The following is the first in a series of guest posts from the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive legal think tank that works on constitutional and environmental issues. It is written by online communications director Hannah McCrea and president Doug Kendall, who also help maintain CAC's blog, Warming Law.
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There can be little doubt that the U.S. needs a strong carbon-pricing system, such as a cap-and-trade program, to help combat global warming. Politicians have proposed a range of alternative policy measures that avoid carbon-pricing (e.g. traditional "command-and-control" regulations on emissions, renewable portfolio standards, massive investments in renewable energy infrastructure and technologies, etc.), but economists widely agree [PDF] that none of these approaches will, on their own, be swift or strong enough to reduce the risk of irreversible climate change. The better approach to mitigating this risk is to attach a price to carbon emissions -- one high enough to ensure that greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels are more expensive to consume, per unit, than are clean and renewable alternatives.
To this end, members of the 110th Congress, including then-Senator Barack Obama, focused on trying to pass a cap-and-trade bill. Last June, they pushed the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, an ultimately doomed effort that attracted harsh criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. As Grist readers will surely recall, progressives condemned the bill for being dangerously weak because it failed to meet the IPCC-established target of an 80 percent reduction below 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, while conservatives claimed the bill would ensure the U.S.'s economic ruin.
After the bill's death, leaders in Congress -- indeed Barack Obama himself -- promised a stronger follow-up to Lieberman-Warner. However, with the economic climate dramatically altered in the last six months, political support for such an ambitious program may be in doubt. As the severity of the recession came into greater focus in the weeks leading up to the November elections, candidates made a notable shift in their rhetoric on climate policy, subtly replacing the focus on cap-and-trade with one on clean energy investments and "green" recovery measures. Outside of Washington, state and local governments continued to demonstrate their lack of faith that federal climate action will be forthcoming, as evidenced by further development of regional cap-and-trade schemes, namely New England's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the Western Climate Initiative, and the Midwestern Governors Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord. These initiatives are motivated by the widely-shared sentiment that even with hope of meaningful federal action on climate change in 2009, dramatic reductions in carbon emissions simply cannot wait a moment longer.
