The Flight From Evidence-Based Regulation
This Administration specializes in arguments for ignoring the evidence.
The Trump Administration’s major deregulatory efforts share a common theme. They assiduously avoid having to rely on scientific or economic evidence. Confronting that evidence is time-consuming and difficult, particularly when it often comes out the other way. Instead, the Administration has come up with clever strategies to shut out the evidence. The effort to repeal the Clean Power Plan illustrates some of these strategies. The Obama Administration’s plan woul...
CONTINUE READINGPresidential Power in a Pandemic
The President does have considerable power, but there are serious limitations.
Now that Trump has belatedly declared a national emergency, what powers does he have to respond to the coronavirus pandemic? There has been a lot of talk about this on the Internet, some of it off-base. it's important to get the law straight. For instance, there's been talk about whether Trump should impose a national curfew, but I haven't been able to find any legal authority for doing that so far. The legal discussion of this issue is still at an early stage, but ...
CONTINUE READINGReducing Coronavirus Fatalities: A Cost-Benefit Analysis
Q: From an economic perspective, what’s it worth spending to curb the pandemic? A: A lot.
So far as I know, nobody has really worried about doing a cost-benefit analysis of the epidemic. That’s probably a good thing. But it’s worth asking what such an analysis would look like. In other words, what would be worth spending to reduce the death rate based on cold-hearted economics? To get a rough idea of the amount, we need to start with some picture of what the world would look like without such an intervention. According to the CDC, its modeling show...
CONTINUE READINGDoes Being Conservative Have to Mean Ignoring Risks?
Florida’s Ron DeSantis doesn’t seem to think so.
There’s no reason why the seriousness of climate change or the coronavirus should be partisan or ideological issues. Those are realities, not policy positions. All too often, however, conservative Republicans have felt the need to minimize or deny those realities. Just turn on Fox News if you want confirmation. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Case in point: Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida. Unlike Trump, he’s been honest about societal risks. DeSantis ...
CONTINUE READINGHow Hot Will Things Get?
Identifying a realistic worst case scenario is complicated.
How hot will the world be in 2100? The answer partly depends on how much carbon we dump in the atmosphere between now and then. It also depends on how sensitive the climate system is to those emissions. Scientists have used 4.5 °C as the high end of the likely possibilities. That estimate derives from a climate scenario called RCP8.5. (RCP stands for Representation Concentration Pathway.) That scenario assumes little or no effort to control carbon emissions. It’s c...
CONTINUE READINGEurope Mulls its First Climate Law
What would it do in terms of emissions targets and likely actual mitigation?
The European Union is, if one treats it as a country, the world's third greatest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs). It has also been a leader in emissions reduction ("mitigation"), and its per capita emissions are merely 43% of the US's. The EU government is presently considering a major new climate law that will set the trajectory of its climate policy for the next thirty years. What would it do, both in terms of emissions targets and in likely actual mitigation? As...
CONTINUE READINGHeathrow’s Third Runway and Airport GHG Emissions
California's potential opportunity to lead through local action
Late last month, a UK court blocked a proposed new runway at London’s Heathrow Airport, ruling that the project conflicted with the national government’s commitment under the 2015 Paris Agreement. The court held that project planners improperly failed to assess the proposal’s consistency with the UK government’s ratified plan to help meet the Paris target of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Since the proposal would have added hundreds of tho...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s New Housing Bill Seeks To End Single-Family Zoning
Sen. Wiener introduces SB 902 to increase suburban density & streamline transit-oriented housing
Sen. Scott Wiener is back trying to boost California housing production again, after his SB 50 legislation to upzone for apartments around transit died in the State Senate in January. This time, he's proposing a "lighter touch" approach, salvaging an SB 50 provision that would end single-family zoning across the state. Senate Bill 902 would authorize minimum residential zoning of duplexes in unincorporated county areas or cities under 10,000 residents. Triplexes would...
CONTINUE READINGWhat the Administration Failed to Learn from Past Disasters
There are some basic rules about how to respond to emergencies. They were ignored.
An epidemic and a hurricane require different responses. But the organizational challenge of confronting an emergency is a constant. Here are some basic rules the Trump Administration failed to heed. Ensure in advance that sufficient supplies will be quickly available. When Hurricane Katrina hit, the government did have supplies, but they were located hundreds of miles away. The government learned a lesson from that and prepositioned supplies before later h...
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s governance innovation for groundwater sustainability
by Anita Milman and Michael Kiparsky
For the past several years, California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act has been the talk, not only of the town and of the state, but also of the national and international groundwater and environmental policy community. What’s the big deal? SGMA fundamentally changes groundwater management in California – a big deal to be sure. Equally important, as we discuss in a recently published paper, is the broader conceptual significance of the SGMA experimen...
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