Anti-Climacus

LINK: watch as I try to bait OGIW into posting something. David Brooks has some thoughts on Bush's environmental record, and concludes that it's not all bad:

"The most ambitious Bush proposal is over the nature of environmental regulation itself. Bush inherited a command-and-control regulatory regime called new-source review, which has metastasized into a regulatory behemoth. Bureaucrats try to issue rules site by site. Industries have a perverse incentive to rely on older high-pollution plants. The review process is opaque, expensive and riddled with litigation.

The administration is trying to supersede it with a cap-and-trade system, in which the government would set caps on overall emissions, allow companies flexibility on how to meet them and give firms the chance to buy and sell emissions credits. This general approach was recently embraced by a comprehensive study by the National Research Council. It builds on a phenomenally successful cap-and-trade provision in the 1990 Clean Air Act, which controls sulfur dioxide emissions at 25 percent of the cost of the old regulatory system.

Nonetheless, for two years Jim Jeffords and a Democratic-led coalition have blocked the Bush initiative. Many Democrats have in the past backed cap-and-trade reforms, but they don't want to allow Bush a victory. This has had several bad effects. The administration has tried to enact the reforms by administrative fiat, which means litigation and delay. More important, it means that there is no discussion or compromise on some remaining points of dispute.

How high should the caps be? Should we reduce emissions by 70 percent, as Bush wants, or by 90 percent? Would the benefits of that higher standard justify the costs? What about mercury? There are proposals to supplement the cap-and-trade approach with local measures to handle hot spots with high mercury concentrations. These languish during the deadlock. Finally, if utilities were given an incentive to switch to natural gas, would that decimate our coal industry?"