Greenhouse Governance

Addressing Climate Change in AmericaBy Barry G. Rabe

Brookings Institution Press

Copyright © 2010 Barry G. Rabe
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8157-0331-0

Chapter One

Introduction: The Challenges of U.S. Climate Governance BARRY G. RABE

Policy analysts and policymakers continue to search for metaphors to describe the unique complexities posed by climate change. According to economist William Nordhaus, “If global warming is the mother of all public goods, it may also be the father of decision making under uncertainty.” Other policy analysts have referred to climate change as “perhaps the most hotly debated and controversial area of environmental policy ever” and as “one of the most complex challenges that the human race has ever created.” In the final days of a federal government career that spanned five decades and included a leading role in many foreign and domestic policy challenges during thirty years in the U.S. Senate, Republican John Warner of Virginia put it more simply: “Without question, this is the most complex problem I have ever faced.” Most of those comments were uttered prior to the tumultuous climate policy events of 2009-10, which included prolonged political combat over dauntingly complex legislative proposals before Congress, fallout over revelations from hacked e-mails that raised questions about the integrity of some high-profile climate scientists, and the melodramatic albeit largely inconclusive Copenhagen climate summit.

The discovery that accumulating levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases in the atmosphere could cause a “greenhouse effect” that both elevated global temperatures and disrupted the climate is not new, though its saliency has grown markedly in recent years. In the United States, “rapid climate warming” first arose as an issue for the Domestic Policy Council in 1976, as the Gerald Ford administration responded to concerns raised by counterparts in the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan signed the first federal climate change legislation, the Global Climate Protection Act (P.L. 100-204), into law in 1987. This authorized the State Department to develop an approach to address global warming and established an intergovernmental task force to develop a national strategy. One year later, governors in California (George Deukmejian) and New Jersey (Thomas Kean) signed the first of many state laws designed to respond to climate change, none of which were capable of “solving” the problem or reversing the threat of climate change. But they initiated a process of “greenhouse governance” that has reached new prominence in the twenty-first century.

A domestic path to policy exploration was also established in other national and subnational capitals and moved rapidly into the arena of international policy. Well before the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, which has triggered much controversy and proven such an abject failure of global governance, international agreements on different aspects of climate change were reached. The United States has been a participant in the vast majority of those agreements. In fact, it was among the first of more than 170 nations to ratify the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which formally pledged to attain “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

Between the first indicators of concern and the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, it is impossible to calculate how much has been said and written about this topic. But we clearly know much more about climate change than in prior decades, and the vast preponderance of relevant evidence from the natural and physical sciences indicates a diverse and alarming set of threats to future generations. Former U.S. vice president Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy on this issue in his post-political career, during which he produced an award-winning film on climate change. Gore shared that award with a veritable army of international climate scientists, known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has brought new focus to what we know about this issue from virtually every discipline in the natural and physical sciences. The ongoing IPCC project remains only one piece of a massive effort that involves the work of countless scientists from around the world. For example, in November 2008 the American Geophysical Union, an international body of 50,000 members who study the earth and its environment, presented a number of major new studies on climate change, ranging from ice-melting patterns to temperature trends. This ever-growing body of scientific analysis has been explored in the hundreds of congressional hearings on climate science held between 1975 and 2009. It resonates with research findings from leading scholars on every continent, creating a consistently disturbing portrait of a staggering challenge. Although policy responses to climate change vary markedly, no national government in the world disputes the core scientific findings. Even the histrionics surrounding “Climategate” and the sophisticated effort to use a select set of purloined e-mails to challenge the existence of human-induced climate change do not reverse the veritable avalanche of evidence on this issue. That said, the best scientific practice remains limited in its ability to predict the future of the planet with any degree of exactitude. That leaves policymakers with considerable uncertainty as they weigh various strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and evaluate the possible impact of the steps taken on global temperatures in future years and future decades.

While the community of natural and physical scientists has weighed in intensively on this issue, more modest contributions have emerged from the social and policy sciences. Within those disciplines, economists have clearly been the most active players on climate change, as reflected in a large body of publications and in active engagement in congressional and state legislative policy hearings and formal reports such as the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. They have played a valuable role in shaping policy options and generally making the case in favor of market-based approaches, such as those that would allow for the trading of emissions among regulated parties or taxing directly the carbon content of fossil fuels. But economic analyses often confront serious limitations, such as weighing the most efficient strategy against political and institutional realities and constraints.

Other social science disciplines have been far more marginal players, including political science and allied fields that address public management and public policy concerns. A content analysis of the leading political science and public management journals over the past decade suggests a rather stunning absence of scholarly engagement on the topic of climate change. For example, between 1998 and 2009, the twenty-seven top-ranked public management journals published in English produced only a pair of articles on the application of management theory to the challenge of climate change. In more than 400 congressional hearings on climate change between 1975 and 2009, only two political science or public management scholars appear to have ever testified on climate change, in contrast to the far more substantial participation from economists, legal analysts, scholars in numerous natural or physical science disciplines, and representatives of diverse interest and environmental advocacy groups.

Consequently, we know far less than we should about what we will term “greenhouse governance,” which involves the intersection of politics, history, public policy, and public management. Recognition of that void was an animating force behind the development of this book, which took shape through the National Conference on Climate Governance, held at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia in December 2008. The intent was to convene leading scholars, drawn primarily from political science but with significant links to history, law, and other social science disciplines. All of the scholars had distinguished records in public policy, public management, or both. About one-half of the invited scholars had launched research programs that focused heavily on climate change; the other half had not but had completed work in other policy areas that was highly relevant to climate governance. They were joined at the conference by a diverse mix of additional scholars as well as policymakers from the public, nonprofit, and private sectors in the United States and abroad, some of whom served as formal commentators on initial papers and all of whom added to the debate over the course of two days. Comments from those exchanges inform this chapter and are cited frequently in subsequent pages. While the chapters that follow make robust analyses and point toward important considerations for future policy development, there was no effort to impose uniformity of viewpoint or to conclude with a memorandum of understanding that presented bullet points marking the next steps to take. Presidents and Congresses had long before been inundated with such “action lists”; we wanted instead to focus on larger and longer-term considerations.

Most of our analysis examines the United States. The conference took place at the midpoint of the transition between the November 2008 national election and the January 2009 inauguration of the 44th president and installation of the 111th Congress. There is, of course, a vast array of issues facing national elected leaders, as well as their counterparts in other nations and at the state and local levels. Some new policy steps have been taken in the United States since our gathering, others remain under consideration, and innumerable implementation challenges lie ahead. Climate change is both competing for attention and intermingled with other current issues, such as economic recovery, health care reform, energy diversification, infrastructure repair, and the redirection of U.S. foreign policy. It is our collective intent to reflect on some of the most serious challenges to developing a coherent set of policies in order to reverse the long-standing trend of growth in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, to avoid causing economic harm through the implementation of climate change policies, and to re-engage the United States effectively in future international deliberations.

We offer our reflections with full awareness that unilateral action by any one government, even a nation as large as the United States or a state as large as California or Texas, has limited capacity to influence global concentrations of greenhouse gases. But we take seriously the fact that the past two decades have witnessed considerable policy experimentation, both in the United States and abroad. That experimentation provides us a unique opportunity to consider the likely challenges facing future policy alternatives by relying on real experience rather than estimates, models, and projections. It allows us to weigh the capacity of various levels of the federal system to engage on this issue, the political and institutional feasibility of various policy options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the capacity of existing federal government institutions to play coherent roles, and possible routes whereby the United States might reconnect with other nations, including its North American neighbors, in search of opportunities for international collaboration. Several key themes, discussed below, animate much of the discussion in subsequent chapters.

U.S. Climate Policy Already Is Operational

Many analysts contend that President Barack Obama and the 111th Congress were the first political actors in the United States to “do something” about climate change. President Obama quickly signaled his views on the federal role through high-level appointments and a pledge from the new leadership of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to revisit an earlier decision to reject the designation of carbon dioxide as an air pollutant. Moreover, approximately 10 percent of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed into law in February 2009 will ultimately be devoted to a range of energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, which could serve to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In his first address to Congress, on February 24, 2009, the president called for “this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.” All of this reflected a shift toward more energetic engagement on climate change, thereby reversing the Bush administration’s stance, which was epitomized by the 2001 decision to withdraw the United States from the Kyoto Protocol. Indeed, the United States has been widely denounced in the European Union and around the world for its seeming indifference to climate change, best reflected in the slow pace of federal government action.

Along with those steps, a series of major climate policy initiatives were indeed taken in Washington during the first year of the Obama presidency. The EPA not only deemed carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to be air pollutants but moved beyond that step to issue an “endangerment finding” that could lead to unilateral executive branch steps to restrict future emissions to protect public health. A far-reaching agreement was reached in May 2009 to attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector through substantial increases in mandatory fuel economy standards for future vehicle fleets. One month later, legislation that stretched to nearly 1,500 pages passed narrowly in the House of Representatives; its intent was to reduce U.S. emissions by 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2020, with more dramatic targets set for subsequent decades. The so-called American Clean Energy and Security Act would establish an exceedingly complex form of a cap-and-trade program for carbon, based loosely on earlier experience with more conventional air pollutants. This legislation included provisions to allow for the purchase of carbon offsets as an alternative to reducing emissions outright, through an elaborate system for regulating newly created carbon markets; for border tariffs to protect energy-intensive domestic industries; and for a maze of additional renewable energy and energy efficiency mandates and subsidies. The legislation stalled in the Senate, leaving its future uncertain in the remainder of the term of the 111th Congress. These domestic steps set the stage for nearly two weeks of international diplomacy in Copenhagen, in which a seeming collapse of the negotiation process was partially allayed by a last-minute agreement by a set of large national players that included a very general statement of future principles.

Despite the frenetic activity that occurred during 2009, one often-overlooked reality is that climate policy development has already been quite active in the United States, albeit at the state and local levels rather than the federal. That reflects the unique political dynamics of recent federal institutions but also a time-honored pattern for bottom-up development of U.S. public policy. In fact, many of the most prominent policy tools under consideration around the world for possible reduction of greenhouse gas emissions have their origins in one or more U.S. states and in many instances have been adopted by many other states. Mandates to increase the level of electricity derived from renewable sources are in operation in portions of nearly every continent. So-called renewable portfolio standards (RPSs), which were first developed in Iowa in 1991, are now in operation in twenty-nine states, with some presence in every region of the nation. In 2001, New Hampshire became the world’s first government to enact carbon cap-and-trade legislation. That expanded into a ten-state regional network, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which in 2008 became the first zone in the world to auction nearly all of its carbon allowances. Some twenty-three states, concentrated in the Northeast, Pacific West, and Midwest, have committed to their own version of a regional cap-and-trade program that also includes four neighboring Canadian provinces. In 2002, California became the world’s first government to enact carbon emission limits on new vehicles. It was formally joined by fourteen other states in seeking federal authority to implement its policy, and it became in effect the model for the 2009 national program on mandatory fuel economy. Wisconsin became the world’s first government to mandate disclosure of carbon emissions from a wide set of sources, through an administrative change in 1993, and thirty-nine states have since negotiated the terms of a national emissions disclosure system. Local governments such as municipalities and counties have also launched far-reaching climate policy innovations.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Greenhouse Governanceby Barry G. Rabe Copyright © 2010 by Barry G. Rabe. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.