In the News

Michael Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank affiliated with the New York University School of Law, said the ability to trade carbon emissions among companies, if utilized, could trigger automakers to go above and beyond what the government has called for. “If you didn’t have a program like this, once you met the standard, there would be no reason to go further, but under this program there is,” Livermore said. “You can go and sell them to someone else. It can push the best players the furthest. If the goal is to promote a start to a technological arms race for manufacturers to develop fuel efficient cars, this will help do that.”

Saturday, Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed will lead a cabinet meeting underwater. The unusual choice of location is to practice for later in the century when low-lying Pacific Island nations will find themselves inundated, thanks to the impacts of climate change. The political leaders of these countries know they don’t have the luxury of seeing global warming through rose-colored glasses. Without action, the almost 9 million citizens of these island nations will be swallowed up by the sea.

“In the Bush administration, the problem was that the political folks were hostile to the mission,” said Michael A. Livermore, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Regulation at New York University Law School. “We’ve already seen the new direction of this White House play out in other regulatory aspects — the Environmental Protection Agency and financial regulation. With the consumer protection agencies, you’re going to see a lot more stuff happening because they fit Obama’s broad vision for government.”

The Obama administration has warned it could use the Environmental Protection Agency to help cut carbon emissions if Congress drags its heels, but legal and logistical problems could thwart that strategy. Environmental groups, like the Sierra Club, and legal experts, such as those at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, have said the EPA could get around Congress and create a national cap-and-trade market on the emissions.

One the same day that the US Senate announced its version of climate change legislation the EPA announced new action limiting greenhouse gases by big emitters. Mike Livermore, the executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law and Bill Snape, the senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity, connects the dots for national, and international, action. Host Daphne Wysham wrote an editorial on this issues at Alternet.

Since EPA is legally bound to regulate vehicle fuel emissions, their new standards are a reasonable step. But it is an example of the kinds of command-and-control regulations that should be used only sparingly to address climate change.

The Washington Post ran an interesting editorial yesterday on regulating carbon—interesting, but ultimately wrong. The Post is correct that putting a price on carbon is the surest way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and that it would be preferable for Congress to do this through legislation. But the editorial was wrong to say the EPA could not efficiently regulate carbon on its own. In fact, if Congress can’t pass a climate bill this year, this is exactly what the Obama administration should do.

A dissenting view comes from NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity, which says in an “informal analysis” that the benefits of the House bill “could likely exceed the costs by as much as nine-to-one or more” — although the authors admit that any benefits would be global while the [sic] would be borne by Americans. One EPA estimate found a “$98 to $140 average annual cost per household.”

Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that the benefits of Waxman-Markey greatly outweigh the costs. The Journal highlights a new cost-benefit analysis of the House bill by the New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity. The NYU study finds that finds that the benefits outweigh the costs by 9:1 Based on a middle-of-the road estimate, potential benefits add up to about $1.5 trillion over the next 40 years.

Tucked into that estimate is a calculation that represents the first time the agency has put a dollar amount on the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, according to New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. Edna Ishayik, a spokeswoman for the institute, said EPA chose figures on the lower end of an already “conservative” range of $5 to $55 per ton of carbon. “These are very conservative estimates, which is problematic because the range will be applied to every significant regulation with a climate impact,” she said in an e-mail.