environmental politics
Supervillains of the Enviro-Verse
🏴☠️ For your amusement: a rogues gallery of anti-Green villainy. 🏴☠️
Movements are defined as much by who and what they oppose as what they favor. To understand environmentalism, you have to know how it defines its opponents. Reality, of course, is always nuanced, but nuance isn’t much fun. Although I was originally going to provide a more serious treatment, I decided instead to have a …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Recall
Here are the replacement candidates’ views on climate.
With the California recall election coming up a month from now, it’s time to take a look at the candidates. The environment hasn’t been a signature issue for incumbent, Gavin Newsom, but he has strongly supported climate action. Now let’s take a look at who might replace him. It’s hard to know who, out of …
CONTINUE READINGTowards Optimal Climate Policy, Part II
The future of effective climate policy requires balancing equity, efficiency, political feasibility, and technological innovation
In the prior blog post in this two-part series, I talked about how current debates on climate policy that are focused on equity and efficiency are inadequate. Today, I’ll explain how we might advance political feasibility through climate policy, how that is connected to technological innovation, and how we must necessarily balance between all four …
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CONTINUE READINGPublic Opinion and the Limits of Climate Policy
There’s a simple reason why it’s so hard to take bold climate actions nationally.
Gallup has studied environmental attitudes in America for several decades. Their historical compilation is very revealing about our present political situation. It sheds light on why it’s been so hard to develop momentum for real change at the national level, and also about why there’s so much more of a push for change within the …
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CONTINUE READINGTowards Optimal Climate Policy, Part I
Moving the debate beyond equity and efficiency
As Congress debates two large pieces of legislation – both a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a partisan reconciliation package – a key question is the extent to which either piece of legislation (assuming it is enacted) addresses climate policy. And the recent flooding in Europe, the wildfires in the western US and Russia, and more …
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CONTINUE READINGWhy I Was Wrong About Methane
I didn’t think cutting methane was a high priority. Now I do. Here’s why.
I didn’t use to think that eliminating methane emissions should be a priority. True, methane is a potent greenhouse gas. But it’s also a short-lived one, which only stays in the atmosphere for twenty years or so. In contrast, CO2 emissions cause warming for 2-3 centuries or more. So methane emissions seemed to be something …
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CONTINUE READINGAnti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency
Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
Should Biden declare a national climate emergency? There are certainly arguments that, on balance, it would be better not to take that step. Some opponents argue that declaring a climate emergency would be horribly anti-democratic, polarizing, and counterproductive. Those arguments seem to me seriously overstated. I’d like to go through the major arguments against declaring …
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CONTINUE READINGStraws in the Wind
Businesses have intensified public support for climate action. That could presage a major shift in climate politics.
In the past few weeks, there’s been a notable growth of business support for climate action. A letter from the CEOs of 300 hundred major companies called for a 50% cut from 2005 carbon emissions by 2030. The companies ranged from the utilities to tobacco to investment management. Google, McDonalds, Walmart, and Philip Morris were …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Green MAGA-Deal Goes Public!
It’s something no one expected, and for good reason.
There were gasps of astonishment when Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Bernie Sanders took the stage together. The gasps turned into stunned silence as Trump began to speak. The trio were there, Trump said, to announce something HUGE, something no one ever expected: the world’s biggest plan for climate action. Trump began by denouncing the …
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CONTINUE READINGWhen “Stay In Your Lane” Is Wrong
Technical policy questions often involve ethical political questions that the public must have a say in
As vaccination for the coronavirus in the United States ramps up, I want to take a look back to a policy dispute over the initial plans for vaccine distribution at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 – in part because that fight (like “follow the science,” which I blogged about recently) also …
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