Lisa Jackson for EPA: a dissenting voice?
December 20, 2008
I haven’t commented yet on Steven Chu, Lisa Jackson and the rest of Obama’s energy & enviro team because I just can’t wrap my arms around what would make my hosannas that much more worthy of your limited eyeball time than anyone else’s. In all honesty, though, I do have some reservations about Ms. Jackson, based on my published study of New Jersey’s program designed to remediate brownfield sites. See vol. 34 of the Fordham Urban Law Journal from 2007 if you are curious. My principal source for some background info for that article, Bill Wolfe of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), strongly opposes her, for reasons some of which are described in my article. Note this as one example: “The state hazardous waste clean-up program under Ms. Jackson was so mismanaged that the Bush EPA had to step in and assume control of several Superfund sites.”
I’m going to go back and look a little more closely than I did at the time at specific persons and offices who bore responsibility for the mess in the NJ brownfields program (the quote above refers to the Superfund program, designed for the more contaminated sites). If anything, I might get some clues about a post-Bush EPA. My gut instinct, based on other appointments (Solis, Chu, Holdren, Lubchenco, etc.), is that the transition team is so focused on reversing eight years of climate change policy that other priorities may have been crowded out. I also think that Carol Browner had a lot to do with this nomination; Jackson worked in her EPA.
PEER argues that even in the area of climate change, New Jersey is not a shining beacon on the hill. As I told my Law of Global Warming class, and as PEER rightly observes, NJ missed out on the first RGGI greenhouse gas auction because it could not get its regulatory act together.
Maybe Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board would have been a better choice. I hope I am proven wrong.
A “must-read” on Obama and the inauguration controversy
December 20, 2008
I don’t use that term often. Heck, we read so much (Google Reader alone throws 100+ items my way each day, not to mention the NYT, new books, etc., etc.) that it’s really hard for anything to stand out from the pack.
But this jumped out at me. Don’t get me wrong: I am no more thrilled than my LGBT friends at the choice of Rick Warren, but let’s not trap Obama from day one with the political noose others have used on Democrats for my entire lifetime.
Policy snapback on global warming
December 10, 2008
AP: “former New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection commissioner Lisa Jackson and Mary Nichols, who heads the California Air Resources Board, are in the running for the EPA administrator post. Both women worked at the EPA under Clinton EPA chief Carol Browner, who is leading the energy and environmental policy team for Obama’s transition.
Browner, who ran the agency for 8 years, is expected to be named to a new position in the Obama White House overseeing energy, environment and climate matters.” Later: we learn that position may be as head of a new Climate Council.
I continue to be impressed at how President-elect Obama is filling out his team with many who represent a sharp break from the past . . . with Shinseki, Browner et al. he is sending a message that things are going to be the polar opposite of the policies of the past eight years.
Transition To Green report
December 1, 2008
This past week, nearly 30 environmental, science and conservation groups presented their top environmental policy recommendations to President-elect Obama’s transition team. The 391-page document, called “Transition to Green,” sets forth recommendations for key federal agencies on a wide variety of environmental issues, including land, air, water, oceans and public health.
Transition to Green is an extraordinary collaboration among groups with millions of members. Most recommendations are listed twice — within “issue” groupings of similar actions and then in agendas for “The First 100 Days” that are meant to guide immediate action.
Even a small part of the document, dealing with recommendations for the EPA, will give an idea of the sweeping change called for. Recommendations listed under “ISSUE 2 /PROTECT AMERICANS AND OUR ENVIRONMENT AGAINST THREE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS FORMS OF AIR POLLUTION: FINE PARTICLES, SMOG, AND TOXICS SUCH AS MERCURY” call for the EPA to reverse damaging Bush administration policies on New Source Review and SOx/NOx pollution and junk any (expected) eleventh-hour rules made under the Clean Air Act.
There are numerous recommendations listed under “ISSUE 4/REDUCE EMISSIONS QUICKLY AND DEEPLY ENOUGH TO AVOID THE WORST EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING,” as one might expect, including “Comply with Landmark Supreme Court Ruling” (Massachusetts v. EPA), “Reduce Global Warming Emissions from Cars and Trucks,” “Require New Power Plants to Factor in Global Warming” (an outgrowth of the Deseret Power EAB decision I wrote about last week), “Reduce Global Warming Emissions from Power Plants,” “Reduce Global Warming Emissions from Fuels,” “Announce Principles for Comprehensive Global Warming Legislation,” “Enact Comprehensive Global Warming Legislation,” “Reduce Global Warming Emissions from the Transportation Sector,” “Support EPA Voluntary and Complimentary [sic] Programs,” and “Support EPA Research Funding.”
None of these are surprising (all have been discussed at length in blogs and other media), but still, I’d say the new EPA Administrator will have his/her hands full.
Obama’s economic stimulus plan: how accurate were my predictions?
November 23, 2008
Two weeks ago, I told both of my classes that within the next few weeks, President-elect Obama would announce that upon taking office he would propose an economic stimulus plan with the following features:
1. It would be termed “Green Recovery” or something to that effect
2. It would be touted as a plan that would create 2 million or more jobs in the short term
3. It would feature direct federal spending of at least $100 billion (but probably considerably more than that) over two years in the following areas:
- Retrofitting buildings to increase energy efficiency
- Expanding mass transit and freight rail
- Constructing “smart” electrical grid transmission systems
- Wind power
- Solar power
- Advanced biofuels
I also predicted that any new comprehensive federal carbon regulation (a cap-and-trade program similar to that proposed in the Climate Security Act, for example) would not be a priority until after this stimulus plan was underway.
I predicted that Obama would use the following talking points to justify this program:
– it would create 2 million new jobs, with a significant proportion in the struggling construction and manufacturing sectors (I showed a graphic detailing the professions that would see increased jobs).
– it would be a strategy to “invest in the greening of our economy,” “to jumpstart a comprehensive clean energy transformation for our nation,” to provide “more jobs, and better jobs, compared to continuing to pursue a path of inaction marked by rising dependence on energy imports.”
It now appears that this sort of plan is pretty close to what the incoming Administration has in mind, according to this report.
I had several reasons for my confident prediction.
First, “personnel is policy,” as Ronald Reagan once famously said. John Podesta, head of the Obama transition team, is the head of the Center for American Progress, the progressive think tank that issued the Green Recovery report in September. That report “shows the impact of a swift initial investment in climate solutions that would direct funding toward six energy efficiency and renewable energy strategies.” There are other proposals of this sort floating out there, but none came with Podesta’s central position in the transition to power. Robert Reich, the former Clinton Secretary of Labor and an Obama economic advisor, repeated most of the six strategies on his blog, calling for investment “mostly [in] infrastructure — – repairing roads and bridges, levees and ports; investing in light rail, electrical grids, new sources of energy, more energy conservation.” Note the substantial overlap.
Many Americans still believe that protecting the environment and growing the economy are incompatible. So what’s a new President to do in a time of economic downturn? Simple: use government spending to create “green jobs,” which was a theme Obama touched upon frequently during the campaign. It’s no accident that creating the kinds of jobs described in Green Recovery, jobs for civil engineers, mechanics, HVAC professionals and the like, could do a wealth of good in Rust Belt states. Just ask Tom Friedman.
Finally, let’s return to the idea that a “green recovery” program signals that action on a comprehensive regulatory program for carbon regulation is not forthcoming immediately. I think Obama knows that if Congress moves forward with a cap-and-trade bill shortly after taking office, he will be “Harry and Louise”‘d to no end, and it will be a major blow to his political standing. The cloture vote on the Climate Security Act was 48-36 in favor of closing off debate. Six Senators (including Obama, Clinton and McCain) were not present and indicated they would have voted with the 48. So it has been reported that 54 Senators in this outgoing Congress were in favor of the bill. That’s misleading, as the vote was on a procedural matter, not the underlying substance of the bill. I don’t think there are 60 votes for a variant of the bill in the new Congress.
Here’s an interesting nugget from Green Recovery: “[t]he next president and lawmakers can pledge to repay the Treasury the cost of the green infrastructure recovery program from cap-and-trade auction revenue.” This is both a justification for starting with a green recovery plan (the $ will come back later) and a signal that the economic stimulus plan will come first. What better way to resolve a primary difference between the two Presidential candidates’ global warming plans (McCain wanted to distribute free pollution allowances to companies) than to remind lawmakers in 2010 that auctioning off allowances is necessary to recoup the downpayment on green recovery?
And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that the international community will be meeting in Copenhagen in December, 2009 to conclude negotiations on a global warming agreement. I foresee President Obama announcing that the United States will agree to binding greenhouse gas reductions and achieve its target through implementation of a comprehensive control scheme to be put in place after Copenhagen.
As for the plan itself, I offer the words I say at the outset of every class I have ever taught: “let’s get started.”
Obama and the “Team of Rivals”
November 15, 2008
I love the Hillary Clinton/”Team of Rivals” stuff. One of my favorite books, writ large on the public stage.
Let’s go the extra mile. I was asked “who’d be Chase?,” so I thought I would try my hand at filling out the entire team of rivals. Here goes:
Obama — Lincoln, natch. Not the first choice of his party at the start of the nominating process (that would be Seward, and how juicy is it that the “obvious choice” now is the one who may wind up filling the Seward role?) but the guy who was victorious at the end.
Clinton — Seward. But will she hang in the Prez’s digs with him in the evenings, sipping brandy and smoking cigars? Hmmm, doubt it.
Bates — I figure Joe Lieberman for this. Bates was the older, so-called “moderate” who really wasn’t a Republican and whose politics would have destroyed the party.
Chase — Al Gore, hands down. Brains, but with a brainy and not politically or socially adept view of the election borne in large part from being above/beyond the fray. But he still comes out OK with an important job (Supreme Court Justice), as I imagine Al Gore will, even if maybe it’s not this job. Not sure who’d play his charming first-lady-in-waiting daughter Kate. Evidence is not necessarily to the contrary , just not convincing that his daughters could run the country.
Yes, I know I am being historically inaccurate, as Lincoln’s rivals contended for the same nomination as him, but I hope you all will give me some license.
Stanton — McCain? I guess we’ll see on Monday.
Sounds “reasonable” to me!
November 9, 2008
The Google Generation
November 6, 2008
Barack Obama and I are the same age, and both of us graduated from top law schools. The similarity ends there. He is a gifted political orator, I am not. He is about to take puppy and kids to the White House. I remain in the ivory tower.
Obama was elected President by a wide array of voters young and old. Latinos, men and women, Democrats and independents, Jews, Christians, and African Americans turned out in record numbers to turn out the Republicans. Still, I am especially heartened by the fact that Obama won by 10 points among college-educated white voters, and I think that was no accident.
In places like Virginia and Colorado, young, educated members of the professional class are flooding into the suburbs and exurbs. This “Google Generation” of knowledge workers makes its living with a computer and smartphone. They are not beholden to any political party or ideology, and that has led some think of them as apolitical. But so many of them participated in this movement that this simply is no longer true. Is it any wonder that Google’s CEO starred in the Obama infomercial? Yeah, thought not.
In Barack Obama, this generation saw one of their own, who inspired him with his rhetoric but also spoke their language and adopted methods of reaching them that were exquisitely tailored to them: Facebook, e-mail, and so on. On Election Day alone I received half a dozen e-mail messages and several videos imploring me to vote. On the eve of the election, we roared over the viral video that “blamed” a single voter for not turning out to support Obama. You shared it with your friends, and then by inserting their e-mail addresses, it was their turn to cringe and laugh. It was a technological marvel with high production values, and apparently very effective, as 12 million people shared the “blame.”
Among them is the first person to alert me to the candidacy of the senator from Illinois with the funny name. Rick Klau is a graduate of our law school who forsook law practice for the techie world, which surprised no one who was paying attention when he was the driving force behind the creation at Richmond of the nation’s first online law journal devoted to technology issues.
Rick deserves credit for introducing me to Twitter, Talkingpointsmemo, the finer points of RSS (his company Feedburner is now part of the Google world), iGoogle, and, most importantly, the Obama campaign and its vast presence on the Internet. Not a bad list, no? He was on board the Obama train and cheering long before anyone else I know. Heck, he’d had the guy in his living room (he now proudly says he’s 1 for 1 with candidates with that status). And he convinced me, singlehandedly, to get on board with Obama, whom I had only known previously from his electrifying speech in 2004.
The nation has handed over the car keys to someone my age. Not to baby boomers still reliving Vietnam, not to the Democrats’ traditional constituencies, but to this new creative class, the Google Generation. How often were the words “disciplined” and “professional” used to describe Obama’s great campaign, the one whose methods will be studied in political science classes for decades to come? That is the ethos of this cohort, and the real break from the past that Obama represents. It’s time for the group that created Google and Facebook to turn that creativity to make headway in the federal government, which is sorely in need of change.
In this new era, government has a continuing and important role to play. While the Google Generation has not been part of the traditional framework of government-building, and it may not have the expected views about government’s purpose, its perspective is not a libertarian disbelief. Nor is it comfortable with the social conservatives’ pettiness and nannyism. The multi-racial, multi-ethnic, more tolerant society that pundits discovered on Election Day has been in place in Edge Cities for quite some time.
When you invest the new technocrats with power, you may also find that they have no truck for traditional ways of lobbying, back-slapping and deal-making. Instead, government may well be a much more disciplined (there’s that word again!) force to simply get things done. So if you want a glimpse of the kind of person whom Obama should and will bring in to run things, I suggest you bypass asking John Kerry and his ilk, and instead go straight to Rick Klau.
