power Plan, a mainstay of the Obama administration’s approach to achieving its emissions reduction target for carbon dioxide under the Paris agreement.

What should we make of such campaign promises? Taking Mr. Trump at his word, he will surely seek to pull the country out of the Paris pact. But because the agreement has already come into force, under the rules, any party must wait three years before requesting to withdraw, followed by a one-year notice period.

Those rules would seem to be mere technicalities. The incoming Trump administration simply can disregard America’s pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 26 to 28 percent below the 2005 level by 2025. That is bad enough. But the big worry is what other key countries, including the world’s largest emitter, China, as well as India and Brazil, will do if the United States reneges on its pledge. The result could be that the Paris agreement unravels, taking it from the 97 percent of global emissions currently covered by the pact to little more than the European Union’s 10 percent share.

In addition, Mr. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency probably will stop work on regulations of methane emissions (a very potent greenhouse gas) from existing oil and gas operations. Undoing complex existing regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan, will be more difficult, but a reconstituted Supreme Court will probably help President Trump when that plan inevitably comes before the court. Also, the new president will most likely ask that the Keystone XL pipeline permit application be renewed — and facilitate other oil and gas pipelines around the country.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump promised to “bring back” the coal industry by cutting environmental regulations. That may not be so easy. The decline of that industry and related employment has been caused by technological changes in mining, and competition from low-priced natural gas for electricity generation, not by environmental regulations. At the same time, Mr. Trump has pledged to promote fracking for oil and gas, but that would make natural gas even more economically attractive, and accelerate the elimination of coal-sector jobs.

If he lives up to his campaign rhetoric, Mr. Trump may indeed be able to reverse course on climate change policy, increasing the threat to our planet, and in the process destroy much of the Obama legacy in this important realm. This will make the states even more important players on this critical issue.

Robert N. Stavins is a professor at Harvard, where he directs the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Given the brevity of the piece, it is not intended to be comprehensive of the many implications for climate change policy of the Trump victory (nor the implications of the Republicans continuing to hold majorities in both houses of Congress).

And I did not get into the many subtleties of the issues I identified.  At a bare minimum, these would include:

  • the possibility of the new administration trying to bypass the four-year delay involved in dropping out of the Paris climate agreement by taking the one-year route of dropping out of the overall United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – signed by President George H.W. Bush and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1992;
  • federal “climate change policies” that have been bipartisan and are therefore much less likely to be repealed, such the latest CAFE and appliance efficiency standards, and the recently extended wind and solar tax credits; and
  • the myriad of sub-national climate change policies, ranging from AB-32 in California to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the northeast (It’s not a coincidence that there’s a high – although not perfect – correlation between the states Secretary Clinton won in the election and the location of the most ambitious climate change policies).

On another occasion, after I’ve had an opportunity to reflect more calmly and carefully on the implications of the forthcoming Trump presidency for environmental, natural resource, and energy policy, I will return to this topic.  But for now, I have to prepare for my trip in a few days to Marrakech, Morocco, for the annual UNFCCC negotiations.  Given the election results, my meetings there may be quite strange, if not surreal. I hope to write about that in my next essay at this blog.

Share