Jonathan Adler's Claim That Stripping the EPA of Its Authority to Regulate Greenhouse Gases Would Be a Good idea: For the Virtual Green Room
Jonathan Adler writes
The GOP’s Climate Anti-Policy: Yesterday the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to remove the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.... This is a good first step on climate policy.... Stripping the EPA of authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act is a good idea...
Rebutted by Jonathan Adler, who in the same post writes:
The GOP’s Climate Anti-Policy: For years I have been arguing for a combination of policies that would include a) a revenue-neutral carbon tax, like that proposed by James Hansen, offsetting new taxes on carbon with reductions in income or other taxes; b) measures to incentivize and accelerate energy and climate-related innovation, including technology inducement prizes; c) streamlining of regulatory requirements that hamper the development and deployment of alternative energy technologies, including (but not limited to) offshore wind development; d) policies to facilitate adaptation due to the inevitability of some amount of climate change, and e) elimination of policies that subsidize energy inefficiency and excess greenhouse gas emissions, including ill-conceived ethanol mandates (which, among other things, forestall efforts at reforestation). Would this be enough? Maybe not, but it would be a start...
If you want carbon taxes, you have to provide representatives with an incentive to vote for carbon taxes--and fear of an EPA-led regulatory regime that would be a (bad) second-best to carbon taxes is the only way to get to the first-best outcome. Strip the EPA of its regulatory authority, and you wind up at the third-best with an anti-climate policy.
