In the News

If climate change legislation doubles as a plan to avoid a fiscal crisis back home, there will be a new powerful constituency behind a yes vote—an unusual marriage of convenience between state budget offices and environmentalists that may be the key to getting ACES over the hump.

Immediately after word came out that Sonia Sotomayor was the President’s pick for the Supreme Court, the environmental community (this author included) immediately went searching for the green angle. We found it in one decision: Riverkeeper v. EPA, which was seized upon as proof of Judge Sotomayor having a modicum of green cred. However, in a new Huffington Post piece Richard Revesz (dean of the NYU School of Law) and Michael Livermore (executive director of NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity) think the green community might be reading too much into things.

Be careful about reading too much into Sonia Sotomayor’s environmental leanings from one cost-benefits case, warn Richard Revesz and Michael Livermore in the Huffington post: “Some environmentalist have seized on the Riverkeeper opinion as proof that Sotomayor bleeds eco-green, while industry is afraid that she is insensitive to the costs imposed by green regulation. But both sides are misreading the Judge’s opinion.”

Obama is going to start facing many more similar choices. Because the Mass. v. EPA ruling dealt with cars and light trucks, regulating those sources was naturally the first on the list. But this is only the first step. There are petitions on aircrafts, marine vessels, and fuels collecting dust that will need to be wrestled with. The President’s legal obligation to deal with these petitions will likely force additional greenhouse gas regulations into the pipeline in the near future.

The question of the cost of climate change legislation has rightly emerged as a major theme of the debate on the Hill. Most recently, Charlie Rangel, Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee announced last week that he would insist on using auction revenues to reimburse American families for increases in energy prices.

According to new analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, when the EPA issues its final declaration on global warming being an endangerment to human health, the Obama administration could press forward with a cap-and-trade program without having to go through Congress:

Sempre più simile a un supereroe da fumetti, Barack Obama per vincere la sfida climatica avrebbe ora anche un’arma segreta, un superpotere. E’ quanto afferma l’Institute for policy integrity della facoltà di Legge dell’Università di New York.

According to a groundbreaking new analysis from New York University, the administration could even unilaterally establish a cap-and-trade system very similar to what Congress is considering.

‘The Road Ahead: EPA’s Options and Obligations for Regulating Greenhouse Gases,’ notes a report on the Policy Integrity site. This detailed legal analysis provides an in-depth and thorough discussion of greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act. The main finding of the report is that the Obama Administration has the ability to create a cap-and-trade system entirely through EPA regulation- complete with auctions and the ability to sign an international agreement.