Articles by David Roberts

OIRA chief on making the invisible visible

In a post on Cass Sunstein (new head of OIRA) I mentioned his work with behavioral economics and his book Nudge and wondered, "What other unobtrusive-but-effective green policy tweaks could be made to nudge people toward greener behavior?"

Clearly Sunstein is reading Grist, as he responded a few days later with a piece in the Chicago Tribune: "A gentle prod to go green." After some throat-clearing (and tangential carbon tax shilling) he gets to examples:

Sue me harder

So, remember how we're going to dump billions and billions of dollars into the laps of the Big Three automakers, to rescue them from their own myopic decisions? And remember how automakers are suing the crap out of every state that tries to implement California's tailpipe emission standards? Remember how Obama green-lit the waiver for those standards yesterday, and how those standards are overwhelmingly supported by the public?

Putting all that together, it occurred to New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert to wonder whether automakers will use that taxpayer money to fund their lawsuits against, um, taxpayers.

So she contacted them, and the following day put up a second post: Yes. Yes, they are going to use taxpayer money to sue taxpayers.

Obama doesn't need to back away from investment to appease conservatives

Conservative pollster Frank Luntz takes to the pages of the L.A. Times to share the news that everyone loves infrastructure:

Last month, I conducted a national survey of 800 registered voters on their attitudes toward infrastructure investment ...

The survey's findings were unlike any other issue I have polled in more than a decade. Iraq, healthcare, taxes, education -- they all predictably divide and polarize Americans into political camps. Not infrastructure.

Consider this: A near unanimous 94% of Americans are concerned about our nation's infrastructure. And this concern cuts across all regions of the country and across urban, suburban and rural communities.

This demonstrates yet another reason why Obama's attempt to appease conservatives by bumping transit infrastructure investments to make room for tax cuts is pointless. The people want infrastructure, they want stimulus, and those two happen to be the same thing, so who gives a f*ck what Republicans want?

Nate Silver follows up with this excellent point:

I'm not sure why Obama isn't doing more to highlight the green portions of the stimulus bill. The public seems to tolerate the spending on bridges and highways -- but they also see it, perhaps not wholly improperly, as make-work. The long-run benefits of the alternative energy programs, on the other hand, are far more intuitively appealing. If the central critique of the stimulus is that the debt we're creating will be burdensome to future generations, that concern could be mitigated if the spending in question is portrayed as a down payment made on behalf of those future generations toward cleaning up the environment and mitigating dependence on fossil fuels. It also provides for some sense of purpose to the stimulus: we'll come out of this, Obama can say, with the greenest, most energy-independent major industrial economy in the world, etc. etc.

Exactly. I really don't see why Obama has to trim his sails one bit on this stuff. It's overwhelmingly popular and substantively correct policy, a combo that doesn't come along very often.

E.U. leaks details of its proposed Kyoto successor treaty

On Wednesday, the European Commission will release a communiqué outlining the E.U.'s vision for a successor agreement to Kyoto, to be hashed out this December in Copenhagen.

There have been some leaks related to the document, covered in The NYT and elsewhere, but now EurActiv has gotten a draft copy [PDF] to look over. It's got pencil marks on it, so obviously it's preliminary and could change by Wed., but it gives a good sense of the direction E.U. sees things going.