In the News

As a climate change policy, President Obama’s carbon cap is a winner. It gets greenhouse reductions at the lowest possible cost and spurs the innovation and invention that will drive us to a clean-energy economy. But if folks are eyeing the carbon cap as a way to raise money to pay for clean energy programs, they are barking up the wrong tree. Unless these funds are returned to the American public, the cap will have severely regressive effects on lower-income Americans. And in the end, it would come back around to bite us by sapping support for environmental spending in the future.

Obama wants to stop energy companies from eating our lunch – we shouldn’t fight him. In our backwards political climate, President Obama’s sensible carbon cap proposal has gotten him in hot water with everyone from utilities to members of the green movement. While other plans give away pollution permits to energy companies for free —a windfall valued roughly $100 billion per year—President Obama’s proposal auctions off the permits and refunds the money to taxpayers.

President Obama is right to auction off 100% of the carbon credits and he is also right to refund that revenue to American taxpayers—this is the key piece of the puzzle that will promote broad based support for climate change policy.

President Barack Obama hits three nails on the head with his plan to cap carbon emissions: weaning us off fossil fuels, spurring a wave of investment and job creation, and putting cash in the pockets of Americans who most need it.

Often, the Superfund is associated with the big toxic cleanups one reads about in the news. But just as important are the toxic disasters that never happen because of the threat of Superfund liability. By bringing the Superfund back from the dead, President Obama will reinvigorate incentives for proper waste disposal taxes that have essentially lapsed while the Superfund stalled.

Until existing imbalances are eliminated, it would make sense for the Obama administration to implement short-term mechanisms to create incentivizes for clean energy. But the longer-term focus should be on trying to move away from this approach as quickly as possible as it can only be a stop gap measure treating a symptom and not the disease.

The Senate has a very important opportunity to improve the stimulus bill,’ Livermore said. ‘It must make sure this stimulus is a long-term dividend for the economy that keeps paying us back and isn’t just a flash in the pan.

A key component … is to ensure new building that is being generated by the stimulus package is not following the old way of doing business of excess energy consumption,” Michael Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, told reporters yesterday.

On Tuesday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Entergy v. EPA, a case that pits environmentalists seeking strong clean water protections against industry and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. But beyond the basic facts of the case is the bigger issue of how to use cost-benefit analysis when setting environmental policy.

Detroit is in a free fall. Some say it’s their own doing by deciding to push big gas guzzlers rather fuel efficient cars. With that choice, the Big Three maximized their short-term profits but conceded the auto market of the future to foreign companies. There is plenty of blame to pass around. Executives made exceedingly poor investment decisions. Union officials were blinded by the good times and failed to protect their members’ future. An army of lobbyists was hired to protect the industry from tighter laws.