(Note: This column is adapted from a forthcoming article, co-authored with former Virgiania Governor George F. Allen, in the University of Richmond Law Review.)
December 28, 2009 was the final day to submit comments on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) proposed Prevention of Significant Deterioration and Title V Greenhouse Gas Tailoring Rule. This is the rulemaking in which EPA proposes to “tailor” the Clean Air Act’s (CAA or Act’s) Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program and Title V operating permits program so that they can be applied to carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) without spawning an economically-chilling administrative morass.
The Tailoring Rule is an eye opener, because it reveals, or rather confirms in spades, that the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA has created an almost bottomless well of “absurd results” — disastrous consequences that EPA can avoid only by poaching legislative power and amending the Act.…
Continue ReadingAs projections of catastrophic climate changes are being beaten down by the far less than catastrophic actual climate response, other calamities that may result from our untoward use of fossil fuels are being offered up for our consideration. Besides the well-worn pitfalls of our failure to achieve energy independence, or to be the first to grasp green technologies, a new problem is being worked into the mix—ocean acidification.
Ocean acidification. Sounds bad doesn’t it. Much worse than say, “the oceans are becoming less basic” which is a more accurate, but less worrisome-sounding description. In either case, it is used to describe the situation in which the oceans absorb an increasing amount of carbon dioxide as the atmospheric partial pressure of CO2 increases. The dissolution of CO2 in the oceans has the net effect of increasing the hydrogen ion concentration which drives the ocean’s pH lower.…
Continue ReadingA recent NYT article discussed a proposal by economist Ross McKitrick to tie CO2 taxes to global temperature increases. McKitrick’s overall aim is to offer a compromise that, he argues, should satisfy those who think the government needs to take drastic action and those who think carbon emissions pose no serious long-term threat. Although McKitrick’s idea is clever, it has theoretical difficulties and (in my opinion) would certainly not work in practice.
McKitrick’s Proposal to Tie CO2 Taxes to Temperature
The NYT story does a good job summarizing the idea:
… Continue Reading[McKitrick] suggests imposing financial penalties on carbon emissions that would be set according to the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere. The penalties could start off small enough to be politically palatable to skeptical voters.
If the skeptics are right and the earth isn’t warming, then the penalties for burning carbon would stay small or maybe even disappear.