Politics
Congressional Dim Bulbs at Work Again
The House of Representatives is continuing its campaign to increase electricity bills, harm a domestic industry, and create regulatory uncertainty. According to E&E, the House appropriations bill “Eliminating funding for light bulb efficiency standards is especially poor policy as it would leave the policy in place but make it impossible to enforce, undercutting domestic manufacturers …
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CONTINUE READINGWhy The Expiration Of The Payroll Tax Cut Hurts The Environment
As Congress wrangles over the expiration of the payroll tax cut at the end of this month, environmentalists should note that the impacts of the expiration go beyond economics. Some environmental goodies will die with the soon-to-expire package of tax benefits, barring congressional action. For starters, I received this message in an email from my …
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CONTINUE READINGFour Great Republican Environmental Leaders
Teddy Roosevelt was an early conservation, who fought even as a young man to help preserve Yellowstone National Park from commercial exploitation. As President, he created the national forest system, TR created the Tongass and the Chugach forest reserves in Alaska. In Hawaii, he set several small islands aside as the Hawaiian Islands Bird Reservation, …
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CONTINUE READINGHow Environmentalism Can Strengthen the Middle Class
At the end of an interesting and constructive piece, David Frum stumbles on the idea: [T]he U.S. needs to reconsider the way it finances Medicare and the Social Security retirement system. The payroll tax has become more and more important to U.S. finances since 1980. Before the crash, payroll taxes supplied almost 40% of all federal …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat REALLY Happened in Durban?
Dan wants to know, and he is right to ask. Fortunately enough, it’s a pretty easy question to answer. As far as I can tell, the delegates agreed to negotiate a treaty some time in the future. That is diplomatic-speak for kicking the can down the road. As I have argued for well over a …
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CONTINUE READINGIs EPA regulation of carbon dioxide anti-democratic?
There’s been a lot of noise from House Republicans (and others) about how EPA regulation of carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act is somehow an end-run around Congress or anti-democratic. But it is neither.
CONTINUE READINGPrimary Colors with a Green Overtone
Frederick Anderson, a leading Washington lawyer who works on energy and environment issues, has written a novel about the current primary campaign. It features a candidate who starts thinking for himself, with predictably negative political effects. Gary Hart, who knows a thing or two about how a primary campaign can go wrong, calls it a …
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CONTINUE READINGThe “21st Century Contract with America”
I’ve just been reading Gingrich’s new version of the Contract with America. It repeats Gingrich’s desire to end most federal regulations in favor of federal coaching and subsidies for businesses and state governments: We must also replace the EPA, which pursues an anti-jobs agenda the economy simply cannot sustain. A pro-growth Environmental Solutions Agency in …
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CONTINUE READINGMore on “Distrust”
I posted a few days ago about declining public trust in societal institutions (including the courts, the presidency, big business, the military, the church, etc.) By coincidence, Nate Silver has a post today that touches on the same subject. He reports that Democrats tend to have more trust institutions these days than Republicans. Moreover, Republican …
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CONTINUE READINGDemocracy and Distrust
“Democracy and Distrust” is the title of a well-known book constitutional theory, which argues that courts should step in to correct dysfunctions in the democratic process. But that’s not what I want to talk about right now. Instead, I want to talk about public trust in the institutions that make democracy work: the media that …
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