Last Thursday, the chance of passing any type of comprehensive climate legislation was pronounced dead-on-arrival in the Senate, but it's worth noting that this isn't the end of climate-change regulation. The Environmental Protection Agency announced its standards for regulating greenhouse gases in May. And while there are many pluses to a market-based cap-and-trade system over a regulatory one, at least this shows that -- behind all the politics -- someone remembers there's a real problem to solve.
Steven Cohen writes in the Huffington Post today that the steps to start regulating these gases take time, but the EPA has already started them. Moreover, the top-down regulatory approach will have some of the same effects as a cap-and-trade bill would have.
The price on carbon long sought by environmental activists and alternative energy entrepreneurs will be set indirectly by these regulations. Electric utilities will need to develop a method to sequester and store greenhouse gasses. Unlike Waxman-Markey, there will be no offsets available for purchase to allow emissions to continue. There will be no cap and trade to allow old polluting factories to buy pollution allowances from newer, cleaner facilities. There will be compliance schedules, penalties, and injunctions. The same methods we employed to clean water, toxics and other air pollutants will be trotted out to deal with the U.S. contribution to global warming. It will be the Environmental Lawyer Full Employment Act of 2010. To all you law students out there, sign up for climate law; it's going to be a growth area for the next several decades.
A Senate's effort to stop the EPA from instituting the new regulations failed last month. But just because the approach is beyond the reach of the Senate doesn't mean it's outside the reach of politics. As Newsweek reported in April, the agency would rather the legislature have come up with a better solution. And in a country ready to blame the Obama administration for overreach on anything, I can see why they're reluctant. Still, it's important to remember that President Obama, while he may be annoyingly deferential to Congress, has some power to do something.
-- Monica Potts
