You Ought to Have a Look is a regular feature from the Center for the Study of Science. While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic. Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary.
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Last week in this space, we highlighted a couple of areas where burdensome carbon dioxide policies exist that we hoped were not being overlooked by the Trump transition and planning teams in their push to reverse the more prominent Obama Administration actions like the Paris Climate Accord and the Clean Power Plan.
We want to draw a bit more attention to one of these—overturning federal regulations that were handed down on greenhouse gas regulations offered by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the EPA.
Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute has a couple of great articles (see here and here) describing how this can be done through elements of the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which was passed in 1996. The beauty of using the CRA is that it only requires a simple majority vote (i.e., no worries of a filibuster) in Congress. To date, the CRA has been pretty ineffective at overturning “midnight rules” (in this case rules finalized since about mid‐May) because the incoming president would veto them. But with Trump’s ascendency, this should not be the case. Crews has compiled, and is maintaining, a running list that is currently 140+ items strong (and growing) of “Significant Federal Rules Containing Potential Candidates for Trump Administration Congressional Review Act Resolutions of Disapproval.” There are many among them that either directly regulate greenhouse gas emissions or include (improperly in our estimate) the so‐called “social cost of carbon” on the benefits side of the cost/benefit analyses that are used to support greenhouse gas reductions. These misguided and ill‐informed should be prime targets for Congressional undoing.
We also want to highlight a couple of other pieces that get into the technical (or legal) details of how Trump may go about disassembling elements of Obama’s Climate Action Plan. These include analysis by:
Andrew Grossman: (Cato podcast) “Undoing Executive Action in a Trump Presidency”
David Bookbinder and David Bailey: “Does Trump Spell Climate Doom?”
Greenwire’s Amanda Reilly: “Clean Power Plan: Rule’s demise looms, but how Trump will ax it remains unclear”
Climatewire’s Jean Chemnick: “Paris Agreement: Here’s what could happen under Trump”
And a good overview by Greenwire’s Robin Bravender: “Can Trump deliver and immense energy, climate promises?”
It worth reading through these if you want to familiarize yourself with the myriad ways that the Trump Administration may clearing the climate policy slate.
And finally, the hard environmental left continues to fret about what is going to come to pass under the new Trump Administration. Much of the fretting is about whether or not Trump decides that “turnabout is fair play” when it comes to matters like research funding, research direction, respect of opposing views, personal attacks on scientists, etc. The new Administration’s approach, in fact, may offer refreshing new directions in both science and policy that were actively oppressed under the Obama Administration. A couple of commentaries over the past week cautiously embrace such possibilities. While we may not agree with everything that is being expressed in these articles, we highlight them because their authors were not afraid to offer at least a glimmer of (cautious) optimism for opportunity. They include essays by:
Dan Sarowitz: “Science and innovation policies for Donald Trump”
Pat Michaels: “Trump Should Shine Spotlight on Shrouded Climate ‘Science’”
And those ideas expressed by Judy Curry in this article “Climate scientists brace for funding battles under Trump”
You ought to have a look!
