ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

Eleventh Edition
To Sandy and Dana,

For their love and support, and

To Sean and Nico

For their future

 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
New Directions for the Twenty-First Century

Eleventh Edition

Edited by

Norman J. Vig

Carleton College

Michael E. Kraft

University of Wisconsin–Green Bay

Barry G. Rabe

University of Michigan

Los Angeles
 London

New Delhi

Singapore

Washington DC

Melbourne
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CONTENTS
Preface
About the Editors
About the Contributors
Part I Environmental Policy and Politics in Transition
Chapter 1 US Environmental Policy: A Half-Century
Assessment
Chapter 2 Racing to the Top, the Bottom, or the Middle of
the Pack? The Evolving State Government Role in
Environmental Protection
Chapter 3 Politics, Prices, and Proof: American Public
Opinion on Environmental Policy
Part II Federal Institutions and Policy Change
Chapter 4 Presidential Powers and Environmental Policy
Chapter 5 Environmental Policy in Congress
Chapter 6 Environmental Policy in the Courts
Chapter 7 The Environmental Protection Agency
Part III Public Policy Dilemmas
Chapter 8 Energy Policy
Chapter 9 Natural Resource Policies in an Era of Polarized
Politics
Chapter 10 Applying Market Principles to Environmental
Policy
Chapter 11 Sustainability and Resilience in Cities: What
Cities Are Doing
Part IV Global Issues and Controversies
Chapter 12 Global Climate Change Governance: Can the
Promise of Paris Be Realized?
Chapter 13 Environment, Population, and the Developing
World
Chapter 14 Creating the Green Economy: Government,
Business, and a Sustainable Future
Part V Conclusion
Chapter 15 Conclusion: Environmental Policy in Crisis
Appendix 1. Major Federal Laws on the Environment, 1969–
2020
Appendix 2. Budgets of Selected Environmental and Natural
Resource Agencies, 1980–2020 (in Billions of Nominal and
Constant Dollars)
Appendix 3. Employees in Selected Federal Agencies and
Departments 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020
Appendix 4. Federal Spending on Natural Resources and the
Environment, Selected Fiscal Years, 1980–2020 (in Billions of
Nominal and Constant Dollars)
Index
PREFACE
At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century,
environmental policy faces significant challenges both at home and
around the world. New demands for dealing with the risks of climate
change and threats to biological diversity, and for meeting the rising
aspirations of the planet’s nearly eight billion people, will force
governments everywhere to rethink policy strategies and tools. They
need to find effective and acceptable ways to reconcile
environmental and economic goals and values through new
approaches to sustainable development.

In the United States, the early part of the 2010s saw a stagnant
economy and persistently high unemployment. Over the following
decade the economy improved greatly, albeit with highly unequal
results; some benefited while others did not. Despite these economic
gains, new criticism emerged in the United States over the perceived
adverse economic impacts of environmental and energy policies and
regulations. As a result, the Donald Trump presidency pursued the
most aggressive anti-environmental agenda of any administration
since Ronald Reagan’s in the 1980s. By fall 2020, the global
coronavirus pandemic created enormous economic damage and
renewed concerns over a severe and possibly prolonged recession.
As economies around the world struggle to regain these losses over
the next several years, environmental policies may well face
continued skepticism both in the United States and in other nations if
they are seen as adding to economic burdens.

Many of these criticisms in the United States divide members of the

two major parties deeply, as Republicans have continued to call, as
they long have, for repealing, reducing, and reining in environmental
policies and regulations in the face of strong Democratic defense of
the same policies and actions. The result has been intense and
relentless partisan debate on Capitol Hill and at the state and local
levels where many of the same conflicts arose. Some
environmentalists have blamed Democrats as well for what they see
as an often timid defense of environmental policy or for their
reluctance to embrace new and far-reaching proposals for a Green
New Deal favored by some within the party. Political debate over the
next few years may continue to be framed in these terms even as
leading businesses, the scientific community, and increasing
numbers of public officials recognize that the real challenge today is
to find ways to meet economic and other human needs while also
protecting the environment on which we depend, that is, on how to
foster sustainable development.

The election of President Donald Trump in November 2016 brought

a dramatic change in policy positions and priorities after eight years
of the Barack Obama administration. Particularly in his second four-
year term, Obama sought through executive action to strengthen
protection of public health and the environment, foster the
development of clean energy resources, and establish a viable and
broadly supported path toward global action on climate change
through the Paris Agreement of 2015. In contrast, decisions in the
Trump administration from 2017 through January 2021 aimed to
reverse many of Obama’s major policy initiatives, especially on
energy use and climate change. The differences between the two
presidencies on societal values and policy priorities, key
appointments to administrative agencies, regulatory decision-
making, budgetary support for established programs, and the use of
science in decision-making could hardly have been greater. These
differences are explored at length in the chapters that follow.

When the first environmental decade was launched in the early

1970s, protecting our air, water, and other natural resources seemed
a relatively simple proposition. The polluters and exploiters of nature
would be brought to heel by tough laws requiring them to clean up or
get out of business within five or ten years. But preserving the life
support systems of the planet now appears a far more daunting task
than anyone imagined back then. Not only are problems such as
global climate change much more complex than recognized by early
efforts to control air and water pollution, but now more than ever, the
success of US policies is tied to the actions of other nations.

This book seeks to explain the most important developments in

environmental policy and politics since the 1960s and to analyze the
central issues that face us today. Like the previous editions, it
focuses on the underlying trends, institutional strengths and
shortcomings, and policy dilemmas that all policy actors face in
attempting to resolve environmental controversies. All chapters have
been thoroughly revised and updated, and five of them are new to
this edition. We have also attempted to compare the positions and
actions of the Trump administration to those of the George W. Bush
and Barack Obama administrations and to put these differing
approaches to environmental policy in the context of ongoing
debates over the cost and effectiveness of past policies, as well as
the search for ways to reconcile and integrate economic,
environmental, and social goals through sustainable development.
As such, the book has broad relevance for the environmental
community and for all concerned with the difficulties and
complexities of finding solutions to environmental problems at the
beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Part I provides a retrospective view of policy development as well as

a framework for analyzing policy change in the United States.
Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the book by outlining the
basic issues in US environmental policy since the late 1960s, the
development of institutional capabilities for addressing them, and the
successes and failures in implementing policies and achieving
results. In Chapter 2, Barry G. Rabe considers the evolving role of
the states in environmental policy at a time when the devolution of
responsibilities has faced sharp scrutiny from new federal leaders.
He focuses on innovative policy approaches used by the states and
the promise of—as well as the constraints on—state action on the
environment. Part I ends with a chapter by Christopher Borick and
Erick Lachapelle that analyzes public opinion on the environment,
drawing from a diversity of recent surveys to explain the nature of
the public’s views and the support or opposition they offer for policy
proposals.

Part II analyzes the role of federal institutions in environmental

policymaking. Chapter 4, by Norman J. Vig, discusses the role of
recent presidents as environmental actors, evaluating their
leadership on the basis of several common criteria. In Chapter 5,
Michael E. Kraft examines the role of Congress in environmental
policy, giving special attention to partisan conflicts over the
environment and continued policy gridlock. In Chapter 6, Kimberly
Smith describes how federal courts shape environmental policy and
often play a critical role in limiting the actions of the other branches
of government. In Chapter 7, Richard N. L. Andrews examines the
EPA and the way it uses the policy tools granted to it by Congress,
especially its regulatory authority, to address environmental
challenges.

Some of the broader dilemmas in environmental policy formulation

and implementation are examined in Part III. Chapter 8, by Sanya
Carley, examines national energy policy, exploring technical,
economic, and political controversies surrounding the major energy
sources used today as well as the challenges and opportunities that
their use presents for climate change. In Chapter 9, William Lowry
and John Freemuth describe the major policies and agencies
affecting the use of the nation’s natural resources, their historical
development, and controversies over their implementation today.

In Chapter 10, Sheila M. Olmstead introduces economic

perspectives on environmental policy, including the use of benefit–
cost analysis, and she assesses the potential of market forces as an
alternative or supplement to conventional regulation. Chapter 11, by
Kent E. Portney and Bryce Hannibal, examines the intriguing efforts
by communities throughout the nation to integrate environmental
sustainability into policy decisions in areas as diverse as energy use,
housing, transportation, land use, and urban social life.

Part IV shifts attention to selected global issues and controversies. In

Chapter 12, Henrik Selin and Stacy D. VanDeveer survey the key
scientific evidence and major disputes over climate change, as well
as the evolution of the issue since the late 1980s. They also assess
government responses to the problem of climate change and the
outlook for public policy actions. Chapter 13 examines the plight of
developing nations that are struggling with a formidable array of
threats brought about by rapid population growth and resource
exploitation. Richard J. Tobin surveys the pertinent evidence,
recounts cases of policy success and failure, and outlines the
remaining barriers (including insufficient commitment by rich
countries) to achieving sustainable development in these nations.
Finally, Chapter 14, by Daniel Fiorino, explores the political economy
of green growth, recounting the history of the key ideas and the
broad debates taking place today over how to promote sustainable
development that meets people’s needs and yet is compatible with
environmental constraints.

In the final chapter of the book we review the many environmental

challenges that continue to face the nation and the world at an
unusually critical time, and discuss innovative policy instruments that
might help us to better address these issues in the future. We offer a
postscript at the end of this volume that addresses results from the
November 2020 presidential and congressional elections.

We thank the contributing authors for their generosity, cooperative

spirit, and patience in response to our editorial requests. It is a
pleasure to work with such a conscientious and punctual group of
scholars. Tragically, two of our authors passed away unexpectedly
shortly after completing their chapters for this book. We consider
ourselves most fortunate to have worked with Kent Portney and John
Freemuth over the years, and we will miss them both.

Special thanks are also due to the staff of CQ Press/SAGE, including

Charisse Kiino, Scott Greenen, Anna Villarruel, Olivia Weber-Stenis,
Lauren Younker, Tiara Beatty, Kenzie Offley, Jennifer Jones, Erica
DeLuca, and Agnes Preethi. We also thank Hannah Smith of the
University of Michigan for her assistance on several chapters. We
owe a great debt to our colleagues who graciously agreed to review
previous editions of the book and offered many useful suggestions:
William G. Holt, Birmingham-Southern College; Daniel Fiorino,
American University; Jeff W. Justice, Tarleton State University; Jack
Rasmus, St. Mary’s College; Ninian Stein, Smith College; Gerald A.
Emison, Mississippi State University; Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo,
University of Kentucky; Sarah Anderson, University of California,
Santa Barbara; Irasema Coronado, University of Texas at El Paso;
Robert Duffy, Colorado State University; Erich Frankland, University
of Wyoming; Raymond Lodato, University of Chicago; Melissa K.
Merry, University of Louisville; and John W. Sutherlin, University of
Louisiana at Monroe; Meghann N. Smith; Montclair State University;
Deborah M. Steketee, Aquinas College. We also gratefully
acknowledge support from the Department of Public and
Environmental Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay.
Finally, we thank our students for forcing us to rethink our
assumptions about what really matters. As always, any remaining
errors and omissions are our own responsibility.

Norman J. Vig

Michael E. Kraft

Barry G. Rabe
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Norman J. Vig
is the Winifred and Atherton Bean Professor of Science,
Technology, and Society emeritus at Carleton College. He has
written extensively on environmental policy, science and
technology policy, and comparative politics and is coeditor with
Michael G. Faure of Green Giants? Environmental Policies of
the United States and the European Union (2004) and with
Regina S. Axelrod and David Leonard Downie of The Global
Environment: Institutions, Law, and Policy, 2nd ed. (2005).
Michael E. Kraft
is a professor of political science and the Herbert Fisk Johnson
Professor of Environmental Studies emeritus at the University of
Wisconsin–Green Bay. He is the author of Environmental Policy
and Politics, 8th ed. (2022), and coauthor of Coming Clean:
Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance (2011,
winner of the Lynton K. Caldwell award for best book on
environmental politics and policy that year) and of Public Policy:
Politics, Analysis, and Alternatives, 7th ed. (2021). In addition,
he is coeditor of both the Oxford Handbook of Environmental
Policy (2013) and Business and Environmental Policy (2007)
with Sheldon Kamieniecki and of Toward Sustainable
Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental
Policy, 2nd ed. (2009), with Daniel A. Mazmanian.
Barry G. Rabe
is the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy
and the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Environmental Policy at
the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of
Michigan. He also serves as a nonresident senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution and chaired the US Environmental
Protection Agency Assumable Waters Committee from 2015 to
2017. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including
Statehouse and Greenhouse: The Emerging Politics of
American Climate Change Policy, which received the 2017
Martha Derthick Book Award from the American Political
Science Association for making a lasting contribution to the
study of federalism. His latest books are Can We Price Carbon?
(MIT Press, 2018) and Trump, the Administrative Presidency,
and Federalism (Brookings, 2020), coauthored with Frank J.
Thompson and Kenneth K. Wong, and he is currently working
on a book examining the politics of methane emissions.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Richard N. L. Andrews
is a professor emeritus of public policy, environmental studies,
environmental sciences and engineering, and city and regional
planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A primary
focus of his research and writing is the history of US environmental
policy. He is the author of Managing the Environment, Managing
Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy, 3rd ed.
(2020), “The EPA at 40: An Historical Perspective” (Duke
Environmental Law and Policy Forum, 2011), “Reform or Reaction:
EPA at a Crossroads” (Environmental Sciences & Technology,
1995), and many other articles on related topics.

Christopher Borick
is a professor of political science and public health, and Director of
the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College in Allentown,
Pennsylvania. His primary areas of research include public opinion,
environmental policy, and state and local politics. He is the author of
four books, and over 40 articles and book chapters, and he has
directed over 350 large scale surveys on an array of policy matters.
Since 2008 he has been a Director of the National Surveys on
Energy and Environment (NSEE), which includes multiple surveys of
Americans each year on matters including their perceptions of
climate change and views regarding energy and climate policy.

Sanya Carley
is a professor and director of the Master of Public Affairs programs at
the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at
Indiana University. Her research focuses on energy policy, the justice
and equity implications of the energy transition, and public
perceptions of energy infrastructure. She is the author of Energy-
based Economic Development: How Clean Energy Can Drive
Development and Stimulate Economic Growth (2014), “Empirical
Evaluation of the Stringency and Design of Renewable Portfolio
Standards” (Nature Energy, 2018), “A Framework for Evaluating
Geographic Disparities in Energy Transition Vulnerability” (Nature
Energy, 2018), and “An Analysis of the Macroeconomic Effects of
2017–2025 Federal Fuel Economy and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Standards” (Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2019),
among other articles.

Daniel J. Fiorino
is the founding Director of the Center for Environmental Policy and
Distinguished Executive in Residence in the School of Public Affairs
at American University, and a faculty member in the Department of
Public Administration and Policy. He served for many years in a
variety of senior positions at the US Environmental Protection
Agency. He is the author of A Good Life on a Finite Earth: The
Political Economy of Green Growth (2018); Can Democracy Handle
Climate Change? (2018), and The New Environmental Regulation
(2006), and co-editor of Conceptual Innovation in Environmental
Policy (2017) and Environmental Governance Reconsidered (2nd
ed., 2017).

John Freemuth
was Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Cecil Andrus
Endowed Chair of Environment and Public Lands at Boise State
University. His primary interest was with the public lands of the
United States. He wrote Islands Under Siege: National Parks and the
Politics of External Threats (1991), contributed chapters to two
editions of Environmental Politics and Policy in the West (2007 and
2016), and wrote “A Happy Combination? Great Interests, Particular
Interests, and State-Federal Conflicts over Public Lands” (Publius,
2018) as well as many other articles.

Bryce Hannibal
is a research scientist in the Institute for Science, Technology, and
Public Policy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service,
Texas A&M University. He has published in a number of scholarly
journals, including Public Management Review, Frontiers of
Environmental Science, Social Science Quarterly, Environmental
Sociology, Sociological Spectrum, International Journal of Social
Economics, Environmental Science and Policy, and Environmental
Behavior.

Erick Lachapelle
is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at
the University of Montreal. He is the principal investigator for the
Canadian Surveys on Energy and the Environment (CSEE). He has
written widely on climate change public opinion in Canada and the
United States, and has published articles in Global Environmental
Politics, PLoS ONE, Environmental Politics, Energy Policy, Policy
Studies Journal, Climate Policy, Perspectives on Global
Development and Technology, and Canadian Foreign Policy, among
other journals.

William R. Lowry
is a professor of political science at Washington University in St.
Louis. He studies environmental issues and natural resource
policies, particularly those involving public lands and waters. He is
the author of five books, including Repairing Paradise (Brookings,
2009) and numerous articles. He is also a US Navy veteran and a
former employee of the National Park Service.

Sheila M. Olmstead
is a professor of public affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of
Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, a university fellow
at Resources for the Future (RFF) in Washington, DC, and a senior
fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in
Bozeman, Montana. She was previously a fellow and senior fellow at
RFF (2010–2013) and an associate professor (2007–2010) and
assistant professor (2002–2007) of environmental economics at the
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Her research
has been published in leading journals such as the Journal of
Economic Perspectives, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management,
and Journal of Urban Economics. With Nathaniel Keohane, she is
the author of the book Markets and the Environment. From June
2016 to June 2017, she served on the President’s Council of
Economic Advisers.

Kent E. Portney
was a professor and the director of the Institute for Science,
Technology, and Public Policy at the Bush School of Government
and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Previously, he taught
for many years at Tufts University. He was the author of
Sustainability (2015), Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: Economic
Development, the Environment, and Quality of Life in American
Cities, 2nd ed. (2013), Approaching Public Policy Analysis (1986),
Siting Hazardous Waste Treatment Facilities: The NIMBY Syndrome
(1991), and Controversial Issues in Environmental Policy (1992). He
also was the coauthor of Acting Civically (2007) and The Rebirth of
Urban Democracy (1993).

Henrik Selin
is an associate professor in the Frederick S. Pardee School of
Global Studies at Boston University. His authored, coauthored, and
coedited books include Mercury Stories: Understanding
Sustainability through a Volatile Element (MIT Press, 2020), The
European Union and Environmental Governance (Routledge, 2015),
Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of
Multilevel Management (MIT Press, 2010), Changing Climates in
North American Politics: Institutions, Policymaking, and Multilevel
Governance (MIT Press, 2009), and Transatlantic Environment and
Energy Politics: Comparative and International Perspectives
(Ashgate, 2009). In addition, he has authored and coauthored more
than four dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as
well as numerous reports, reviews, and commentaries on issues
relating to the environment and sustainability.

Kimberly Smith
is a professor of environmental studies and political science at
Carleton College. Her research and teaching interests include
American environmental policy, American constitutional law,
American environmental thought, and environmental ethics. Among
her publications are Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A
Common Grace (University Press of Kansas, 2003); African
American Environmental Thought (University Press of Kansas,
2007); Governing Animals: Animal Welfare and the Liberal State
(Oxford University Press, 2012); and The Conservation Constitution:
The Conservation Movement and Constitutional Change, 1870–1930
(University Press of Kansas, 2019), awarded the Forest History
Society’s 2020 Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award. In 2020 she
was awarded the William R. Freudenburg Lifetime Achievement
Award by the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences
(AESS).

Richard J. Tobin
has spent much of his career working on international development.
After retiring from the World Bank, he has served as a consultant to
UNICEF, the United Nations Development Programme, the United
Nations Population Fund, the African Development Bank, the Asian
Development Bank, the Arab Administrative Development
Organization, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in
Europe. He continues to serve as consultant to the World Bank and
has also worked on development projects funded by the US Agency
for International Development, the United Kingdom’s Department for
International Development, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs
and Trade, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Stacy D. VanDeveer
is a professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human
Security, and Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts
Boston. His research and teaching interests include the global
politics of resource overconsumption, international environmental
policymaking and institutions, connections between environmental
and security issues, and comparative and EU environmental politics.
In addition to authoring and coauthoring over 100 articles, book
chapters, working papers, and reports, he is the coeditor or coauthor
of nine books, including EU Enlargement and the Environment
(2005), Changing Climates in North American Politics (2009),
Transatlantic Environment and Energy Politics (2009), Comparative
Environmental Politics (2012), Transnational Climate Change
Governance (2014), The European Union and Environmental
Governance (2015), Want, Waste or War? (2015), and The Global
Environment, 5th ed. (2020).
 PART I ENVIRONMENTAL
POLICY AND POLITICS IN
TRANSITION
1 US ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY : A HALF-CENTURY
ASSESSMENT
—Michael E. Kraft and Norman J. Vig
The United States and the world have come a long way since the beginning of the modern
environmental movement, around 1970. Progress was particularly evident for the first half of this period,
from 1970 to 1995, when environmental policy enjoyed considerable bipartisan support despite
occasional political reaction to prevailing policies and programs, most evident during Ronald Reagan’s
presidency (1981–1989). As we recount in this introductory chapter, during that 25-year span, the US
Congress approved a broad array of new and expansive public policies and guided and funded the
development of governmental institutions capable of putting them into effect. The result was striking
improvements in environmental quality and public health throughout the nation. We review these
achievements at the end of the chapter as we do the policies’ collective limitations.

Since 1995, however, the bipartisan consensus on environmental policy has broken down, replaced by
an increasingly acrimonious debate between the two major parties. This new partisan polarization
emerged in the mid- to late-1990s in Congress and intensified during the George W. Bush
administration from 2001 through January 2009. It has been central to environmental policy debate
since then, as evident in the stark differences in policies, regulatory actions, budgetary priorities, and
personnel appointments during the two most recent presidencies: those of Barack Obama and Donald
Trump.

Whether the issue is clean air, clean water, energy use, or climate change, the two parties typically have
found little common ground. What one administration struggles to achieve under the sharply critical eye
of its partisan adversaries is reversed by the next. Even agreement on the core scientific facts can no
longer be assured, adding to public confusion and dismay, and hindering the development of much
needed new policies, as evident in debates over how to deal with climate change.

Despite the substantial progress the nation has made in the first half century of environmental policy,
there is a real question of whether it can continue if deep partisan differences remain and block the
adoption of new and innovative solutions. The timing could hardly be worse because the nation and
world desperately need to develop effective policies to combat climate change while also modernizing
the environmental, natural resources, and energy policies that we have developed over the past half
century. These policies could be made more effective, efficient, and equitable, and more appropriate for
the twenty-first century as the chapters in this volume make clear.

How can we best learn from our collective experience of the past 50 years? And how should we
respond to the demands of scientists and environmental leaders who call for a new generation of public
policies to address the momentous challenges we face today? National and global actions taken in
response to the deadly coronavirus pandemic in 2020 suggest both what is possible as well as the
obstacles we must overcome.

This chapter provides a historical and institutional analysis that seeks to explain how policymakers have
addressed environmental problems previously and the policy choices they have made. We review the
activities of government in addressing environmental problems, including the structure of US
government that can facilitate or hinder decisions, the processes of agenda setting and policymaking,
major policy decisions made over the past five decades, and what those policies have achieved since
their adoption. In the concluding chapter in this volume (Chapter 15), we return to the many remaining
challenges of the twenty-first century, and we explore the need for a fresh examination of environmental
governance and the possible new directions in policies that better match the problems that the nation
and world now face as well as the public’s willingness to support them.
THE CHALLENGES OF CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTAL
PROBLEMS
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, environmental issues soared to a prominent place on the political
agenda in the United States and other industrial nations. The new visibility was accompanied by
abundant evidence, domestically and internationally, of heightened public concern over environmental
threats and broad support for governmental action.1 By the 1990s, policymakers around the world had
pledged to deal with a range of important environmental problems, from protection of biological diversity
to air and water pollution control. Such commitments were particularly manifest at the 1992 United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit) held in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, where an ambitious agenda for redirecting the world’s economies toward sustainable
development was approved, and at the December 1997 Conference of the Parties in Kyoto, Japan,
where delegates agreed to a landmark treaty on global climate change. Although it received far less
media coverage, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in September 2002 in
Johannesburg, South Africa, reaffirmed the commitments made a decade earlier at the Earth Summit,
with particular attention to the challenge of alleviating global poverty. The far-reaching goals of the Earth
Summit and the 2002 Johannesburg meeting were revisited at the 2012 Rio+20 United Nations
Conference on Sustainable Development held once again in Brazil, where global commitments were
reaffirmed once more.

Despite the positions taken at these and many other comparable meetings in recent decades, rising
criticism of environmental programs also was evident throughout the 1990s and in the first two decades
of the twenty-first century, both domestically and internationally. So too were a multiplicity of efforts to
chart new policy directions. For example, intense opposition to environmental and natural resource
policies arose in the 104th Congress (1995–1997), when the Republican Party took control of both the
House and Senate for the first time in 40 years. Ultimately, much like the earlier efforts in Ronald
Reagan’s administration, that antiregulatory campaign on Capitol Hill failed to gain much public
support.2 Nonetheless, pitched battles over environmental and energy policy continued in every
Congress since then (see Chapter 5). Both antiregulatory actions and fights over them were equally
evident in the executive branch, particularly during the George W. Bush administration, as it sought to
rewrite environmental rules and regulations to favor industry and to increase development of US oil and
natural gas supplies on public lands, and even more directly in the Donald Trump administration, which
shared many of the same priorities (see Chapter 4). Yet growing dissatisfaction with the effectiveness,
efficiency, and fairness of environmental policies was by no means confined to congressional
conservatives and the Bush and Trump administrations. It could be found as well among a broad array
of interests, including the business community, environmental policy analysts, environmental justice
groups, and state and local government officials, although not always with the ideological agenda that
was so evident in the Bush and Trump administrations.3

Since 1992, governments at all levels have struggled to redesign environmental policy for the twenty-
first century. Under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) tried to “reinvent” environmental regulation through the use of collaborative decision-making
involving multiple stakeholders, public–private partnerships, market-based incentives, information
disclosure policies, and enhanced flexibility in rulemaking and enforcement (see Chapters 7, 10, and
14).4 Many state and local governments have pursued similar goals with the adoption of innovative
policies that promise to address some of the most important criticisms directed at contemporary
environmental policy (see Chapters 2 and 11).5 The election of President Barack Obama in 2008
brought additional attention to new policy ideas, especially in his second term of office when he pursued
strong policies on clean energy and climate change (see Chapter 4).

The precise way in which Congress, the White House, the states, and local governments—and other
nations—will change environmental policies in the years to come remains uncertain. The prevailing
partisan polarization and policy gridlock of recent years may give way to greater consensus on the need
to act; yet policy change rarely comes easily in the US political system. Its success likely depends on
the conditions that affect all policymaking: the saliency of the issues, public support for action, media
coverage, the relative influence of opposing interests, and the state of the economy. Political leadership,
as always, will play a critical role, especially in articulating the problems and potential solutions,
mobilizing the public and policy actors, and trying to reconcile the deep partisan and ideological
divisions that exist today on environmental protection and natural resource issues. Political conflict over
the environment is not likely to vanish anytime soon. Indeed, it may well increase as the United States
and other nations struggle to define how they will respond to the latest generation of environmental
challenges, particularly climate change.
THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
The high level of political conflict over environmental protection efforts in the past several decades,
particularly evident during the Trump administration, underscores the important role a government plays
in devising solutions to the nation’s and the world’s mounting environmental ills. Global climate change,
the spread of toxic and hazardous chemicals, loss of biological diversity, air and water pollution, and the
continued growth of the world’s population and its economic needs require diverse and often demanding
actions by individuals and institutions at all levels of society and in both the public and private sectors.
These range from scientific research and technological innovation to strong public policy initiatives and
significant changes in both individual and corporate behavior. As political scientists, we believe the
government has an indispensable role to play in environmental protection and improvement. Because of
this conviction, we have commissioned chapters for this volume that focus on environmental policies
and the governmental institutions and political processes that affect them. Our goal is to illuminate that
role as well as to suggest needed changes and strategies for making them.

Government plays a preeminent role in this policy arena primarily because environmental threats, such
as urban air pollution and climate change, pose risks to the public’s health and well-being that cannot be
resolved satisfactorily through private actions alone. That said, there is no question that individuals and
nongovernmental organizations, such as environmental groups and scientific research institutes, can do
much to protect environmental quality and promote public health. There is also no doubt that business
and industry can do much to promote environmental quality and foster the pursuit of national energy
goals, such as improved energy efficiency and increased reliance on renewable energy sources. We
see evidence of extensive and often creative individual, nonprofit, and corporate actions of this kind
regularly, for example, in sustainable community efforts and sustainable business practices, as
discussed in Chapters 11 and 14.

Yet such actions often fall short of national needs without the backing of public policy, without, for
example, laws mandating control of toxic chemicals that are supported by the authority of government or
standards for drinking water quality and urban air quality that are developed and enforced by the EPA,
the states, and local governments. The justification for government intervention lies partly in the inherent
limitations of the free market system and the nature of human behavior. Self-interested individuals and a
relatively unfettered economic marketplace guided mainly by a concern for short-term gains or profits
tend to create spillover effects, or externalities; pollution and other kinds of environmental degradation
are examples. As economists have long recognized, collective action is needed to correct such market
failures (see Chapter 10). In addition, the scope and urgency of environmental problems typically
exceed the capacity of private markets and individual efforts to deal with them quickly and effectively.
For these reasons, among others, the United States and other nations have relied on government
policies—at local, state, national, and international levels—to address environmental and resource
challenges.

Adopting public policies does not imply, of course, that the voluntary and cooperative actions by citizens
in their communities or the many environmental initiatives undertaken by corporations cannot be the
primary vehicle of change in many instances. Nor does it suggest that governments should not consider
a full range of policy approaches—including market-based incentives, new forms of collaborative
decision-making, and information provision strategies—to supplement conventional regulatory policies
where needed. Public policy intervention should be guided by the simple idea that we ought to use
those policy approaches that offer the greatest promise of working to resolve the problem at hand.
Sometimes that will mean governments setting and enforcing public health or environmental standards
(regulation), and sometimes it will mean relying on market incentives, such as carbon taxes, or
information disclosure, such as data provided to the public on toxic chemicals and drinking water quality.
Typically, governments employ a combination of policy tools to reach agreed-upon objectives: improving
environmental quality, minimizing health and ecological risks, and helping to integrate and balance
environmental and economic goals.
Political Institutions and Public Policy
Public policy is a course of government action or inaction in response to social problems. It is expressed
in goals articulated by political leaders; in formal statutes, rules, and regulations; and in the practices of
administrative agencies and courts charged with implementing or overseeing programs. Policy states
the intent to achieve certain goals and objectives through a conscious choice of means, usually within a
specified period of time. In a constitutional democracy like the United States, policymaking is distinctive
in several respects: It must take place through constitutional processes, it requires the sanction of law,
and it is binding on all members of society.

The constitutional requirements for policymaking were established well over 200 years ago, and they
remain much the same today. The US political system is based on a division of authority among three
branches of government and between the federal government and the states. Originally intended to limit
government power and to protect individual liberty, this division of power translates today into a
requirement that one build an often elusive political consensus among members of Congress, the
president, and key interest groups for any significant national policymaking to take place. Such
fragmented authority may impede the ability of the government to adopt timely and coherent
environmental policy, as has been evident for some of the most challenging of modern environmental
problems. Weak national climate change policy is something of a poster child for such governmental
gridlock, which is an inability to act on problems because of divided authority and prevailing political
conflict (see Chapter 5).

Dedication to principles of federalism means that environmental policy responsibilities are distributed
among the federal government, the fifty states, and tens of thousands of local governments. Here, too,
strong adherence to those principles may result in no agreement on national policy action. Yet a federal
structure also means that states often are free to adopt environmental and energy policies as they see
fit, as has been the case for natural gas “fracking” where no major national policies have been in force.
Some of the states have a track record of favoring environmental policies that go well beyond what is
possible politically in Washington, DC. California’s adoption of a strong climate change policy and
Minnesota’s successful encouragement of renewable energy sources are two notable illustrations of the
considerable power that states have in the US political system (see Chapter 2).6 The flip side of that
coin is that some states will choose to do far less than others in the absence of national requirements.

Responsibility for the environment is divided within the branches of the federal government as well, most
notably in the US Congress, with power shared between the House and Senate and jurisdiction over
environmental policies scattered among dozens of committees (see Table 1.1). For example,
approximately twenty Senate and twenty-eight House committees and subcommittees have some
jurisdiction over EPA activities.7 The executive branch is also institutionally fragmented, with at least
some responsibility for the environment and natural resources located in twelve cabinet departments
and in the EPA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and other agencies (see Figure 1.1). Most
environmental policies are concentrated in the EPA and in the Interior and Agriculture Departments; yet
the Departments of Energy, Defense, Transportation, and State are increasingly important actors as
well. Finally, the more than one hundred federal trial and appellate courts play key roles in interpreting
environmental legislation and adjudicating disputes over administrative and regulatory actions (see
Chapter 6).

Table 1.1 Major Congressional Committees With Environmental Responsibilitiesa

Committee Environmental Policy Jurisdiction
HOUSE
Agriculture Agriculture generally; forestry in general and private forest reserves; agricultural
and industrial chemistry; pesticides; soil conservation; food safety and human
nutrition; rural development; water conservation related to activities of the
Department of Agriculture
Appropriationsb Appropriations for all programs
Energy and Measures related to the exploration, production, storage, marketing, pricing, and
Commerce regulation of energy sources, including all fossil fuels, solar, and renewable
energy; energy conservation and information; measures related to general
management of the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission; regulation of the domestic nuclear energy industry; research and
development of nuclear power and nuclear waste; air pollution; safe drinking
water; pesticide control; Superfund and hazardous waste disposal; toxic
substances control; health and the environment
Natural Public lands and natural resources in general; irrigation and reclamation; water
Resources and power; mineral resources on public lands and mining; grazing; national parks,
forests, and wilderness areas; fisheries and wildlife, including research,
restoration, refuges, and conservation; marine affairs and oceanography,
international fishing agreements, and coastal zone management; US Geological
Survey
Science, Environmental research and development; marine research; energy research and
Space, and development in all federally owned nonmilitary energy laboratories; research in
Technology national laboratories; NASA, National Weather Service, and National Science
Foundation
 Committee Environmental Policy Jurisdiction
Transportation Transportation, including civil aviation, railroads, water transportation, and
and transportation infrastructure; Coast Guard and marine transportation; federal
Infrastructure management of emergencies and natural disasters; flood control and improvement
of waterways; water resources and the environment; pollution of navigable waters;
bridges and dams
SENATE
Agriculture, Agriculture in general; food from fresh waters; soil conservation and groundwater;
Nutrition, and forestry in general; human nutrition; rural development and watersheds; pests and
Forestry pesticides; food inspection and safety
Appropriationsb Appropriations for all programs
Commerce, Interstate commerce and transportation generally; coastal zone management;
Science, and inland waterways; marine fisheries; oceans, weather, and atmospheric activities;
Transportation transportation and commerce aspects of outer continental shelf lands; science,
engineering, and technology research and development; surface transportation
Energy and Energy policy, regulation, conservation, research and development; coal; oil and
Natural gas production and distribution; civilian nuclear energy; solar energy systems;
Resources mines, mining, and minerals; irrigation and reclamation; water and power; national
parks and recreation areas; wilderness areas; wild and scenic rivers; public lands
and forests; historic sites
Environment Environmental policy, research, and development; air, water, and noise pollution;
and Public climate change; construction and maintenance of highways; safe drinking water;
Works environmental aspects of outer continental shelf lands and ocean dumping;
environmental effects of toxic substances other than pesticides; fisheries and
wildlife; Superfund and hazardous wastes; solid waste disposal and recycling;
nonmilitary environmental regulation and control of nuclear energy; water
resources, flood control, and improvements of rivers and harbors; public works,
bridges, and dams
a
In addition to the standing committees listed here, select or special committees may be created for a limited time. Each committee
also operates with subcommittees (generally five or six) to permit further specialization. Committee webpages offer extensive
information about jurisdiction, issues, membership, and pending actions, and include both majority and minority views on the issues.
See www.house.gov/committees/ and www.senate.gov/committees.
b
Both the House and Senate appropriations committees have interior and environment subcommittees that handle all Interior
Department agencies as well as the Forest Service and the EPA. The Energy Department, Army Corps of Engineers, and Nuclear
Regulatory Commission fall under the jurisdiction of the subcommittees on energy and water development. Tax policy affects many
environmental, energy, and natural resource policies and is governed by the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and
Means Committee.
Sources: Compiled from descriptions of committee jurisdictions reported in Rebecca Kimitch, “CQ Guide to the Committees: Democrats
Opt to Spread the Power,” CQ Weekly Online (April 16, 2007): 1080–83, http://library.cqpress.com/cqweekly/weeklyreport110-
000002489956, and from current House and Senate committee websites.
Description

Figure 1.1 Executive Branch Agencies With Environmental Responsibilities

The implications of this constitutional arrangement for policymaking were evident in the early 1980s as
Congress and the courts checked and balanced the Reagan administration’s efforts to reverse
environmental policies of the previous decade. They were just as evident in Barack Obama’s presidency
when the Republican House of Representatives frequently took strong exception to the president’s
budget recommendations and proposals for new rules and regulations in the agencies, especially the
EPA’s efforts to reduce toxic pollution from coal-fired power plants and to restrict release of greenhouse
gases linked to climate change. Similarly, during the Trump administration, members of the president’s
own party often voiced objections to the severity of his proposed budget cuts for environmental
programs and scientific research, and routinely rejected them, often increasing science budgets over
White House objections (see Chapter 5).8

During the last two decades, the conflict between the two major parties on environmental issues had
one striking effect. It shifted attention to the role of the states in environmental policy. As Barry G. Rabe
discusses in Chapter 2, the states often have been at the center of the most innovative actions on
environmental and energy policy, including climate change, when the federal government remained
mired in partisan disputes. By 2020, for example, well over half of the states had adopted some form of
climate change policy, particularly to favor use of renewable energy sources, whereas Congress and the
White House could reach no agreement on what to do.9

Generally, after broad consultation and agreement among diverse interests, both within and outside of
the government, divided authority typically produces slow and incremental alterations in public policy.
Such political interaction and accommodation of interests enhance the overall legitimacy of the resulting
public policies. Over time, however, the cumulative effect often results in disjointed policies that fall short
of the ecological or holistic principles of policy design so often touted by environmental scientists,
planners, and activists.

Nonetheless, when issues are highly visible or salient, the public is supportive, and political leaders act
cohesively, the US political system has proved flexible enough to permit substantial and fairly rapid
policy advancement.10 Quick and bipartisan congressional actions in response to the coronavirus
pandemic in spring 2020 is a recent example. As we shall see, this also was the case in the early to
mid-1970s, when Congress enacted major changes in US environmental policy, and in the mid-1980s,
when Congress overrode objections of the Reagan administration and greatly strengthened policies on
hazardous waste and water quality, among others. Passage of the monumental Clean Air Act
Amendments of 1990 is an example of the same alignment of forces. With bipartisan support, Congress
adopted the act by a margin of 401 to 25 in the House and 89 to 10 in the Senate. Comparable
bipartisanship during the mid-1990s produced major changes in the Safe Drinking Water Act and in
regulation of pesticide residues in food. In 2005 and 2007, the same kind of bipartisan cooperation
allowed Congress to approve new national energy policies and significantly expand protection of
wilderness areas. In 2016, it also led to approval of major changes to the Toxic Substances Control Act,
and in 2019 and 2020 to approval of sweeping land conservation measures (see Chapter 5).
Policy Processes: Agendas, Streams, and Cycles
Students of public policy have proposed several models for analyzing how issues get on the political
agenda, how they are defined or framed, and how they move through the policy processes of
government. These theoretical frameworks help us to understand both long-term policy trends and
short-term cycles of progressive action and political reaction. One set of essential questions concerns
agenda setting: How do new problems emerge as political issues that demand the government’s
attention, if they do achieve such recognition, and how are they defined or framed in the public mind?

For example, why was it so difficult for climate change to gain the attention of policymakers over the
years, and why did various policy actors frame the issue so differently and interpret climate science in
such disparate ways? Climate change’s rise on the political agenda was quite slow, and then it became
a significant issue by the 2008 presidential election campaign, only to fade again in prominence as the
nation’s attention was fixed on the economy and persistently high unemployment. In the 2016 elections,
it returned as a prominent issue and was given a central role in the Trump administration as it sought to
overturn the core elements in Barack Obama’s climate policy (see Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 12).

As the case of climate change illustrates, hurdles almost always must be overcome for an issue to rise
to prominence. The issue must first gain societal recognition as a problem, often in response to
economic, technological, or social changes. It must be defined or framed as a particular kind of problem,
which in turn affects the way possible solutions are developed and whether they are seen as
acceptable.11 Organized interest groups strongly affect this process, as do the media. Finally,
governmental policymakers must consider the issue to be salient enough to warrant action. An issue is
not likely to reach this latter stage unless conditions are ripe—for example, a triggering event that
focuses public opinion sharply, as occurred with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in
2010 and with wildfires in the West in recent years, which reinforced public concern about the effects of
climate change.12

John Kingdon describes this kind of agenda setting as the convergence of three streams of information
and activity that flow through the political system at any time: (1) evidence of the existence of problems,
(2) available policies to deal with them, and (3) the political climate or willingness to act. Although largely
independent of one another, these problem, policy, and political streams can be brought together at
critical times when policy entrepreneurs (key activists and policymakers) are able to take advantage of
the moment and make the case for policy action.13

Once an issue is on the agenda, it must pass through several more stages in the policy process. These
stages are often referred to as the policy cycle. Although terminology varies, most students of public
policy suggest five stages of policy development beyond agenda setting itself. These are (1) policy
formulation (designing and drafting policy goals and strategies for achieving them, which may involve
extensive use of environmental science, economics, and policy analysis), (2) policy legitimation
(mobilizing political support and formal enactment by law or other means), (3) policy implementation
(putting programs into effect through provision of institutional resources such as agency budgets and
staffs and making key administrative decisions, such as regulatory advances or retreats, as well as
judicial rulings on them), (4) policy evaluation (how well policies are working in terms of meeting their
goals at a reasonable cost), and (5) policy change (modifying program goals or the means used to
achieve them, or ending programs altogether).14

The policy cycle model is useful because it emphasizes all phases of policymaking. For example, how
well a law is implemented by agencies such as the EPA or the Interior Department and how the courts
rule on it is as important as the goals and motivations of those who designed and enacted the
legislation. The model also suggests the continuous nature of the policy process. No policy decision or
solution is final because changing conditions, new information, and shifting opinions will require policy
reevaluation and change. Other short-term forces and events, such as presidential or congressional
elections or environmental accidents, can profoundly affect the course of policy over its life cycle. Thus,
policy at any given time is shaped by the interaction of long-term social, economic, technological, and
political forces as well as short-term fluctuations in the political climate. These factors are manifest in the
development of environmental policy.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY FROM THE
1970S TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
As implied in the policy cycle model, the history of environmental policy in the United States is not one of
steady improvement in human relations with the natural environment. Rather, it has been highly uneven,
with significant discontinuities, particularly since the late 1960s. The pace and nature of policy change,
as is true for most areas of public policy, reflect the dominant social values at any given time, the
saliency of the issues, and the prevailing economic and political conditions.

Sometimes, as was the case in the 1970s, the combination facilitates major advances in environmental
policy, and at other times, such as during the early 1980s, early 2000s, and late 2010s, we have periods
of reaction and retrenchment. A third possibility, evident in the 2010s during President Obama’s second
term, is that no political consensus exists on what to do and consequently no major legislative actions
take place. Yet, even in times like this, we see governments responding to changing environmental
challenges through executive authority, rulemaking in administrative agencies, state-level actions, and
court decisions. These responses were evident both in the Obama administration and in the Trump
administration. As noted earlier in the chapter, Trump sought to reverse many Obama initiatives through
executive orders and through deep cuts in agency budgets even as Congress resisted those cuts (see
Chapters 4 and 5). That is, policy change need not come only through the adoption of new legislation; it
can be accomplished through administrative actions as well, and that route to policy change may be
preferred when a presidential administration seeks rapid change with minimal public visibility.15

Despite these variations in political conditions and policy responses, it is fair to say that since the late
1960s, generally we have seen substantial public support for environmental protection and expanding
government authority to act (see Chapter 3).16 We focus here on the major changes from that time
through the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, and we discuss the future
challenges for environmental politics and policy in the concluding chapter of the book.
Policy Actions Prior to 1970
Until about 1970, the federal government played a sharply limited role in environmental policymaking—
public land management being a major exception to this pattern. For nearly a century, Congress had set
aside portions of the public domain for preservation as national parks, forests, grazing lands, recreation
areas, and wildlife refuges. The multiple use and sustained yield doctrines that grew out of the
conservation movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, strongly supported by President
Theodore Roosevelt, ensured that this national trust would contribute to economic growth under the
stewardship of the Interior and Agriculture Departments.

Steady progress was also made, however, in managing the lands in the public interest and protecting
them from development.17 After several years of debate, Congress passed the Wilderness Act of 1964
to preserve some of the remaining forestlands in pristine condition, “untrammeled by man’s presence.”
At the same time, it approved the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965 to fund federal
purchases of land for conservation purposes and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968 to protect
selected rivers with “outstandingly remarkable features,” including biological, scenic, and cultural
value.18

During the mid-1960s, the United States also began a major effort to reduce world population growth in
developing nations through financial aid for foreign population programs, chiefly voluntary family
planning and population research. President Lyndon B. Johnson and congressional sponsors of the
programs tied them explicitly to a concern for “growing scarcity in world resources.”19

Despite this longtime concern for resource conservation and land management, and the new interest in
population and development issues, federal environmental policy was only slowly extended to the
control of industrial pollution and human waste. Air and water pollution were long considered to be
strictly local or state matters, and they were not high on the national agenda until around 1970. In a very
early federal action, the Refuse Act of 1899 required individuals who wanted to dump refuse into
navigable waters to obtain a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers; however, the agency largely
ignored the pollution aspects of the act.20 After World War II, policies to control the most obvious forms
of pollution were gradually developed at the local, state, and federal levels, although some of the
earliest local actions to control urban air pollution date back to the 1880s and the first limited state
actions to the 1890s.

By the late 1940s and 1950s, we see the forerunners of contemporary air and water pollution laws. For
example, the federal government began assisting local authorities in building sewage treatment plants
and initiated a limited program for air pollution research. Following the Clean Air Act of 1963 and
amendments to the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, Washington began prodding the states to set
pollution abatement standards and to formulate implementation plans based on federal guidelines.21
Agenda Setting for the 1970s
The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970. Nationwide “teach-ins” about environmental problems
demonstrated the environment’s new place on the nation’s social and political agendas. With an
increasingly affluent and well-educated society placing new emphasis on the quality of life, concern for
environmental protection grew apace and was evident across the population, if not necessarily to the
same degree among all groups.22 The effect was a broadly based public demand for more vigorous and
comprehensive federal action to prevent environmental degradation. In an almost unprecedented
fashion, a new environmental policy agenda rapidly emerged. Policymakers viewed the newly salient
environmental issues as politically attractive, and they eagerly supported tough new measures, even
when the full impacts and costs were unknown. As a result, laws were quickly enacted and implemented
throughout the 1970s but with a growing concern over their costs and effects on the economy and an
increasing realization that administrative agencies at all levels of government often lacked the capacity
to assume their new responsibilities.

Congress set the stage for the spurt in policy innovation at the end of 1969 when it passed the National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The act declared that

it is the continuing policy of the Federal Government, in cooperation with State and local
governments, and other concerned public and private organizations, to use all practicable
means and measures, including financial and technical assistance, in a manner calculated to
foster and promote the general welfare, to create and maintain conditions under which man
and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other
requirements of present and future generations of Americans.23

The law required detailed environmental impact statements for nearly all major federal actions and
established the Council on Environmental Quality to advise the president and Congress on
environmental issues. President Richard Nixon then seized the initiative by signing NEPA as his first
official act of 1970 and proclaiming the 1970s as the “environmental decade.” In February 1970, he sent
a special message to Congress calling for a new law to control air pollution. The race was on as the
White House and congressional leaders vied for environmentalists’ support.
Policy Escalation in the 1970s
By the spring of 1970, rising public concern about the environment galvanized the 91st Congress
(1969–1971) to action. Sen. Edmund Muskie, D-Maine, the then leading Democratic hopeful for the
presidential nomination in 1972, emerged as the dominant policy entrepreneur for environmental
protection issues. As chair of what is now called the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee,
he formulated proposals that went well beyond those favored by the president. Following a process of
policy escalation, both houses of Congress approved the stronger measures and set the tone of
environmental policymaking for much of the 1970s. Congress had frequently played a more dominant
role than the president in initiating environmental policies, and that pattern continued in the 1970s. This
was particularly so when the Democratic Party controlled Congress during the Nixon and Ford
presidencies. Although support for environmental protection was bipartisan during this era, Democrats
provided more leadership on the issue in Congress and were more likely to vote for strong
environmental policy provisions than were Republicans.24

The increase in new federal legislation in the next decade was truly remarkable, especially since, as we
noted earlier, policymaking in US politics usually takes place through incremental change. Appendix 1
lists the major environmental protection and natural resource policies enacted from 1969 to 2020. They
are arranged by presidential administration primarily to show a pattern of significant policy development
throughout the period, not to attribute chief responsibility for the various laws to the president.

These landmark measures covered air and water pollution control (the latter enacted in 1972 over a
presidential veto), pesticide regulation, endangered species protection, control of hazardous and toxic
chemicals, ocean and coastline protection, improved stewardship of public lands, requirements for the
restoration of strip-mined lands, the setting aside of more than one hundred million acres of Alaskan
wilderness for varying degrees of protection, and the creation of a “Superfund” (in the Comprehensive
Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERCLA) for cleaning up toxic waste
sites. Nearly all of these policies reflected a conviction that the federal government must have enough
authority to compel polluters and resource users to adhere to demanding national pollution control
standards and new decision-making procedures that ensure responsible use of natural resources. There
were other signs of commitment to environmental policy goals as Congress and a succession of
presidential administrations (through Jimmy Carter’s term) cooperated on land conservation issues,
such as wilderness protection, national parks, and wildlife refuges. Throughout the 1970s, the Land and
Water Conservation Fund, financed primarily through royalties from offshore oil and gas leasing, was
used to purchase additional private land for park development, wildlife refuges, and national forests.

Congress maintained its strong commitment to environmental policy throughout the 1970s, even as the
salience of these issues for the public seemed to wane. For example, it revised the Clean Air Act of
1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972 through amendments approved in 1977. Yet, by the end of the
Carter administration, concerns over the impact of environmental regulation on the economy and
specific objections to implementation of the new laws, particularly the Clean Air Act, began creating a
backlash.
Political Reaction in the 1980s
The Reagan presidency brought to the federal government a markedly different environmental policy
agenda (see Chapter 4). Virtually all environmental protection and resource policies enacted during the
1970s were reevaluated in light of the president’s desire to reduce the scope of government regulation,
shift responsibilities to the states, and depend more on the private sector. Whatever the merits of
Reagan’s new policy agenda, it was put into effect through a risky strategy that relied on ideologically
committed presidential appointees to the EPA and the Agriculture, Interior, and Energy Departments and
on sharp cutbacks in budgets for environmental programs.25

Congress initially cooperated with Reagan, particularly in approving budget cuts, but it soon reverted to
its accustomed defense of existing environmental policy, frequently criticizing the president’s
management of the EPA and the Interior Department under Anne Gorsuch (later Burford) and James
Watt, respectively; both Burford and Watt were forced to resign by the end of 1983. Among Congress’s
most notable achievements of the 1980s were its strengthening of the Resource Conservation and
Recovery Act (Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments, 1984); the enactment of the Superfund
Amendments and Reauthorization Act (1986), which toughened the act and also established the federal
Toxics Release Inventory (TRI); and amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act (1986) and the Clean
Water Act (1987; see Appendix 1 for a list of major federal environmental laws from 1969 to 2020).

As we discuss later in this chapter, budget cuts and the loss of capacity in environmental institutions
took a serious toll during the 1980s. Yet even the determined efforts of a popular president could not halt
the advance of environmental policy. Public support for environmental improvement, the driving force for
policy development in the 1970s, increased markedly during Reagan’s presidency and represented the
public’s stunning rejection of the president’s agenda.26 Paradoxically, Reagan strengthened
environmental forces in the nation. Through his lax enforcement of pollution laws and prodevelopment
resource policies, he created political issues around which national and grassroots environmental
groups could organize. These groups appealed successfully to a public that was increasingly disturbed
by the health and environmental risks of industrial society and by threats to ecological stability. As a
result, membership in national environmental groups soared, and new grassroots organizations
developed, creating further political incentives for environmental activism at all levels of government.27

By the fall of 1989, there was little mistaking congressional receptivity to continuing the advance of
environmental policy into the 1990s. Especially in his first 2 years as president, George H. W. Bush was
eager to adopt a more positive environmental policy agenda than his predecessor; this eagerness was
particularly evident in his support for the demanding Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. Bush’s White
House, however, was deeply divided on environmental issues for both ideological and economic
reasons.
SEEKING NEW POLICY DIRECTIONS: FROM THE 1990S TO
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Environmental issues received considerable attention during the 1992 presidential election campaign.
Bush, running for reelection, criticized environmentalists as extremists who were putting Americans out
of work. The Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton, took a far more supportive stance on the environment,
symbolized by his selection of Sen. Al Gore, D-Tennessee, as his running mate. Gore was the author of
a best-selling book, Earth in the Balance, and had one of the strongest environmental records in
Congress.

Much to the disappointment of environmentalists, Clinton exerted only sporadic leadership on the
environment throughout his two terms in office. However, he and Gore quietly pushed an extensive
agenda of environmental policy reform as part of their broader effort to “reinvent government,” making it
more efficient and responsive to public concerns. Clinton was also generally praised for his
environmental appointments and for his administration’s support for initiatives such as the restoration of
the Florida Everglades and other actions based on new approaches to ecosystem management. Clinton
reversed many of the Reagan- and Bush-era executive actions that were widely criticized by
environmentalists, and he favored increased spending on environmental programs, alternative energy
and conservation research, and international population policy.

Clinton also earned praise from environmental groups when he began speaking out forcefully against
the antienvironmental policy decisions of Republican Congresses (see Chapters 4 and 5), for his efforts
through the President’s Council on Sustainable Development to encourage new ways to reconcile
environmental protection and economic development, and for his “lands legacy” initiatives.28 Still,
Clinton displeased environmentalists as often as he gratified them.

The environmental policy agenda of George W. Bush’s presidency is addressed in Chapter 4 and at
points throughout the rest of the book, as are actions taken during Barack Obama’s presidency from
January 2009 through January 2017. As widely expected from statements Bush made on the campaign
trail and from his record as governor of Texas, he and his cabinet departed significantly from the
positions of the Clinton administration. The economic impact of environmental policy emerged as a
major concern, and the president gave far more emphasis to economic development than he did to
environmental protection or resource conservation.

Like his father, Bush recognized the political reality of popular support for environmental protection and
resource conservation. Yet as a conservative Republican, he was also inclined to represent the views of
the party’s core constituencies, particularly industrial corporations and timber, mining, agriculture, and oil
interests. He drew heavily from those constituencies, as well as from conservative ideological groups, to
staff the EPA and the Interior, Agriculture, and Energy Departments, filling positions with what the press
termed industry insiders, a practice that reappeared by 2017 in the Trump administration.29 In addition,
Bush sought to further reduce the burden of environmental protection through the use of voluntary,
flexible, and cooperative programs and to transfer to the states more responsibility for the enforcement
of federal laws. Bush also withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change,
significantly weakening US leadership on global environmental issues.

The administration’s tendency to minimize environmental concerns was equally clear in its 2001
proposal for a national energy policy (which concentrated on the increased production of fossil fuels)
and, throughout Bush’s two terms, in many decisions on clean air rules, water quality standards, mining
regulations, and the protection of national forests and parks, decisions that were widely denounced by
environmentalists.30 Many of these decisions received considerably less media coverage than might
have been expected. In part, this neglect appeared to reflect the administration’s strategy of keeping a
low profile on potentially unpopular environmental policy actions, a pattern that also was evident in the
Trump administration from 2017 through 2020. But President Bush benefited further from the sharply
altered political agenda after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as from the decision in
2003 to invade Iraq.31

Barack Obama’s environmental policy priorities and actions are described in some detail in Chapter 4
and in many of the chapters that follow. Hence, we leave much of that appraisal until later in the volume.
However, we address budgetary and administrative changes during the Obama presidency in the next
section as well as comparable changes in budgets, institutions, and staffing in the Trump administration.
BUDGETS AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
In this review of environmental policy development since 1970, we have highlighted the adoption of
landmark policies and the political conflicts that shaped them. Another part of this story is the changes
over time in budgetary support for the agencies responsible for implementing the policies.

Agency budgets are an important part of institutional capacity, which in turn affects the degree to which
public policies might help to improve environmental quality. Although spending more money hardly
guarantees policy success, substantial budget cuts can significantly undermine established programs
and hinder the achievement of policy goals. For example, the massive reductions in environmental
funding during the 1980s had long-term adverse effects on the government’s ability to implement
environmental policies. Equally sharp budget cuts proposed by Congress in the mid- to late 1990s, by
the Bush administration in the 2000s, and by the Trump administration from 2017 through 2020.

Changes since the 1980s in budgetary support for environmental protection merit brief comment here.
The appendices offer more detail. In constant 2020 dollars (that is, adjusting for inflation), the total
spending authorized by the federal government for natural resource and environmental programs was
about 27 percent higher in 2020 than it was in 1980 (see Appendix 4). However, in some program areas
reflecting the core functions of the EPA, such as pollution control and abatement, spending declined
substantially (about 32 percent) from 1980 to 2020, in constant dollars. In contrast, spending on
conservation and land management rose appreciably between 1980 and 2020, more than tripling, again
in constant dollars. For most budget categories, spending decreased during the 1980s before
recovering under the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and to some extent under
George W. Bush and Barack Obama. A notable exception, other than the case of pollution control, is
spending on water resources, where the phaseout of federal grant programs resulted in a significant
decline in expenditures between 1980 and 2010 before recovering somewhat by 2020; overall, spending
dropped by about 17 percent between 1980 and 2020.

Even when the budget picture was improving, most agencies faced important fiscal challenges.
Agencies’ legal responsibilities rose substantially under environmental policies approved between the
1970s and 2020, and the agency staffs often found themselves with insufficient resources to implement
new policies fully and to achieve the environmental quality goals they embodied.

These constraints can be seen in the budgets and staffs of selected environmental and natural resource
agencies. For example, in constant dollars, the EPA’s operating budget as we calculate it (the EPA
determines it somewhat differently) was only a little higher in 2020 than it was in 1980, despite the many
new duties Congress gave the agency during this period (see Appendix 2). The agency’s budget
authority rose from 2000 to 2010, enjoying a big boost in Obama’s first year in office. It then declined in
2011, rose modestly to $10.8 billion in 2012, but declined again in his last few years in office, ending at
$8.3 billion in proposed spending in fiscal year 2017.

In early 2017, the Trump administration proposed a 31 percent cut from this level of funding, including a
26 percent cut in the environmental program and management budget. However, Congress approved a
budget agreement that year that included only a 1 percent cut in EPA’s budget and no further reduction
in its staff. The administration proposed similar agency budget cuts in succeeding years, with much the
same result. By fiscal year 2019, EPAs reported that its budget stood at $8.85 billion, and for fiscal year
2020 at an estimated $9.1 billion. The Trump administration proposed for fiscal year 2021 that it be
reduced by 26 percent to $6.7 billion, a level that Congress once again is likely to reject.32

The EPA’s staff grew by a greater percentage than its budget, rising from slightly fewer than 13,000 in
1980, the last year of the Carter administration, to around 17,360 by 2011; however, the agency saw its
staff decline substantially after 2011; by 2016, the fiscal year 2017 budget, it stood at about 15,400.33
Most other agencies saw a decrease in staff from 1980 through 2010, some remained at about the
same level, and a few enjoyed an increase in staff size (see Appendix 3).
The Trump White House proposed a large reduction in the EPA’s staff of some 2,500 people below its
modern low point in 2016, as the administration sought to diminish the agency’s role in environmental
protection significantly and turn over many of its responsibilities to the states. As noted, however,
Congress did not go along fully. Even so, by 2019, EPA staff levels had declined to about 14,000, a level
not seen since the late 1980s. The administration’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal put the desired
staffing much lower yet, at 12,610.34 For the near term, it seems likely that both budgets and staffing
levels will remain at their present levels, which almost certainly will continue to adversely affect the
capacity of the agency to achieve the objectives set out for it by Congress.
IMPROVEMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY
It is difficult, both conceptually and empirically, to measure the success or failure of environmental
policies.35 Yet one of the most important tests of any public policy is whether it achieves its stated
objectives. For environmental policies, we should ask if air and water quality are improving, hazardous
waste sites are being cleaned up, and biological diversity is protected adequately. Almost always, we
also want to know what these improvements cost, not just to government, but for society as a whole.
There is no simple way to answer those questions, and it is important to understand why that is, even if
some limited responses are possible.36
Measuring Environmental Conditions and Trends
Environmental policies entail long-term commitments to broad social values and goals that are not easily
quantified. Short-term and highly visible costs are easier to measure than long-term, diffuse, and
intangible benefits, and these differences often lead to intense debates over the value of environmental
programs. For example, should the EPA toughen air quality standards to reduce adverse health effects
or hold off out of concern for the economic impacts of such a move (see Chapter 7)? The answer often
seems to depend on which president sits in the White House and how sensitive the EPA is to public
concerns over the relative benefits and costs.

Variable and often unreliable monitoring of environmental conditions and inconsistent collection of data
over time also make it difficult to assess environmental trends. The time period selected for a given
analysis can affect the results, and many scholars discount some data collected prior to the mid-1970s
as unreliable. One thing is certain, however. Evaluation of environmental policies depends on significant
improvements in monitoring and data collection at both state and federal levels. With better and more
appropriate data, we should be able to speak more confidently in the future about policy successes and
failures. Of course, any such judgments require that policymakers examine the data objectively and
evaluate programs on the evidence as opposed to acting on ideological leanings. This assumption is
difficult to make today as scientific data and professional expertise are not necessarily valued as
consistently by policymakers and other political actors as both were previously.

In the meantime, scientists and pundits continue to debate whether environmental conditions are
deteriorating or improving, and for what reasons. Many state-of-the-environment reports that address
such conditions and trends are issued by government agencies and environmental research institutes.
For the United States, EPA and other agency reports, discussed below, are available online and offer
authoritative data. Not surprisingly, interpretations of the data may differ. For instance, critics of
environmental policy tend to cite statistics that show rather benign conditions and trends (and therefore
little reason to favor public policies directed at them), whereas most environmentalists focus on what
they believe to be indicators of serious environmental decline and thus a justification for government
intervention. The differences sometimes become the object of extensive media coverage and public
debate.

Despite the many limitations on measuring environmental conditions and trends accurately, it is
nevertheless useful to examine selected indicators of environmental quality. They tell us at least
something about what we have achieved or failed to achieve after nearly five decades of national
environmental protection policy. We focus here on a brief overview of trends in air quality, greenhouse
gas emissions, water quality, toxic chemicals and hazardous wastes, and natural resources.37

Air Quality

Perhaps the best data on changes in the environment can be found for air quality, even if disagreement
exists over which measures and time periods are most appropriate. The EPA estimates that, between
1970 and 2018, aggregate emissions of the six principal, or criteria, air pollutants decreased by 74
percent even while the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 275 percent, its population grew
by 56 percent, vehicle miles traveled increased by 173 percent, and energy consumption grew by 44
percent, all of which would likely have increased air pollution without federal laws and regulations.38

Progress generally continues. For example, between 2000 and 2018, monitored levels of the six criteria
pollutants (that is, ambient air concentrations) showed improvement, with all declining during this period
by between 16 and 93 percent. Ozone concentrations (using the 8-hour standard) declined by 16
percent, particulate matter by 31 percent and fine particulates (which pose a greater health risk) by 39
percent, lead by 93 percent, nitrogen dioxide (annual measure) by 49 percent, carbon monoxide by 59
percent, and sulfur dioxide by 80 percent. The changes are far more modest for these pollutants for the
period 2010–2018, indicating a substantial slowing of progress in recent years.

Consistent with these trends, the number of days with unhealthy air quality in major US cities generally
has been trending downward since 1990, although it has leveled off over the past decade. The EPA
celebrates these achievements, saying that the “air quality benefits will lead to improved health,
longevity, and quality of life for all Americans.”39 Despite the history of impressive gains in air quality, as
of 2018, over 137 million people (about 41 percent of the US population) lived in counties with pollution
levels above the standards set for at least one of these criteria pollutants, particularly ozone and fine
particulates. These figures vary substantially from year to year, reflecting changing economic activity
and weather patterns, including wildfire-related air pollution. For example, air quality improved in many
areas in the spring of 2020 due to a coronavirus-related decline in economic activity and vehicle traffic,
and thus reduced use of fossil fuels.40

One of most significant remaining problems is toxic or hazardous air pollutants, which have been
associated with cancer, respiratory diseases, and other chronic and acute illnesses. The EPA was
extremely slow to regulate these pollutants and had established federal standards for only seven of
them by 1989. Public and congressional concern over toxic emissions led Congress to mandate more
aggressive action in the 1986 Superfund amendments as well as in the 1990 Clean Air Act
Amendments. The former required manufacturers of more than 300 different chemicals (later increased
by the EPA to over 650) to report annually to the agency and to the states in which they operate the
amounts of those substances released to the air, water, or land. The EPA’s TRI indicates that for the
core chemicals from industry that have been reported in a consistent manner over time, total releases
on- and off-site decreased by over 60 percent between 1988 and 2015, an impressive improvement in
reducing public exposure to toxic chemicals. For a more recent period, 2007 through 2018, however,
releases declined by only 9 percent.41

The annual TRI reports also tell us that industries continue to release very large quantities of toxic
chemicals to the environment—3.8 billion pounds a year from about 21,000 facilities across the nation,
based on the latest report. About 600 million pounds of the chemicals are released into the air, and
those may pose a significant risk to public health.42 It should be noted, however, that the TRI and
related numbers on toxics do not present a full picture of public health risks. For instance, many
chemicals and industries were added to TRI reporting requirements from the 1990s to the 2010s,
complicating the determination of change over time. Using the original or core list of chemicals obviously
doesn’t account for those put on the list more recently. In addition to the TRI, under the 1990 Clean Air
Act Amendments, the EPA regulates 188 listed air toxics, but nationwide monitoring of emissions is not
standard.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The United States is making significant progress in addressing climate change despite fairly weak
policies, largely because of improved energy efficiency, increased reliance on natural gas rather than
coal for energy production, lower emissions from vehicles because of tougher fuel economy standards,
and rapid growth in the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. The Obama
administration advanced vehicle fuel economy standards and a Clean Power Plan designed to reduce
reliance on coal-fired power plants. The Trump administration weakened both policies.43 Even so, the
new trends emerging in the nation’s energy use are likely to continue.

According to the EPA’s 2020 inventory of greenhouse gases, US emissions in 2018 totaled 6,678 million
metric tons of CO2 equivalent, a common way of accounting for emissions of all forms of greenhouse
gases. Total US emissions of greenhouse gases peaked in 2007 at 7,414 million metric tons, and
declined slowly after that, with some years showing a small increase or decrease. Emissions declined in
2015, 2016, and 2017, but increased by 3.1 percent in 2018, the last year covered in the report.44
Global emissions, however, have been increasing, hitting a new high in 2019, even though emissions
declined temporarily in early 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic.45 The most notable declines in
carbon dioxide releases in the United States have been in electricity generation even as there have
been slight increases in emissions from transportation and industrial activity. Projections for the next
several years depend on the pace of the nation’s movement away from extensive reliance on coal for
generating electricity and on its shift to cleaner-burning natural gas or renewable forms of energy, such
as wind and solar power.

Despite this reduction in emissions, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s
Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (based on highly precise atmospheric measurements) show the global
concentration of the most important greenhouse gases continued to increase in recent years, reflecting
a growth in “radiative forcing” or warming impact of nearly 60 percent since 1990.

Measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, a long-time test
site, show years of continuous increases, with levels reaching 417 parts per million in May 2020. In
addition, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that global carbon dioxide emissions (that is,
releases to the atmosphere) grew significantly in recent years, reflecting an increasing global economy,
although emissions leveled off in 2019. Given what the IEA called a “continuing decoupling of emissions
and economic activity,” the pattern may change in coming years. The explanations for this trend include
the growing reliance on renewable sources of energy, switching from coal to natural gas for electricity
generation, and gains in energy efficiency.46 In this context, it is worth adding that the United States
remains by far the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases by large nations on a per capita basis
(see Chapter 12).

Water Quality

The nation’s water quality has improved since passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972, although more
slowly and more unevenly than has air quality. However, monitoring data are far less adequate for water
quality than for air quality, making judgments about improvement difficult. For example, the best
evidence for the state of water quality can be found in the EPA’s consolidation of state reports
(mandated by the Clean Water Act), which are accessible at the agency website. For the most recent
reporting period (which often is not current due to lax state reporting), the states collectively assessed
only 31 percent of the entire nation’s rivers and streams; 45 percent of lakes, ponds, and reservoirs; 64
percent of estuaries and bays; and a mere 8 percent of coastal shorelines and 13 percent of oceans and
near coastal areas.

Based on these very limited inventories, 47 percent of the surveyed river and stream miles were
considered to be of good quality and 53 percent impaired. Some 71 percent of lakes, ponds, and
reservoirs also were found to be impaired. A classification of impaired means that water bodies are not
meeting or fully meeting the national minimum water quality criteria for “designated beneficial uses” such
as swimming, fishing, drinking-water supply, and support of aquatic life. The same survey found that 80
percent of the nation’s assessed estuaries and bays were impaired, as were 72 percent of assessed
coastal shorelines and 90 percent of assessed oceans and near coastal waters.47

The latest data on water quality show very little improvement in recent years, and in some of the
categories, a decline in quality. In the face of a growing population and strong economic growth,
prevention of significant further degradation of water quality could be considered an important
achievement. At the same time, water quality clearly falls short of the goals of federal clean water acts.

The causes of impaired waters today are well understood. The EPA reports that the leading identifiable
sources of impairment of rivers and streams, for example, are agriculture, human modification of
waterways, atmospheric deposition of chemicals, habitat modification, unspecified nonpoint sources,
and municipal discharges (in that order). That is, the causes no longer are point sources of pollution,
such as industrial discharges, which have been well controlled with regulation under the Clean Water
Act. Rather, they are largely nonpoint sources that are much more difficult to control and will take longer
to affect.
To date, little progress has been made in halting groundwater contamination despite passage of the
Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, and their later
amendments. Heading the list of contaminant sources are leaking underground storage tanks, septic
systems, landfills, spills, fertilizer applications, large industrial facilities, hazardous waste sites, and
animal feedlots. With about half of the nation’s urban population relying on groundwater for drinking
water (99 percent in rural areas), far more remains to be done.48

The surge in natural gas drilling around the nation through hydraulic fracturing or fracking has sparked
additional concerns over groundwater quality and its possible impacts on human health. Fracking
involves the injection of massive amounts of water mixed with sand and various chemicals under high
pressure to release natural gas from shale formations. There were over 1.7 million active wells in the
nation in recent years, and they yielded about two-thirds of natural gas production; natural gas is now
the leading source of the country’s electricity generation. One consequence, however, is increasing
citizen concern about the risks posed by fracking’s possible contamination of groundwater. Fracking is
regulated primarily by the states rather than the federal government.49

Toxic Chemicals and Hazardous Wastes

Progress in dealing with hazardous wastes and other toxic chemicals has been the least satisfactory of
all pollution control programs. Implementation of the major laws has been extraordinarily slow due to the
extent and complexity of the problems, scientific uncertainty, litigation by industry, public fear of siting
treatment and storage facilities nearby, budgetary limitations, and poor management and lax
enforcement by the EPA. As a result, gains have been modest when judged by the most common
measures.

For example, the nation has yet to agree on how to dispose of high-level radioactive wastes from civilian
nuclear power plants, despite several major national policies that date back decades. There also is the
enormous task of cleaning up contaminated federal facilities, such as former nuclear weapons
production plants, as well as tens of thousands of abandoned mines on federal lands in the West for
which the federal government is liable for remediation. One comprehensive assessment in 2016 put the
total federal environmental liability at over $400 billion, with the eventual cleanup cost likely to be much
higher than that.50

One of the major federal programs aimed at toxic and hazardous chemicals is Superfund. For years, the
government made painfully slow progress under the program in cleaning up the nation’s worst
hazardous waste sites. By the late 1990s, however, the pace of action improved significantly. Even so,
by 2020, the EPA reported 1,335 sites remained on the program’s National Priorities List or NPL; the
NPL includes the top 1,600 or so sites out of some 40,000 Superfund sites in the country.51 Many
cleanup efforts have been successful to date, and those sites are removed from the list. Yet the pace of
future cleanup remains in doubt given scarce federal funds for the program. In addition, some of the
costliest cleanups, including chemical containments in rivers and bays, remain to be addressed. The
EPA captured the challenge well in a report from several years ago. It noted that the “Superfund cleanup
work EPA is doing today generally is more difficult, is more technically demanding, and consumes
considerable resources at fewer sites than in the past.”52

Historically, the EPA has set a sluggish pace in the related area of testing and acting on toxic chemicals,
including pesticides. For example, under a 1972 law mandating control of pesticides and herbicides,
only a handful of chemicals used to manufacture the fifty thousand pesticides in use in the United States
had been fully tested or retested. The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 required the EPA to
undertake extensive assessment of the risks posed by new and existing pesticides. Following a lawsuit,
the EPA began moving more quickly toward meeting the act’s goal of protecting human health and the
environment from these risks. The agency has said in recent years that it has begun a new program to
reevaluate all pesticides in use on a regular basis, at least once every 15 years.53
Similarly, limited progress in implementing the relatively weak Toxics Substances Control Act of 1976
finally led to the act’s amendment in 2016 with congressional approval of the Frank R. Lautenberg
Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act. That act mandated that the EPA evaluate existing chemicals
with a new risk-based safety standard, that it do so with clear and enforceable deadlines, with increased
transparency for chemical information, and with assurances that the agency would have the budgetary
resources to carry out its responsibilities for chemical safety. A list of the first ten chemicals to be studied
was released in late 2016. However, it remains unclear whether the Trump administration will accord the
new law the priority that Congress intended, particularly in light of the budgetary and staff cuts that are
likely to hinder the act’s implementation.54

Natural Resources

Comparable indicators of environmental progress can be cited for natural resource use. As is the case
with pollution control, however, interpretation of the data is problematic. We have few good measures of
ecosystem health, and controversies continue about how best to value ecosystem services. Moreover,
the usual information supplied in government reports details only the area of land set aside for
recreational and aesthetic purposes rather than how well ecosystem functions are being protected.55
Nonetheless, the trends in land conservation and wilderness protection suggest important progress
since the 1960s.

For example, the national park system grew from about 26 million acres in 1960 to over 84 million acres
by 2020, and the number of units (that is, parks) in the system doubled. Since adoption of the 1964
Wilderness Act, Congress has set aside more than 111 million acres of wilderness through the national
wilderness preservation system. Since 1968, it has designated parts of 226 rivers in 41 states as wild
and scenic, with over 13,400 river miles protected by 2020. The Fish and Wildlife Service manages
more than 150 million acres in more than 560 units of the national wildlife refuge system in all fifty
states, far in excess of the total acreage in the system in 1970; about 95 million acres of this total are set
aside as wildlife habitat.56

Protection of biological diversity through the Endangered Species Act has produced some success as
well, although far less than its supporters believe essential. By March 2020, 47 years after passage of
the 1973 act, more than 1,661 US plant and animal species had been listed as either endangered or
threatened, and more than 1,169 active recovery plans were in effect. Yet only a few endangered
species have recovered fully. The Fish and Wildlife Service reported in 2008 (no similar assessments
have been made in more recent years) that 41 percent of those listed were considered to be stable or
improving, but that 34 percent were considered to be declining in status, and that for 23 percent their
status was unknown. About 2 percent were presumed to be extinct.57
ASSESSING ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRESS
As the data reviewed in the preceding sections suggest, the nation made impressive gains between
1970 and 2020 in controlling many conventional pollutants and in expanding parks, wilderness areas,
and other protected public lands. Despite some setbacks, progress on environmental quality continues,
even if it is highly uneven from one period to the next. In the future, however, further advances will be
more difficult, costly, and controversial. This is largely because the easy problems have already been
addressed. At this point, marginal gains—for example, in air and water quality—are likely to cost more
per unit of improvement than in the past. Moreover, second-generation environmental threats such as
toxic chemicals, hazardous wastes, and nuclear wastes are proving even more difficult to regulate than
the “bulk” air and water pollutants that were the main targets in the 1970s. In these cases, substantial
progress may not be evident for years to come, and it may well be expensive.

The same is true for the third generation of environmental problems, such as global climate change and
the protection of biodiversity. Solutions require an unprecedented degree of cooperation among nations
and substantial improvement in institutional capacity for research, data collection, and analysis, as well
as for policy development and implementation. Hence, success is likely to come slowly and will reflect
the extent to which national and international commitments to environmental protection grow and
capabilities improve.

Some long-standing problems, such as population growth, will continue to be addressed primarily within
nation-states, even though the staggering effects on natural resources and environmental quality are felt
worldwide. By mid-2020, the Earth’s population of about 7.7 billion people was increasing at an
estimated 1.1 percent (or about 85 million people) each year, with a middle-range projection for the year
2050 at about 9.8 billion. The US population had a natural rate of growth (that is, not counting
immigration) of 0.3 percent a year, and middle-range projections by the Population Reference Bureau
put the US population at about 388 million by 2050 (see Chapter 13).58
CONCLUSION
Since the 1970s, public concern and support for environmental protection have risen significantly,
spurring the development of an expansive array of policies that substantially increased the government’s
responsibilities for the environment and natural resources, both domestically and internationally. The
implementation of these policies, however, has been far more difficult and controversial than their
supporters ever imagined. Moreover, the policies have not been entirely successful, particularly when
measured by tangible improvements in environmental quality. Further progress will likely require the
United States to search for more efficient and effective ways to achieve these goals, including the use of
alternatives to conventional command-and-control regulation, such as the use of flexible regulation,
market incentives, and information disclosure or public education.59 Despite these qualifications, the
record since the 1970s demonstrates convincingly that the US government is able to produce significant
environmental gains through public policies. Unquestionably, the environment would be worse today if
the policies enacted during the 1970s and 1980s, and since then, had not been in place.

Emerging environmental threats on the national and international agenda are even more formidable
than the first generation of problems addressed by government in the 1970s and the second generation
that dominated political debate in the 1980s. Responding to these threats will require creative new
efforts to improve the performance of government and other social institutions, as well as effective
leadership to design appropriate strategies to combat these threats, both within government and in
society itself. Some of these strategies might include sustainable community initiatives and corporate
social responsibility actions. This new policy agenda is addressed in Part IV of the book and in Chapter
15.

Government obviously is an important player in the environmental arena, and the federal government
will continue to have unique responsibilities, as will the fifty states and the more than ninety thousand
local governments across the nation. President Obama assembled an experienced and talented
environmental policy team to address these challenges and, at the launch of his administration, vowed
to make energy and environmental issues “a leading priority” of his presidency and a “defining test of
our time.”60 The Donald Trump administration adopted a dramatically different environmental policy
agenda and set of priorities, the effects of which will become apparent only over the next few years.
Readers can judge for themselves how well recent presidents and their appointees have lived up to the
promises they made as they peruse the chapters in this volume. It is equally clear, however, that
government rarely can pursue forceful initiatives without broad public support. Ultimately, society’s
values and priorities will shape the government’s response to a rapidly changing world environment that,
in all probability, will involve major economic and social dislocations over the coming decades.
NOTES
1. See survey data reviewed in Chapter 3; Riley E. Dunlap, “Public Opinion and Environmental Policy,”
in Environmental Politics and Policy: Theories and Evidence, 2nd ed., ed. James P. Lester (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 63–114; Riley E. Dunlap, George H. Gallup Jr., and Alec M. Gallup,
“Of Global Concern: Results of the Health of the Planet Survey,” Environment 35, no. 9 (1993): 7–15,
33–40; and David P. Daniels, Jon A. Krosnick, Michael P. Tichy, and Trevor Tompson, “Public Opinion on
Environmental Policy in the United States,” in The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy, ed.
Sheldon Kamieniecki and Michael E. Kraft (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 461–86.

2. Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft, eds., Environmental Policy in the 1980s: Reagan’s New Agenda
(Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1984).

3. See Robert Durant, Rosemary O’Leary, and Daniel Fiorino, eds., Environmental Governance
Reconsidered: Challenges, Choices, and Opportunities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017);
Daniel Fiorino, The New Environmental Regulation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Marc Allen
Eisner, Governing the Environment: The Transformation of Environmental Regulation (Boulder, CO:
Lynne Rienner, 2007); and Christopher McGrory Klyza and David Sousa, American Environmental
Policy: Beyond Gridlock, updated and expanded edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

4. For example, see Daniel A. Mazmanian and Michael E. Kraft, eds., Toward Sustainable Communities:
Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009);
Durant, O’Leary, and Fiorino, Environmental Governance Reconsidered; Klyza and Sousa, American
Environmental Policy; and Michael E. Kraft, Mark Stephan, and Troy D. Abel, Coming Clean:
Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

5. Kent E. Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: Economic Development, the Environment, and
Quality of Life in American Cities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

6. The California policy is discussed in Chapter 2. On Minnesota’s multifaceted and very successful
energy policy, see Michel Wines, “Without Much Straining, Minnesota Reins in Its Utilities’ Carbon
Emissions,” New York Times, July 17, 2014. See also Roger Karapin, Political Opportunities for Climate
Policy: California, New York, and the Federal Government (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2016); and Barry G. Rabe, Statehouse and Greenhouse: The Emerging Politics of American Climate
Change Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004).

7. See Walter A. Rosenbaum, “Science, Policy, and Politics at the EPA,” in Environmental Policy, 8th
ed., ed. Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013), 158–84. See also
National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), Setting Priorities, Getting Results: A New Direction
for EPA (Washington, DC: NAPA, 1995), 124–25.

8. See, for example, Glenn Thrush and Coral Davenport, “Donald Trump Budget Slashes Funds for
E.P.A. and State Department,” New York Times, March 15, 2017; and Rebecca Beitsch and Rachel
Frazin, “Trump Budget Slashes EPA Funding, Environmental Programs,” The Hill, February 10, 2020;
and Jeffrey Mervic, “Trump’s New Budget Cuts All But a Favored Few Science Programs,” Science 367
(6479): February 14, 2020: 723–24.

9. See Karapin, Political Opportunities for Climate Policy and Klyza and Sousa, American Environmental
Policy, Chapter 7.

10. John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 2nd ed. (New York: HarperCollins,
1995); and Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

11. For a review of how this process works, see Deborah Lynn Guber and Christopher J. Bosso, “Issue
Framing, Agenda Setting, and Environmental Discourse,” in The Oxford Handbook of U.S.
Environmental Policy, ed. Sheldon Kamieniecki and Michael E. Kraft (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 437–60.

12. Roger W. Cobb and Charles D. Elder, Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-
Building (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1972). See also Thomas A. Birkland, After Disaster: Agenda Setting,
Public Policy, and Focusing Events (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1997).

13. Kingdon, Agendas.

14. For a more thorough discussion of how the policy cycle model applies to environmental issues, see
Michael E. Kraft, Environmental Policy and Politics, 7th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018), Chapter 3.
The general model is discussed at length in James E. Anderson, Public Policymaking: An Introduction,
8th ed. (Stamford, CT.: Cengage Learning, 2015), as well as in Thomas A. Birkland, An Introduction to
the Policy Process: Theories, Concepts, and Models of Public Policy Making, 5th ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2020).

15. Klyza and Sousa, American Environmental Policy. See also Frank J. Thompson, Kenneth K. Wong,
and Barry G. Rabe, Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism (Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution, 2020).

16. Dunlap, “Public Opinion and Environmental Policy”; Deborah Lynn Guber, The Grassroots of a
Green Revolution: Polling America on the Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and Daniels
et al., “Public Opinion on Environmental Policy in the United States.”

17. Paul J. Culhane, Public Lands Politics: Interest Group Influence on the Forest Service and the
Bureau of Land Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). See also Richard N. L.
Andrews, Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental
Policy, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020); and Sally K. Fairfax, Lauren Gwin, Mary
Ann King, Leigh Raymond, and Laura A. Watt, Buying Nature: The Limits of Land Acquisition as a
Conservation Strategy: 1780–2004 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

18. Andrews, Managing the Environment; Kraft, Environmental Policy and Politics, Chapter 4.

19. Michael E. Kraft, “Population Policy,” in Encyclopedia of Policy Studies, 2nd ed., ed. Stuart S. Nagel
(New York: Marcel Dekker, 1994), 617–42.

20. J. Clarence Davies III and Barbara S. Davies, The Politics of Pollution, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1975).

21. Evan J. Ringquist, Environmental Protection at the State Level: Politics and Progress in Controlling
Pollution (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), Chapter 2; Davies and Davies, The Politics of Pollution,
Chapter 2. A much fuller history of the origins and development of modern environmental policy than is
provided here can be found in Andrews, Managing the Environment and in Michael J. Lacey, ed.,
Government and Environmental Politics: Essays on Historical Developments since World War Two
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

22. Samuel P. Hays and Barbara D. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in
the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See also Dunlap,
“Public Opinion and Environmental Policy,” and Robert Cameron Mitchell, “Public Opinion and
Environmental Politics in the 1970s and 1980s,” in Environmental Policy in the 1980s, ed. Norman J. Vig
and Michael E. Kraft (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1984), 51–74.

23. National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, Pub. L. No. 91–90 (42 USC 4321–4347), Sec. 101. See
also Lynton Keith Caldwell, The National Environmental Policy Act: An Agenda for the Future
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

24. Michael E. Kraft, “Congress and Environmental Policy,” in The Oxford Handbook of U.S.
Environmental Policy, ed. Kamieniecki and Kraft, 280–305; Amy Below, “Parties, Campaigns, and
Elections,” in The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy, ed. Kamieniecki and Kraft, 525–51;
and Charles R. Shipan and William R. Lowry, “Environmental Policy and Party Divergence in Congress,”
Political Research Quarterly 54 (June 2001): 245–63.

25. Vig and Kraft, Environmental Policy in the 1980s.

26. See Riley E. Dunlap, “Public Opinion on the Environment in the Reagan Era,” Environment 29 (July–
August 1987): 6–11, 32–37; and Mitchell, “Public Opinion and Environmental Politics.”

27. The changing membership numbers can be found in Kraft, Environmental Policy and Politics,
Chapter 4. See also Christopher J. Bosso, Environment, Inc.: From Grassroots to Beltway (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2005).

28. President’s Council on Sustainable Development, Sustainable America.

29. Katharine Q. Seelye, “Bush Picks Industry Insiders to Fill Environmental Posts,” New York Times,
May 12, 2001.

30. See Natural Resources Defense Council, Rewriting the Rules: The Bush Administration’s First-Term
Environmental Record (New York: NRDC, 2005); Bruce Barcott, “Changing All the Rules,” New York
Times Magazine, April 4, 2004; and Margaret Kriz, “Vanishing Act,” National Journal, April 12, 2008, 18–
23.

31. Eric Pianin, “War Is Hell: The Environmental Agenda Takes a Back Seat to Fighting Terrorism,”
Washington Post National Weekly Edition, October 29–November 4, 2001, 12–13. See also Barcott,
“Changing All the Rules,” and Joel Brinkley, “Out of the Spotlight, Bush Overhauls U.S. Regulations,”
New York Times, August 14, 2004.

32. See Denise Lu and Armand Emamdjomeh, “Local Programs Get the Biggest Hit in Proposed EPA
Budget,” Washington Post, April 11, 2017; and Milman, “Trump Budget Would Gut EPA Programs
Tackling Climate Change and Pollution.” Current and historical EPA budgets and staff numbers can be
found at https://www.epa.gov/planandbudget/budget.

33. On the staff numbers, see EPA, FY 2015: EPA Budget in Brief, Publication No. EPA-190-S-14-001
(Washington, DC: EPA, Office of the Chief Financial Officer, March 2014), available at
http://www2.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2014-03/documents/fy15_bib.pdf. The overall EPA budget
numbers come from the Obama administration’s fiscal year 2017 budget. Annual budget numbers in
EPA’s FY 2017 document differ somewhat from the budget authority figures in the historical tables of the
fiscal year 2017 budget. For consistency, we use the latter for comparisons over time.

34. See James K. Conant and Peter J. Balint, The Life Cycles of the Council on Environmental Quality
and the Environmental Protection Agency: 1970–2035 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). The
book reports in detail on EPA and Council on Environmental Quality personnel and budgetary support
over time.

35. Robert V. Bartlett, “Evaluating Environmental Policy,” in Environmental Policy in the 1990s, 2nd ed.,
eds. Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1994), 167–87; Evan J. Ringquist,
“Evaluating Environmental Policy Outcomes,” in Environmental Politics and Policy, ed. James P. Lester
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 303–27; and Gerrit J. Knaap and Tschangho John Kim,
eds., Environmental Program Evaluation: A Primer (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

36. One of the most thorough evaluations of environmental protection policies of this kind can be found
in J. Clarence Davies and Jan Mazurek, Pollution Control in the United States: Evaluating the System
(Washington, DC: NAPA, 1995). See also Daniel Press, American Environmental Policy: The Failures of
Compliance, Abatement and Mitigation (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015).

37. For a fuller account, see Kraft, Environmental Policy and Politics, Chapter 2.
38. US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Our Nation’s Air,” available at
https://gispub.epa.gov/air/trendsreport/2019/#home, accessed May 24, 2020. Other data in this section
come from the EPA’s report Air Trends, which is much more comprehensive and covers differing time
periods: https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary, accessed May 24, 2020.

39. US EPA, “Air Trends Report.”

40. US EPA, “Air Trends Report.”

41. The data are from the Toxics Release Inventory: National Analysis for the most recent year
available: https://www.epa.gov/trinationalanalysis/releases-chemicals, accessed March 27, 2020.

42. EPA, 2018 Toxics Release Inventory: National Analysis,

https://www.epa.gov/trinationalanalysis/releases-chemicals, accessed March 27, 2020. The volume of
releases refers only to TRI facilities that reported to the EPA that year. Facilities falling below a threshold
level are not required to report, nor are many smaller facilities. To view TRI data for anywhere in the
United States via an interactive map, see https://www.epa.gov/trinationalanalysis/releases-chemicals.

43. See, for example, Coral Davenport, “U.S. to Announce Rollback of Auto Pollution Rules, a Key Effort
to Fight Climate Change,” New York Times, March 30, 2020.

44. See EPA, Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2018 (Washington, DC:
EPA, 2020), available at https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-
and-sinks, accessed May 8, 2020.

45. See Brad Plumer, “Carbon Dioxide Emissions Hit a Record in 2019, Even as Coal Fades,” New York
Times, December 4, 2019; and Chris Mooney, Brady Dennis, and John Muyskens, “Global Emissions
Plunged an Unprecedented 17 Percent During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Washington Post, May 19,
2020.

46. US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, The NOAA
Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (Boulder, CO: NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory), available at
https://esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html, accessed March 31, 2020. The IEA report can be found at
https://www.iea.org/articles/global-co2-emissions-in-2019.

47. US EPA, “National Summary of State Information,” available at

https://ofmpub.epa.gov/waters10/attains_nation_cy.control#total_assessed_waters. The same page
allows review of reports on each of the fifty states.

48. US EPA, National Water Quality Inventory: 2000 Report to Congress (Washington, DC: Office of
Water, EPA, 2002). After this publication, the EPA no longer included an assessment of groundwater in
these reports. The US Geological Survey has an extensive program of monitoring and assessing
groundwater. See its website (https://www.usgs.gov). See also the EPA’s page on groundwater and
drinking water: http://water.epa.gov/drink/.

49. A major study by the EPA found that “hydraulic fracturing activities can impact drinking water
resources under some circumstances,” but also that data gaps and uncertainties limit its ability to
characterize the severity of the impacts. See US EPA, Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts
from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources in the United States: Final
Report EPA/600/R-16/236F (Washington, DC: Office of Research and Development, 2016), available at
https://www.epa.gov/hfstudy.

50. See Government Accountability Office, Numbers of Contaminated Federal Sites, Estimated Costs,
and EPA’s Oversight Role, GAO-15-830T (Washington, DC: GAO, 2015) and Government
Accountability Office, U.S. Government’s Environmental Liability (Washington, DC: GAO, 2016). The
latter report was published as part of the GAO’s 2017 High-Risk Series: Government Accountability
Office, Progress on Many High-Risk Areas, While Substantial Efforts Needed on Others, GAO-17-317
(Washington, DC: GAO, February 2017), 232–47.

51. The summary data can be found at https://www.epa.gov/superfund/npl-site-totals-status-and-

milestone, accessed on March 31, 2020.

52. On the cleanup of rivers, see Anthony DePalma, “Superfund Cleanup Stirs Troubled Waters,” New
York Times, August 13, 2012. For the quotation, see US Environmental Protection Agency, The Office of
Solid Waste and Emergency Response: Fiscal 2010 End of the Year Report (Washington, DC: USEPA,
2010), 12, https://archive.epa.gov/region3/ebytes/web/pdf/oswer_eoy_2010.pdf.

53. The pertinent documents can be found at the EPA’s website for pesticide programs:
https://www.epa.gov/pesticides/.

54. See Coral Davenport and Emmarie Huetteman, “Lawmakers Reach Deal to Expand Regulation of
Toxic Chemicals,” New York Times, May 19, 2016. For details about the new act, see the EPA webpage
on it: https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/frank-r-lautenberg-chemical-
safety-21st-century-act.

55. Hallett J. Harris and Denise Scheberle, “Ode to the Miner’s Canary: The Search for Environmental
Indicators,” in Environmental Program Evaluation: A Primer, eds. Gerrit J. Knaap and Tschangho John
Kim (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 176–200. See also Gretchen C. Daily, ed., Nature’s
Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997); and
Water Science and Technology Board, Valuing Ecosystem Services: Toward Better Environmental
Decision-Making (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2004).

56. The numbers come from the various agency websites.

57. The Fish and Wildlife Service website provides extensive data on threatened and endangered
species and habitat recovery plans through its ECOS system at https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp/. Look for the
“listed species summary” tab. The figures on improving and declining species come from the US Fish
and Wildlife Service, Report to Congress on the Recovery of Threatened and Endangered Species:
Fiscal Years 2009–2010 (Washington, DC: Fish and Wildlife Service, January 2012), available at
https://www.fws.gov/endangered/esa-library/pdf/Recovery_Report_2010.pdf.

58. Population Reference Bureau, “2020 World Population Data Sheet,” available at https://www.prb.org.

59. See Mazmanian and Kraft, Toward Sustainable Communities; Fiorino, The New Environmental
Regulation; Eisner, Governing the Environment; and Kraft, Stephan, and Abel, Coming Clean. A number
of the chapters in Kamieniecki and Kraft, eds., The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy also
analyze the promise of new policy approaches, as do the chapters in Durant, Fiorino, and O’Leary,
Environmental Governance Reconsidered.

60. The quotation is from John M. Broder and Andrew C. Revkin, “Hard Task for New Team on Energy
and Climate,” New York Times, December 16, 2008. See also David A. Fahrenthold, “Ready for
Challenges: Obama’s Environmental Team: No Radicals,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition,
December 22, 2008–January 4, 2009, 34.
Descriptions of Images and Figures
Back to Figure

The flowchart is a representation of the various executive branch agencies along with their respective
environmental responsibilities. It starts at the very top with the President under whose executive office
lies the White House Office, Council on Environmental Quality, Office of Management and Budget, and
Office of Science and Technology Policy, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of the Interior,
Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of State, Department of Justice,
Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, Department of Housing
and Urban Development, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Labor, Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Department of Homeland Security.
2 RACING TO THE TOP, THE
BOTTOM, OR THE MIDDLE OF THE
PACK? : THE EVOLVING STATE
GOVERNMENT ROLE IN
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
—Barry G. Rabe

The problem which all federalized nations have to solve is

how to secure an efficient central government and preserve
national unity, while allowing free scope for the diversities,
and free play to the … members of the federation. It is … to
keep the centrifugal and centripetal forces in equilibrium, so
that neither the planet States shall fly off into space, nor the
sun of the Central government draw them into its
consuming fires.
Lord James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 1888

Before the 1970s, the conventional wisdom on federalism viewed

“the planet States” as sufficiently lethargic to require a powerful
“Central government” in many areas of environmental policy. States
were widely derided as mired in corruption, hostile to innovation, and
unable to take a serious role in environmental policy out of fear of
alienating key economic constituencies. If anything, they were seen
as “racing to the bottom” among their neighbors, attempting to
impose as few regulatory burdens as possible. In more recent times,
the tables have turned—so much so that current conventional
wisdom often berates an overheated federal government that
squelches state creativity and capability to tailor environmental
policies to local realities. The decentralization mantra of recent
decades has endorsed an extended transfer of environmental policy
resources and regulatory authority from Washington, DC, to states
and localities.

Governors turned presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton,

and George W. Bush, extolled the wisdom of such a strategy, at least
in their rhetoric. Many heads of the US Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), including Gina McCarthy in the Obama administration
and Scott Pruitt under Donald Trump, took federal office after
extended state government experience. They frequently endorsed
the idea of shifting some authority back to statehouses, while
differing on just what that meant in practice. Pruitt repeatedly
invoked the phrase “cooperative federalism” during his 2017
confirmation hearings in embracing a state-centered model of
federalism. His 2019 successor, Andrew Wheeler, employed similar
rhetoric in advancing many Trump initiatives designed to soften
federal authority over air, water, and climate in favor of expanded
state discretion. Of course, such a transfer would pose a potentially
formidable test of the thesis that more localized units know best and
has faced major political hurdles.

What accounts for this sea change in our understanding of the role
of states in environmental policy? How have states evolved in recent
decades, and what types of functions do they assume most
comfortably and effectively? Despite state resurgence, are there
areas in which states fall short? How did states respond to efforts by
the Trump administration to reduce federal engagement and shift
many environmental protection responsibilities to them? Looking
ahead, should regulatory authority devolve to the states, or are there
better ways to sort out federal and state responsibilities?

This chapter addresses these questions, examining evidence of

state performance in environmental policy. It provides both an
overview of state evolution and a set of brief case studies that
explore state strengths and limitations. These state-specific accounts
are interwoven with assessments of the federal government’s role,
for good or ill, in the development of state environmental policy.
Indeed, as political scientist John Kincaid has noted in a
sophisticated analysis of power shifting between federal and state
governments since the founding of the Republic, federal
environmental policy powers have expanded markedly since 1970
and yet the American system remains quite balanced between
federal and state authority.1 In order to be truly effective, US
environmental policy often needs to reflect constructive engagement
across state and federal levels rather than acrimony.
THE STATES AS THE “NEW HEROES” OF
AMERICAN FEDERALISM
Policy analysts are generally most adept at analyzing institutional
foibles and policy failures. Indeed, much of the literature on
environmental policy follows this pattern, with criticism particularly
voluminous and potent when directed toward federal efforts in this
area. By contrast, states have received much more favorable
treatment. Many influential books and reports on state government
and federalism portray states as dynamic and effective.
Environmental policy is often depicted as a prime example of this
general pattern of state performance. Some analysts routinely
characterize states as the “new heroes” of American federalism, as
having long since eclipsed a doddering federal government.
According to this line of argument, states are consistently at the
cutting edge of policy innovation, eager to find creative solutions to
environmental problems, and “racing to the top” with a goal of
national preeminence in the field. When the states fall short, an
overzealous federal partner is often said to be at fault.

Such assertions have considerable empirical support. The vast

majority of state governments have undergone fundamental changes
since the first Earth Day in 1970. Many states have drafted new
constitutions and gained access to unprecedented revenues through
expanded taxing powers. These state powers have been further
refined and expanded through highly active constitutional
amendment processes.2 In turn, many state bureaucracies have
grown and become more professionalized, as have staff serving
governors and legislatures. Expanded policy engagement was
further stimulated by increasingly competitive two-party systems in
many regions between 1980 and 2010, intensifying pressure on
elected officials to deliver desired services. Heightened use of direct
democracy provisions, such as the initiative and referendum, and
increasing activism by state courts and coalitions of elected state
attorneys general create alternative routes for policy adoption. On
the whole in recent decades, public opinion data have consistently
found that citizens have a considerably higher degree of “trust and
confidence” in the public services and regulations dispensed from
their state capitals than those generated from Washington. This
pattern was evident during 2020 when governors received far higher
marks than President Trump in their ability to address the profound
challenges of the COVID-19 crisis. These factors have converged to
expand state capacity and commitment to environmental protection.

This transformed state role is evident in virtually every area of

environmental policy. States directly regulate approximately 20
percent of the total US economy, including many areas in which
environmental concerns come into play.3 States operate more than
90 percent of all federal environmental programs that can be
delegated to them. Collectively, they approach that high level of
engagement in the issuance of all environmental permits and the
implementation of all environmental enforcement actions. Despite
this expanded role, federal financial support to states in the form of
grants to fund environmental protection efforts has generally
declined since the early 1980s and plunged further during the Trump
presidency. This increasingly forces states to find ways to fund most
of their operations even as many face significant fiscal strains and
face constitutional limits on their ability to run deficits.

Many areas of environmental policy remain clearly dominated by

states, including most aspects of waste management, groundwater
protection, land use management, transportation, energy production,
and electricity regulation. This state-centric role is also reflected in
rapidly emerging areas, such as environmental risks to air, water,
and land linked to dramatic expansion in the exploration of shale gas
and oil via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) techniques. In many
instances, state action represents “compensatory federalism,”
whereby Washington proves “hesitant, uncertain, distracted, and in
disagreement about what to do,” and states respond with a “step into
the breach.”4 Even in policy areas with an established federal
imprint, such as air and water quality, states often have considerable
latitude to oversee implementation and move beyond federal
standards if they so choose. In air quality alone, more than a dozen
states routinely adopt policies to either exceed federal standards or
fill federal regulatory gaps, often setting models for national
consideration. Political scientists Christopher McGrory Klyza and
David Sousa confirm that “the greater flexibility of state government
can yield policy innovation, opening the way to the next generation of
environmental policy.”5

That flexibility and commitment are further reflected in the

institutional arrangements established by states to address
environmental problems. Many states maintain comprehensive
agencies that gather most environmental responsibilities under a
single organizational umbrella. These agencies have sweeping,
cross-programmatic responsibilities and some take the lead on
emerging issues such as climate change. In turn, many states have
continued to experiment with new organizational arrangements to
meet evolving challenges, including the use of informal networks,
special task forces, and interstate compacts to facilitate cooperation
among various departments and agencies.6

This expanded state commitment to environmental policy may be

accelerated, not only by the broader factors introduced above but
also by features somewhat unique to this policy area. First, many
scholars contend that broad public support for environmental
protection provides considerable impetus for more decentralized
policy development tailored to salient local concerns. Such “civic
environmentalism” stimulates numerous state and local stakeholders
to take creative collective action independent of federal intervention.
As opposed to top-down controls, game-theoretic analyses of efforts
to protect so-called common-pool resources, such as river basins
and forests, side decisively with local or regional approaches to
resource protection. Much of the leading scholarly work of the late
Elinor Ostrom, who in 2009 became the first political scientist to win
the Nobel Prize in economics, actively embraced “bottom-up” or
“polyarchic” environmental governance, including possible climate
change applications.7
Second, the proliferation of environmental policy professionals in
state agencies and legislative staff roles has created a sizable base
of talent and ideas for state-level policy innovation. Contrary to
conventional depictions of agency officials as shackled by elected
“principals,” an alternative view finds considerable policy innovation
or “entrepreneurship” in state policymaking circles. This pattern is
especially evident in environmental policy because numerous areas
of specialization place a premium on expert ideas and allow for
considerable innovation within agencies.8 Recent scholarly work on
state environmental agency performance gives generally high marks
to officials for professionalism, constructive problem-solving, and
increasing emphasis on improving environmental outcomes, albeit
with considerable state-to-state variation.9 Networks of state
professionals, working in similar capacities but across jurisdictional
boundaries, have become increasingly influential in recent decades.
These networks facilitate information exchange, foster the diffusion
of innovation, and pool resources to pursue joint initiatives. Such
multistate groups as the Environmental Council of the States, the
National Association of Clean Air Agencies, and the National
Association of State Energy Officials also band together to influence
the design of subsequent federal policies, seeking either latitude for
expanded state experimentation or federal emulation of state “best
practices.” Other entities, such as the Northeast States for
Coordinated Air Use Management, the Great Lakes Commission,
and the Pacific Coast Collaborative, represent state interests in
certain regions.

Third, environmental policy in many states is stimulated by direct

democracy, unlike the federal level, through initiatives, referendums,
and the recall of elected officials. In every state except Delaware,
state constitutional amendments must be approved by voters via
referendum. Thirty-one states and Washington, DC, also have some
form of direct democracy for approving legislation, representing well
over half the US population. Use of this policy tool has grown at an
exponential rate to consider a wide array of state environmental
policy options, including nuclear plant closure, disclosure of
commercial product toxicity, and public land acquisition. In 2016 and
2018, Washington voters decisively rejected proposals to establish
the first tax in the United States on carbon dioxide emissions, a
policy already in place in parts of Canada and Europe, prompting
Governor Jay Inslee to pursue other paths to climate policy. In prior
years, however, Washington voters approved a ballot proposition
requiring a steady increase in the amount of electricity derived from
renewable sources, as was the case in Colorado and Missouri.
Western states have generally made the greatest use of these
provisions on environmental issues, particularly Oregon, California,
and Colorado. In 2020, voters considered a wide range of
environmental ballot propositions, including far-reaching expansion
in Missouri and Nevada of earlier renewable energy policies, an
Oregon proposal to heighten water protection from logging and
pesticides, and a Colorado proposal to reintroduce the gray wolf to
wildlife areas.
THE CUTTING EDGE OF POLICY: CASES
OF STATE INNOVATION
The convergence of these various political forces has unleashed
substantial new environmental policy at the state level. Various
researchers have attempted to analyze some of this activity through
ranking schemes that determine which states are most active and
innovative, often tracking how policy ideas then diffuse across
states. Such studies consistently conclude that certain states tend to
take the lead in most areas of policy innovation, followed by an often
uneven pattern of innovation diffusion across state and regional
boundaries.10 For example, the American Council for an Energy-
Efficient Economy produces annual rankings of states on the basis
of their adoption rates for a range of policies that offer environmental
protection through more efficient energy use. In 2019, its
researchers found that Massachusetts retained the top ranking for
the ninth straight year, followed by California and other states
located primarily on the East and West coasts. Maryland registered
the biggest advances of any state from 2018, while Hawaii also
made major strides. Minnesota maintained the highest ranking
among Midwestern states, Colorado led Mountain West states, and
Florida received top rating in the Southeast. Kansas, Louisiana, and
North and South Dakota ranked at the very bottom.11

Additional analyses have attempted to examine which economic and

political factors are most likely to influence the rigor of state policy or
the level of resources devoted to it.12 An important but less
examined question concerns the relationships between
environmental policy and both environmental quality and economic
growth. Policy scholars Daniel Fiorino and Riordan Frost have
created an “eco-efficiency index” that looks across multiple areas of
environmental protection over time, ranking states according to the
“stress on health and ecology required to generate a given unit of
income.”13 These rankings generally parallel earlier studies that track
rates of policy innovation and adoption, with higher scores reflecting
greater eco-efficiency (see Table 2.1). In turn, a more established
body of research suggests that a number of state innovations offer
promising alternatives to prevailing approaches, often representing a
direct response to local environmental crises and revealing
shortcomings in existing policy design. Brief case studies that follow
indicate the breadth and potential effectiveness of state innovation.
Table 2.1 State Air, Climate, and Energy (ACE) Index

Weighted Weighted
State State
Overall Score Overall Score
New Jersey 47.04 Georgia 9.60
California 41.36 Minnesota 9.34
Connecticut 36.17 Utah 9.16
New York 36.03 Texas 8.84
Rhode Island 30.49 Arizona 8.54
Massachusetts 28.81 South 8.31
Carolina
Delaware 26.57 Indiana 7.00
Maryland 26.18 Iowa 6.70
Washington 17.86 Idaho 6.63
Virginia 17.36 Missouri 6.56
New 16.91 Nebraska 6.44
Hampshire
Hawaii 16.71 Kentucky 6.15
North Carolina 15.15 South 5.61
Dakota
Pennsylvania 14.56 Alabama 5.03
Illinois 13.55 Kansas 4.93
Florida 13.10 West 4.82
Virginia
Vermont 12.99 Oklahoma 4.60
 Weighted Weighted
State State
Overall Score Overall Score
Nevada 12.58 Louisiana 4.58
Oregon 11.38 Arkansas 4.53
Colorado 11.02 New 4.31
Mexico
Tennessee 11.00 Mississippi 4.17
Ohio 10.28 Alaska 4.00
Michigan 10.07 Montana 3.38
Wisconsin 9.99 North 3.35
Dakota
Maine 9.87 Wyoming 2.20
Source: Daniel Fiorino and Riordan Frost, “The Pilot Eco-Efficiency Index: A New State
Environmental Ranking for Researchers and Government” (paper presented at the
Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management’s fall research conference,
Washington, DC, November 4, 2016),
www.researchgate.net/publication/315736703_The_Pilot_Eco-
Efficiency_Index_A_New_State_Environmental_Ranking_for_Researchers_and_Govern
ment.
Anticipating Environmental Challenges
One of the greatest challenges facing US environmental policy is the
need to shift from a pollution control mode that reacts after damage
has occurred to one that anticipates potential problems and attempts
to prevent or minimize them. Some states have launched serious
planning processes in recent decades, attempting to pursue
preventative strategies in an increasingly systematic and effective
way. All fifty states have adopted at least one pollution prevention
program, and some have taken particularly bold approaches, cutting
across conventional programmatic boundaries with various
mandates and incentives to pursue prevention opportunities. Thirty-
four states have adopted laws that move beyond federal standards
in preventing risks from chemical exposure, such as bans of specific
chemicals thought to pose health risks or comprehensive chemical
management systems.14 California has been particularly active in
this area and heavily influenced the design of new federal legislation
adopted in 2016.

Minnesota has long joined California as a national leader in this

area. It requires hundreds of state firms to submit annual toxic
pollution prevention plans and prioritize “chemicals of concern.”15
These plans must outline each firm’s current use and release of a
long list of toxic pollutants and establish formal goals for their
reduction or elimination over specified periods of time. Firms have
considerable latitude in determining how to attain these goals,
contrary to the technology-forcing character of much federal
regulation. But they must meet state-established reduction
timetables and pay fees on releases. Minnesota was also one of the
first two states to ban bisphenol A, a controversial chemical used in
plastics. It moved quickly to address polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS)
chemicals in water supplies, supported by an $850 million 2018 legal
settlement with a major manufacturer of these chemicals. From
these earlier efforts, Minnesota and other states have established
multidisciplinary teams that attempt to forecast emerging
environmental threats and respond before problems arise, including
review of potential environmental risks from nanotechnology and its
production of tiny particles that may improve product design but also
harbor environmental risks.16 Minnesota has also taken a pioneering
role in measuring the environmental impacts of carbon dioxide
emissions and attaching a price to them in statewide electricity
planning.17 In 2019, Governor Tim Walz elevated the role of climate
change in long-term policy development, creating a climate “sub-
cabinet” involving every Minnesota department and establishing
benchmarks for future mitigation and adaptation.18

Colorado has taken a “race-to-the-top” approach to policy designed

to anticipate and thereby minimize environmental risks from
hydraulic fracturing practices. The state has a long-standing history
in oil and gas extraction and has sought in recent years to temper
all-out energy production by addressing environmental challenges in
the fracking era. This featured pioneering steps in requiring public
disclosure of chemicals used in drilling operations, water quality
sampling, air quality standards, and property owner protections.19 It
emerged through a deliberative process orchestrated by former
Governor John Hickenlooper to engage diverse stakeholders to take
proactive steps to mitigate risks.20 In 2019–2020, Colorado adopted
a suite of additional laws that went even farther, imposing unusually
strong regulatory standards on methane and other hydrocarbons and
nitrogen oxides from energy production and transmission and
requiring continuous emissions monitoring with cutting-edge
technology. The state also took steps to give localities considerable
authority to add their own regulatory oversight while transitioning for
a less carbon-intensive future through sweeping new energy
efficiency and renewable energy policies. Another major energy-
producing state, New Mexico, began moving in similar directions in
2020, developing performance-based regulatory standards and
penalties that offered firms incentives for emission release
reductions that could be verified while intensifying oversight on
laggard firms.21
Economic Incentives
Economists have long lamented the penchant for command-and-
control rules and regulations in US environmental policy. Most would
prefer to see a more economically sensitive set of policies, such as
taxes on emissions to capture social costs or “negative externalities”
and provide monetary incentives for good environmental
performance.22 The politics of imposing such costs has proven
contentious at all governmental levels, although a growing number of
states have begun to pursue some form of this approach in recent
years. In all, the states have enacted hundreds of measures that can
be characterized as “green taxes,” including environmentally-related
“surcharges” and “fees” that avoid the explicit use of the label “tax”
but are functional equivalents.23 Revenues from such programs are
often used to cover costs of popular programs such as recycling,
land conservation, and energy efficiency. A growing number of states
have begun to revisit their general tax policies with an eye toward
environmental purposes, including major tax incentives in many
states to purchase hybrid and electric vehicles or invest in renewable
energy. Many states and localities have also developed taxes on
solid waste, often involving a direct fee for garbage pickup while
offering free collection of recyclables.

One of the earliest and most visible economic incentive programs

involves refundable taxes on beverage containers.24 Ten states—
covering one-third of the population—operate such programs.
Deposit collections flow through a system that includes consumers,
container redemption facilities such as grocery stores, and firms that
reuse or recycle containers. Michigan’s program is widely regarded
as among the most successful of these state efforts and, similar to a
number of others, is a product of direct democracy. Michigan’s
program places a dime deposit on containers—double the more
conventional nickel—which may contribute to its unusually high
redemption rate above 95 percent through the 2010s. The failure to
adjust this policy for inflation or expand it to other beverages,
however, served to erode its effectiveness over time. This type of
state policy has diffused to other products, including scrap tires,
used motor oil, pesticide containers, appliances with ozone-depleting
substances, electronic waste such as used computers, and plastic
bags.

States also have constitutional authority to tax all forms of energy,

including transportation fuel and electricity. Increasing the price of
energy in concert with its environmental damage would likely
discourage consumption and related environmental damage, just as
sustained tax increases have elevated the costs of smoking and
driven down rates of tobacco use in recent decades. Many states
have been highly reluctant to move beyond their traditional levels of
taxation for fuels such as gasoline that are commonly used to
maintain highways and bridges. But ten states have worked over the
past decade to place a price on the release of carbon emissions
through an auctioning process linked to an emissions cap that
declines over time. Building on pioneering American work to reduce
sulfur dioxide emissions, nine northeastern states have maintained
the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) that requires
purchase, through quarterly public auctions, of allowances to emit
carbon. This pricing mechanism also provides revenue whereby
RGGI states can support alternative energy projects or rebate
consumer electricity bills. Political scientist Leigh Raymond has
argued that RGGI offers a “new model” for climate policy that is
already influencing other governments in America and
internationally.25 California operates its own version of this cap-and-
trade system in collaboration with Canadian province Québec.
During 2019–2020, New Jersey and Virginia formalized plans to join
RGGI and significantly expand its reach. In turn, Pennsylvania
Governor Thomas Wolf issued a 2019 executive order preparing the
Keystone State for RGGI membership. This faced legislative
opposition and potential state court scrutiny but, if advanced, would
literally double RGGI’s size in terms of carbon emission volume.

RGGI’s successes inspired creation of a transportation sector

replica. The Transportation Climate Initiative involves a partnership
between twelve northeastern and Atlantic states, designed to create
a regional “cap-and-invest” system. This would price oil and gas use,
reallocating revenue to participating states to develop more
environmentally friendly transportation systems. This region
continues to be a hotbed for experimentation on environmental
pricing strategies, further reflected in active exploration of carbon tax
options in such states as Massachusetts and New York.
Filling the Federal Void: Reducing
Greenhouse Gases
As the RGGI case demonstrates, states have proven unexpectedly
active players in the fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to
curb climate change. While most Congresses and some presidents
have struggled to make any policy contribution to this problem, a
number of states have attempted to fill some of the “policy gap”
created by federal inaction.26 This American “bottom-up” approach
has also emerged in other federal or multilevel governmental
systems, including Canada, Australia, and the European Union.27
Many states are responsible for substantial amounts of greenhouse
gas emissions, even by global standards. If all states were to secede
and become independent nations, eighteen of them would rank
among the top fifty nations in the world in terms of releases. In
response, many states have adopted policies that promise to reduce
their greenhouse gas releases, although they often tend to also
pursue these policies for other environmental and economic
reasons.

State-level engagement on climate policy has tended to peak during

periods where federal engagement is lowest, thereby seizing
opportunities that were being ignored or reversed nationally. This
has certainly been evident since the advent of the Trump
administration, including formation of a 25-state coalition that has
pledged to meet Paris Climate Agreement emission reduction
commitments within their boundaries. A 2019 study of subfederal
climate policy concluded that American states could be divided into
three tiers in terms of environmental commitment. At the top, 45
percent of the population and one-third of total emissions involved
“first-mover” states actively engaged in policy. In contrast, 35 percent
of the population and 47 percent of total emissions involved “slow-
follower” states that lagged far behind all others. In the middle were
“fast-follower” states seen as attempting to keep pace with first-
movers, with 20 percent of the population and emissions. The study
concluded that full implementation of all state policies adopted
through 2018 alone could achieve approximately two-thirds of total
American emission reductions that had been pledged under Paris.28

One common climate policy involves a clean electricity mandate

designed to accelerate state transition away from fossil fuel sources.
Twenty-nine states and Washington, DC, have established
“renewable portfolio standards (RPS),” beginning with Iowa in 1991,
and three have clean energy standards. Eight additional states have
nonbinding renewable energy goals and two have comparable clean
energy goals. These policies generally follow a similar structure,
although they vary in terms of both the definition of eligible sources
and the overall targets and timetables for expanding capacity. Seven
states (California, Hawaii, Maine, New Mexico, New York, Virginia,
and Washington) expanded earlier RPS commitments between 2018
and 2020, with legislation mandating that all state electricity emanate
from nonfossil fuel sources between 2045 and 2050. Three others
(Connecticut, New Jersey, and Wisconsin) took similar steps via
gubernatorial executive orders.29 Even without additional federal or
state policies, these existing state efforts were projected to increase
the share of electricity provided by renewables nationally to 26
percent by 2030. In turn, 20 states have adopted energy efficiency
equivalents of an RPS, mandating an ongoing increase in overall
energy efficiency that in some cases is integrated with renewable
energy mandates. Seven states have adopted nonbinding versions
of these policies, and numerous states have adopted more rigorous
efficiency standards for new buildings or appliance purchases.
These policies loom large among state pledges to honor Paris
reduction targets.

Several states also developed policy to reduce climate damage

related to greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, including
accelerated transition away from hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in
refrigerators and air conditioning systems. HFCs were devised
decades ago as far friendlier to the ozone layer than previous
chemicals that they replaced. But they have far greater global
warming potential per molecule than carbon or even methane. Cost-
effective chemical alternatives are available, and there was
widespread international support even among industry for a 2016
phase-out treaty. However, the Trump administration’s decision to
withdraw the treaty from Senate consideration in 2017 prompted four
states to adopt legislation phasing out HFCs and two more to
develop regulatory provisions. These state actions prompted serious
bipartisan Congressional consideration of a national version of this
approach in 2019–2020, although this ultimately collapsed.

California has ranked among the world’s most active governments in

addressing climate change, developing cap-and-trade policies
alongside renewable electricity and fuel standards and energy-
efficiency provisions.30 It has adopted a number of pioneering
climate statutes in recent decades, including multiple bills designed
to achieve aggressive statewide emission reductions. California
attempts to attain those goals through an all-out policy assault on
virtually every sector that generates greenhouse gases, including
industry, electricity, transportation, agriculture, livestock, waste
management, and residential activity, giving extraordinary authority
to the formidable California Air Resources Board in overseeing
implementation. But California’s flagship climate initiative reflected
repeated use of a unique waiver it holds under federal air legislation.
On more than 100 occasions since 1968, California has established
more rigorous tailpipe emission standards for cars and trucks than
the rest of the nation, although its waiver frequently leads to other
states joining a “bandwagon” that ultimately prompts adoption of a
national standard reflecting California’s lead. This policy has resulted
in substantial statewide and national emission reductions per vehicle
in past decades and took new form in 2009 when the Obama
administration embraced a bold California waiver focused on carbon
emissions as national policy, merging vehicle emission with fuel
economy standards and setting bold targets that would reach an
average of 54.5 miles per gallon in 2025. This reform reflected a
unique situation whereby one state can innovate within its own
boundaries but leverage national-level change in the process
through power granted to it through federal legislation, although it
would face an unprecedented challenge to continue use of this
power in 2020 as noted below.31 Governor Gavin Newsom pushed
even farther in late 2020, issuing an executive order to ban all sales
of gas-powered vehicles in California by 2035, raising added
questions about constitutional authority in his state.
Taking It to the Federal Government
At the same time that states have eclipsed the federal government
through new policies, they have also made increasingly aggressive
use of litigation to attempt to force the federal government to take
new steps or reconsider previous ones. The ability of state attorneys
general from the party opposite the president to take unified and
aggressive countermeasures against executive branch policy
reached new heights under Barack Obama, where virtually every
major climate, air, or water initiative was actively confronted,
resulting in protracted litigation and some state efforts to refuse to
comply with federal orders.32 Unlike their federal counterpart, most
state attorneys general are elected officials, with powers that have
expanded significantly in recent decades. They do not necessarily
work collaboratively with the sitting governor and often use their
powers as a base from which to secure broader visibility and seek
higher office, most commonly governorships.33

Collectively, these officials have increasingly become a force to be

reckoned with, particularly as they expand their engagement through
challenges brought into the federal courts. Whereas President
Obama was routinely challenged by Republican attorneys general,
President Trump was peppered with comparable responses to his
environmental deregulation efforts from Democratic attorneys
general. California’s Xavier Becerra, Massachusetts’ Maura Healey,
and New York’s Letitia James routinely led coalitions tailored to each
particular issue and these expanded in 2019–2020 after more
Democratic attorneys general were elected. A 2019 study identified
some 300 separate actions, ranging from multistate lawsuits to
comment letters, that these officials took to block Trump
administration actions on issues such as climate, air and water
quality, chemical accidents, and public lands and wildlife.34 It
appeared increasingly likely that this form of collective action by
states led by officials of the party opposite the sitting president might
become a permanent feature of political opposition to policies of a
given federal executive.35
STATE LIMITS
Such a diverse set of policy initiatives would seem to augur well for
the states’ involvement in environmental policy. Any such
enthusiasm must be tempered, however, by a continuing concern
over how evenly that innovative vigor extends over the entire nation.
One enduring rationale for giving the federal government so much
environmental policy authority is that states appear to face inherent
limitations. Rather than a consistent, across-the-board pattern of
dynamism, we see a more uneven pattern of performance than
decentralization advocates might anticipate. Just as some states
consistently strive for national leadership, others appear to seek the
middle or bottom of the pack, seemingly doing as little as possible
and rarely taking innovative steps. This imbalance becomes
particularly evident when environmental problems are not confined to
a specific state’s boundaries. Many environmental issues are, by
definition, transboundary, raising important questions of interstate
and interregional equity in allocating responsibility for environmental
protection. These doubts about state capacity and commitment raise
important concerns for any effort to shift more responsibility for
environmental protection from federal to state governments, as was
a central Trump administration emphasis.
Uneven State Performance
Many efforts to rank states according to their environmental
regulatory rigor, institutional capacity, or general innovativeness find
the same subset of states at the top of the list year after year. By
contrast, a significant number of states consistently tend to fall much
further down the list, somewhat consistent with their placement in
Table 2.1 and characterization above as “slow followers,” raising
questions as to their overall policy capacity and commitment. As
political scientist William R. Lowry notes, “Not all states are
responding appropriately to policy needs within their borders…. If
matching between need and response were always high and weak
programs existed only where pollution was low, this would not be a
problem. However, this is not the case.”36 A 2018 study on state
policy adoption across multiple policy areas confirmed wide
environmental policy disparities among states, concluding that “the
most conservative states on the environment simply do not pass the
major environmental laws that the ‘green’ states do.”37

Given all the hoopla surrounding the newfound dynamism of states

racing to the top in environmental policy, there has been remarkably
little analysis of the performance of states that not only fail to crack
top-ten rankings but may view racing to the bottom as an economic
development strategy. Such a downward race may be particularly
attractive during recessions, as was reflected in recent efforts in
states such as North Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin to
weaken dramatically the implementation of existing policies, efforts
that had the express goal of promoting economic growth by creating
a policy environment friendlier to industry.38 What we know more
generally about state policy commitment should surely give pause
over any claims that state dynamism is truly national in scope.
Despite considerable economic growth in formerly poor regions,
such as the Southeast, substantial variation endures among state
governments in their rates of public expenditure, including their total
and per capita expenditures on environmental protection.39 Such
disparities are consistent with studies of state political culture and
social capital, which indicate vast differences in probable state
receptivity to governmental efforts to foster environmental
improvement. These divides increasingly reflect deep partisan
cleavage, unlike early periods between the 1990s and 2000s where
it was more common to see Republicans and Democrats join forces
behind state environmental policy adoption as is discussed in
Chapter 1.

Although many states have unveiled exciting new programs, nearly

half have established some formal restrictions that preclude their
environmental agencies from adopting any regulations or standards
that are more stringent than those of the federal government in such
areas as air and water quality.40 EPA Office of Inspector General
reports and other external reviews generate serious questions about
how effectively states handle core functions either delegated to them
under federal programs or left exclusively to their oversight. Studies
of water quality program implementation have found that states use
highly variable water quality standards in areas such as sewage
contamination, groundwater protection, nonpoint water pollution from
diffuse sources, wetland preservation, fish advisories, and beach
closures. Inconsistencies abound in reporting accuracy, suggesting
that national assessments of water quality trends that rely on data
from state reports may be highly suspect.41 More than half of the
states lack comprehensive water management and drought
response plans, and several with such plans have not revised them
in many years.42 Even in many high-saliency cases, such as
Everglades protection, states have sought a federal rescue rather
than taking serious unilateral action that can be sustained over
time.43 Agricultural interests, particularly those promoting regional
sugar production, have proven formidable opponents of major
restoration, which would restrict their access to massive water
volumes.44

Similar issues have arisen as states have struggled in recent years

to formulate policies to reduce environmental risks linked to shale
gas and oil development, with many racing in the opposite direction
from Colorado’s. Many have proven particularly lenient with methane
releases, even though these represent the permanent loss of a
nonrenewable energy source and pose significant air quality and
climate concerns. Many states have long recognized either direct
venting of methane or flaring into carbon dioxide as wasteful and
dangerous practices, yet offer generous exemptions or exceptions to
established regulations. Venting and flaring triggered particular
concern in the booming Bakken region (North Dakota and Montana)
and Permian Basin (Texas and New Mexico) as methane releases
soared amid rapid expansion of production. State officials routinely
acknowledge the problem as well as their chronic failure to prepare
for long-term remediation of hundreds of thousands of idle or
“orphan” wells after production ends. However, they remained highly
reluctant to impose methane regulations, bonding requirements, or
taxes on prominent energy producing firms, fearful that they might
shift operations to other states with softer standards in response or
accelerate their pursuit of bankruptcy protection during economic
downswings.45

Comparable problems have emerged in state enforcement of air

quality and waste management programs, including basic data
collection and reporting. Despite efforts in some states to integrate
and streamline permitting, many have extensive backlogs and lack
reliable measures of facility compliance with various regulatory
standards. Existing indicators confirm enormous variation among
states, although we likely know less about such variation than in the
1990s, given that the EPA has lost funding and staff to maintain
state-by-state data in many areas of environmental policy. State
governments—alongside their local counterparts—have
understandably claimed much of the credit for increasing solid waste
recycling rates from a national average of 6.6 percent in 1970 to 16
percent in 1990 to 35.2 percent in 2017. At the same time, state
recycling rates and policy design vary markedly, with some states
formally restricting what local governments can do.

There was also growing indication in some states during the

previous decade that environmental policy faced major challenges in
cases where state leaders assumed that government could be
managed similarly to business and industry. Michigan shifted to total
Republican control of the executive and legislative branches in 2010,
and former Republican Governor Rick Snyder won high marks
nationally for his role in addressing fiscal concerns and assisting
cities such as Detroit navigate bankruptcy en route to economic
recovery.46 But the use of state-appointed emergency financial
managers to oversee fiscally-challenged municipalities backfired with
tragic consequences in the case of Flint, a declining city that had
once been an auto manufacturing hub.47 The search for fiscal
balance led to a 2015 decision to shift the source of Flint’s water
supply to save money and resulted in significant lead exposure for a
city of nearly 100,000 residents. A set of state environmental and
public health agencies ignored early warning signs and failed to
respond to the emerging crisis, as did regional EPA authorities
based in Chicago. This resulted in substantial lead contamination for
Flint residents and has necessitated massive efforts to provide
alternative water supplies and begin to replace damaged water
infrastructure that continued more than 5 years after the initial
incident. Research on water quality trends indicates that Flint is not
alone among American localities in this regard, raising questions
over state and local stewardship of drinking water quality in Michigan
and nationally as well as long-term challenges that may require
massive new investments in modern water infrastructure that few
states have shown commitment to supporting.48
Enduring Federal Dependency
Many states have proven reluctant or unable to tap into their own
revenues to support environmental protection efforts, thereby
developing a deep dependency on federal grant funding to cover
core programs or launch new initiatives. There are enormous
differences between states in terms of their tax base and both
capacity and willingness to produce significant revenues,
compounded by a focus in some to only pursue policy when most of
the operational costs are covered through intergovernmental
financial transfers. Indeed, considerable innovative state-level
activity has been at least partially underwritten through federal
grants, which can serve to stimulate additional state environmental
spending.49 Although a number of states have developed fee
systems to cover much of their operational costs, many continue to
rely heavily on federal grants to fund some core environmental
protection activities. States have continued to receive other
important types of federal support, including grants and technical
assistance to complete air and water quality management, wetlands
program development, drinking water infrastructure, brownfields
reclamation, and more. On the whole, states have annually received
between one-fifth and one-third of their total environmental and
natural resource program funding from federal grants in recent
years, although a few states have remained more heavily reliant on
federal dollars. The overall level of federal support has declined in
recent decades and reduction accelerated during the Trump
administration.

State dependence on federal funding has grown in the majority of

states given widespread reluctance to expand agency funding and
staff, even during periods of relative fiscal well-being for many states
during the latter 2010s. A 2019 Environmental Integrity Project report
on state commitment to environmental programs found that “a
majority of states have cut their pollution control spending and
staffing over the last decade—often more drastically than EPA—
even at times when overall state budgets have grown and
environmental challenges have increased.”50 Some states pursued
particularly far-reaching reductions. The Texas Commission on
Environmental Quality, for example, cut its budget by 35 percent
between 2008 and 2018, even though overall state spending
increased by 41 percent. Other states with particularly deep cuts
included Indiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In
contrast, 20 states reduced their dependency on federal dollars
through spending and staff increases during this period.

Furthermore, for all the opprobrium heaped on the federal

government in environmental policy, it has provided states with at
least three other forms of valuable assistance, some of which has
contributed directly to the resurgence and innovation of state
environmental policy. First, federal development of the Toxics
Release Inventory, modeled after programs initially attempted in
Maryland and New Jersey, has emerged as an important component
of many of the most promising state policy initiatives. This program
has generated considerable data concerning toxic releases and
provided states with a vital data source for exploring alternative
regulatory approaches.51 Many state pollution prevention programs
would be unthinkable without such an annual information source.
This program has also provided lessons for states to develop
supplemental disclosure registries for greenhouse gases and
chemical releases related to hydraulic fracturing.52

Second, many successful efforts to coordinate environmental

protection on a multistate, regional basis have received substantial
federal input and support. A series of initiatives in the Chesapeake
Bay, the Great Lakes Basin, and New England have received
considerable acclaim for tackling difficult issues and forging regional
partnerships; federal collaboration—via grants, technical assistance,
coordination, and efforts to unify regional standards—with states has
proven useful in these cases.53 One model for engagement was the
Great Lakes Restoration Initiative championed by the Obama
administration; intended to address pressing regional environmental
challenges, it was successful in accelerating ecological recovery in
several states with legacies of heavy toxic contamination, although
funding to sustain operations lagged in the Trump administration.
Aside from RGGI, other recent regional initiatives in the West and
Midwest to reduce greenhouse gases struggled to endure in the
absence of federal engagement or support.

Third, the EPA can constrain state innovativeness, but its oversight
of state-level program implementation often looks more constructive
when considering the role played by the agency’s ten regional
offices. Most state-level interaction with the EPA involves such
regional offices, which employ approximately two-thirds of the total
EPA workforce and regularly delegate enormous implementation
authority to states.54 Relations between state and regional officials
are generally more cordial and constructive than those between
state and central EPA officials, and such relations may even be, in
some instances, characterized by high levels of mutual involvement
and trust.55 Surveys of state environmental officials confirm that they
have a more positive relationship with regional rather than central
agency staff.56 Regional offices have played a key role in many
promising state-level innovations, particularly during sympathetic
presidential administrations. Their involvement may include formal
advocacy on behalf of states with central headquarters, direct
collaboration on meshing state initiatives with federal requirements,
and special grant support or technical assistance.
The Interstate Environmental Balance of
Trade
States may be structurally ill equipped to handle a large range of
environmental concerns. In particular, they may be reluctant to invest
significant energies to tackle problems that might literally migrate to
another state or nation in the absence of intervention. The days of
state agencies being captured securely in the hip pockets of major
industries are probably long gone, reflecting fundamental changes in
state government.57 Nonetheless, state regulatory dynamism may be
particularly likely to decline when cross-boundary transfer is likely.

The state imperative of economic development clearly contributes to

this phenomenon. As states increasingly devise economic
development strategies that resemble Asian and European industrial
policies, a range of research has concluded they are far more deeply
committed to strategies that promote investment or development
than to those that involve social service provision or public health
promotion.58 A number of states routinely offer incentives of tens of
thousands of dollars per new job to prospective developers and have
intensified efforts to outbid neighboring states in the struggling
manufacturing sector. Energy-producing states often maintain
generous tax preferences and provide infrastructure to support
extraction firms. Environmental protection can be eminently
compatible with economic development goals, promoting overall
quality of life and general environmental attractiveness that entices
private investment. In many states, tourism and recreation industries
have played active roles in seeking strong environmental programs
designed to maintain natural assets. In some instances, states may
be keen to take actions that could produce internal environmental
benefits as long as these actions do not disrupt their economic
growth. California and other states that have formally endorsed
setting strict emissions standards from vehicles or even bans over
time on purchase of gas-powered cars and trucks, for example, have
very few jobs to lose in the vehicle manufacturing sector. They also
see potential economic advantages if they can take a lead role
nationally in developing alternative transportation technologies.

But much of what a state might undertake in environmental policy

may largely benefit other states or regions, thereby reducing an
individual state’s incentive to take meaningful action. In fact, in many
instances, states continue to pursue a “we make it, you take it”
strategy. As political scientist William Gormley notes, sometimes
“states can readily export their problems to other states,” resulting in
potentially serious environmental “balance of trade” problems.59 In
such situations, states may be inclined to export environmental
contaminants to other jurisdictions while enjoying any economic
benefits to be derived from the activity that generated the
contamination. One careful study of state air quality enforcement
found no evidence of reduced regulatory effort along state borders
but a measurable decline in effort along state borders with Mexican
states or Canadian provinces.60

Such cross-boundary transfers take many forms and may be

particularly prevalent in environmental policy areas in which long-
distance migration of pollutants is most likely. Air quality policy has
long fit this pattern. Midwestern states, for example, have historically
depended on burning massive quantities of coal to meet electricity
demands. Prevailing winds invariably transfer pollutants from this
activity to other regions, particularly New England, leading to serious
concern about various contamination threats. Nationally, many states
fail to meet federal air quality standards due to “interstate ‘downwind’
pollution.” Despite some advances linked largely to federal air policy,
air pollution remains responsible for estimated premature deaths of
more than 100,000 people per year.61 A 2020 study concluded that
between 41 and 53 percent of premature mortality due to air
pollution exposure resulted from a state’s emissions that occurred
outside its boundaries. It found that electricity sector emissions were
particularly prominent but that releases from other forms of
commercial and residential activity had grown in significance over
recent decades. Fine particulate matter and ozone emerged as
particularly large public health concerns in this research, whereas
sulfur dioxide emissions have declined as a threat.62 Cross-border
transfers have also contributed to the growing problem of airborne
toxics that ultimately pollute water or land in other regions, including
chronic Lake Superior water quality problems linked to air
contaminants generated outside the Great Lakes. Political scientist
John Kincaid has noted that “externality mitigation across states”
contributed to greater centralization of environmental policy in past
decades.63

Interstate conflicts, often becoming protracted battles in the federal

courts, have endured in recent decades as states allege they are
recipients of such unwanted “imports.” This has included prolonged
political and legal combat over EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule,
the agency’s “good neighbor” provision intended to restrict cross-
border exports of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide emissions from
twenty-eight midwestern and southern states into the northeast. No
region of the nation or environmental media appears immune from
this kind of conflict. Prolonged battles between Alabama, Florida,
and Georgia over access to waters from Lake Lanier and six rivers
that cross their borders, for example, reached new intensity in recent
years, resulting in extended mediation, litigation, and uncertainty
about long-term approaches. Growing water scarcity linked to
increased demand for water and extended drought in many regions
continues to exacerbate these conflicts.

Perhaps nowhere is the problem of interstate transfer more evident

than in the disposal of solid, hazardous, and nuclear wastes. States
have generally retained enormous latitude to devise their own waste
management and facility siting systems, working either
independently or in concert with neighbors. Many states, including a
number of those usually deemed among the most innovative and
committed environmentally, continue to generate substantial
quantities of waste and have struggled to establish comprehensive
recycling, treatment, storage, and disposal capacity. Instead, out-of-
state (and -region) export has been an increasingly common pattern,
with a system that often resembles a shell game in which waste is
ultimately deposited in the least resistant state or facility at any given
moment. This pattern is repeated in emerging areas of waste
management, such as the disposal of wastes generated by hydraulic
fracturing procedures, and it is perhaps best illustrated in the
migration of wastes generated in western Pennsylvania to deep-
injection wells in eastern Ohio. This policy triggered considerable
controversy in Ohio, especially following a significant expansion of
earthquake activity near areas that accepted large amounts of out-
of-state fracking wastes injected into vacated wells, ultimately forcing
Pennsylvania to develop an alternative.

No area of waste management, however, is as contentious as

nuclear waste disposal. In the case of so-called high-level wastes,
intensely contaminated materials from nuclear power plants that
require between 10,000 and 100,000 years of isolation, the federal
government and the vast majority of states have supported a 35-year
effort to transfer these wastes to a geological repository in Nevada.
Ferocious resistance by Nevada officials and concerns among states
who would host transfer shipments have continued to scuttle this
approach, leaving each of the 57 commercial nuclear power plants
with 95 reactors located in 29 states a de facto storage site. In the
case of “low level” wastes, greater in volume but posing a less
severe health threat, states have received considerable latitude from
Washington for decades to develop a strategy for creating a series of
regional sites, including access to funds to develop facilities. But
subsequent siting efforts have been riddled with conflict, and no
long-term plans have emerged.64 One facility established for
hazardous waste in western Texas has volunteered as a potential
“host” for such waste, though it was not designed for nuclear
materials, is thousands of miles away from the bulk of generated
waste, and has triggered political opposition in the state. The Trump
administration in 2017 proposed reopening active pursuit of the
Nevada disposal option, triggering renewed opposition from that
state, only to reverse that position in 2020 as the president prepared
a reelection bid in which Nevada would be a contested state. This
pivot included a 2021 budget proposal lacking any funding for
continued Yucca site development.
RETHINKING ENVIRONMENTAL
FEDERALISM
Federalism scholars and some political officials have explored
models for the constructive sharing of authority in the American
federal system, many of which attempt to build on the respective
strengths of varied governmental levels and create a more functional
intergovernmental partnership.65 But it has generally proven difficult
to translate these ideas into actual policy, particularly in the area of
environmental policy. Perhaps the most ambitious effort to reallocate
intergovernmental functions in environmental protection took place in
the 1990s during the Clinton administration, under the National
Environmental Performance Partnership System (NEPPS). This
effort was linked to Clinton’s broader attempts to “reinvent
government,” heralded by proponents as a way to give states
substantially greater administrative flexibility over many federal
environmental programs if they could demonstrate innovation and
evidence of improved environmental outcomes.66 NEPPS also
offered Performance Partnership Grants that would allow
participating states to concentrate resources on innovative projects
that promised environmental performance improvements.

More than 40 states elected to participate in the NEPPS program,

which required extensive negotiations between state and federal
agency counterparts. Although a few promising examples of
innovation can be noted, this initiative failed to approach its
ambitious goals, and in the words of two scholarly analysts, “there
have been few real gains.”67 NEPPS stemmed from an
administrative action by a single president and thereby lacked the
clout of legislation or resilient political support. In response, federal
authorities often resisted altering established practices and failed to
assume the innovative role anticipated by NEPPS proponents. In
turn, states proved considerably less amenable to innovation than
expected. They tended to balk at any possibility that the federal
government might establish—and publicize—serious performance
measures that would evaluate their effectiveness and environmental
outcomes.

Ultimately, many NEPPS agreements were signed, especially in the

waning years of the Clinton administration, and these generally
remain in place. But the Bush administration never pursued NEPPS
with enthusiasm, and neither the Obama nor Trump administrations
made significant efforts to revitalize this program. It thereby remains
a very modest test of the viability of accountable decentralization,
whereby state autonomy is increased formally in exchange for
demonstrable performance. No subsequent administration has
attempted such a conceptual and far-ranging attempt to improve
intergovernmental performance, as federal environmental policy has
lurched back and forth across priorities of respective presidents.
Challenges to State Routines
The future role of states in environmental policy may be further
shaped by three additional developments. First, the COVID-19
pandemic upended American life and politics, leaving potential long-
term impacts that could influence future state capacity to pursue
environmental policy. The severe economic contraction linked to the
pandemic threatened tax revenue and budget solvency in all 50
states, with particularly severe threats in states that produce
substantial amounts of oil and natural gas and depend on related tax
dollars. Most states had begun to recover by 2020 from the Great
Recession of the prior decade, although states such as Alaska,
Connecticut, Illinois, and Wyoming remained in dire fiscal straits
even prior to the pandemic. In turn, chronic pressures for expanded
spending in certain domains, such as unfunded pensions and
benefits for state employees and state health policy, only intensified
during the economic downswing, further threatening restoration of
state fiscal support for environmental protection efforts.68

Second, a sequence of elections during the 2010s reversed a long-

standing pattern of divided, joint-party control of most state
governments in favor of sweeping control by one party, with
particularly strong gains among Republicans through 2016.
However, state elections between 2017 and 2019 tilted more power
back toward Democrats, including a shift in 10 governorships and
three attorneys general as well as more than 300 state legislative
seats. As of 2020, Republicans held “trifectas,” controlling both
legislative chambers and the governorship in 21 states. Of the
remaining states, 15 featured exclusive Democratic control of the
legislative and executive branches and 14 had divided partisan
control. This gave both parties considerable strongholds and raised
the possibility of continued divides among states over environmental
policy given severe partisan splits on many issues.

Third, one early testing ground for potential environmental policy

shifts was reflected in a flurry of new legislative proposals between
2010 and 2020 to either downsize or repeal many established state
policies. These were most commonly introduced by Republican
legislators, reflecting the growing partisan polarization between the
parties during this period. Many such proposals focused on climate
change and some reflected standardized legislative templates
produced by the conservative American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC), which offers luxurious conference venues and
detailed policy advice for state legislators. One early theme in ALEC-
supported repeal bills involved the reversal of state renewable
portfolio standards. Kansas embraced repeal in 2015 and Ohio
dramatically weakened its commitment to expanding renewables in
2018, with strong backing from electric utilities.69

One emerging theme in such bills in recent years was placing a tax
on wind turbines, advanced by supporters of fossil fuel interests to
slow the pace of wind adoption. These taxes faced intense
opposition from representatives of wind-producing districts in states
such as Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming, although Oklahoma
created a 0.5 cent per kilowatt-hour tax on wind and also repealed its
tax credit for wind farm developers. Other types of state climate
policies also failed to prove durable, most commonly when partisan
control of a governorship or legislature shifted from Democrats to
Republicans. While RGGI and California remained steadfast in their
commitment to carbon cap-and-trade policies, 13 other states
abandoned such initiatives after 2010, including Arizona, Illinois,
New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah. The 2020 elections would prove
particularly important for the next decade of state politics, as states
generally redraw legislative district boundaries after each decennial
census and dominant political parties can often manipulate control
over this process to gain considerable advantage in subsequent
elections.
LOOKING AHEAD
Amid the continued squabbling over the proper role of the federal
government vis-à-vis the states in environmental policy, remarkably
little effort has been made to sort out which functions might best be
concentrated in Washington and which ones ought to be transferred
to state capitals. Some former governors and federal legislators of
both parties offered useful proposals during the 1990s that might
allocate such responsibilities more constructively than at present.
These proposals have been supplemented in later decades by
thoughtful scholarly works by think tanks, political scientists,
economists, and other policy analysts. Interestingly, many of these
experts concur that environmental protection policy defies easy
designation as warranting extreme centralization or decentralization.
Instead, many observers endorse a process of selective
decentralization, one leading to an appropriately balanced set of
responsibilities across governmental levels.

Different presidents have attempted to advance a more functional

form of environmental federalism that allowed for intergovernmental
collaboration and played to the respective strengths of both federal
and state partners. The NEPPS experiment in the Bill Clinton
administration was one such example, as was an effort under
George W. Bush to create more flexible state compliance paths for
some contaminants under the Clean Air Act. In 2015, the Obama
administration followed in this arena with the launch of the Clean
Power Plan that established a national cap on carbon emissions
from the electricity sector but offered states considerable latitude in
achieving reduction targets that they were given.

One common theme across the Clinton, Bush, and Obama

presidencies was the absence of congressional capacity to either
adopt new environmental legislation or revise existing statutes as
discussed in Chapter 5. This generated major incentives for
respective presidents to take unilateral executive actions to achieve
their environmental policy goals, whether through executive orders,
regulatory revision processes, or other mechanisms as discussed in
Chapter 4. It also created an opening for states, particularly through
coalitions of elected attorneys general of the party opposite the
president, in effect leading the direct challenge on those portions of a
president’s environmental agenda that affected states and their
respective environmental policy roles. This rapid-fire response of
coordinated litigation reached new intensity under President Obama,
as Republican attorneys general attacked not only the Clean Power
Plan but nearly every other regulatory initiative involving climate
change and both air and water quality. These state efforts served to
delay and in some instances thwart Obama from achieving his
environmental policy goals.

This set the stage for the transition to the Donald Trump presidency
and the question of how his approach to environmental governance
might impact states. Trump said relatively little about federalism in
the 2016 campaign but made clear his strong opposition to the Clean
Power Plan, linking his plan to gut it with his vows to revive the
fortunes of coal mining and coal use in electricity. Trump won 26 of
the 27 most carbon-intensive states, whereas his opponent, Hillary
Clinton, won the 14 least carbon-intensive states. He would not
introduce any new environmental legislation but rather pursue a
“search and destroy” strategy, involving a sequence of regulatory
reversals or delays that would systematically attempt to undermine
every regulatory effort on climate and air and water pollution taken
by Obama, each of which would involve states in some respects.

Some of these Trump efforts would serve to empower states that

had opposed these regulations and preferred to do far less in these
areas. In the case of the Clean Power Plan, a multiyear regulatory
revision effort led to its replacement with the Affordable Clean
Energy rule. This alternative in essence eliminated any
consequential pressures on states to transition their electricity
generation sectors toward less reliance on fossil fuels, particularly
coal and natural gas. This shift would be generally welcomed by
states with the least aggressive climate policies and greatest
production and use of fossil fuels. But it would be aggressively
opposed by those states that had already made significant climate
policy commitments and planned to do more. Similar patterns
emerged as Trump rolled out the other elements of his deregulatory
strategy for methane emissions and water pollution, empowering
those states most opposed to new federal environmental policy. All
of these steps would be countered not by Congress but rather
coalitions of Democratic attorneys general, designed to derail their
implementation and leave their future highly uncertain as they
navigated the federal courts.

Other Trump initiatives would formally attempt to constrain states,

particularly ones led by Democrats, from taking innovative
environmental policy steps. Many of these focused on California’s
effort to adopt major new climate policy initiatives, in many cases
securing allies from other states and even Canadian provinces. This
included an unprecedented and direct assault on formal powers
granted to California on vehicle emissions under the Clean Air Act
for over a half-century, including the 2019 repeal of a state waiver
approved 6 years earlier. This set the stage for the Trump
administration to write California and allied states out of the decision
process in producing very modest vehicle emission standards
through 2026. In turn, the Trump Justice Department sued California
for allegedly encroaching on federal treaty-making powers by
establishing a carbon pricing partnership with Québec, launching a
federal court review. Moreover, President Trump and his
environmental officials demonstrated loathing of California through
public rhetoric denouncing the state for its alleged policy failures and
enduring environmental problems, while also threatening
unprecedented steps of terminating federal grants to the state. This
took traditional intergovernmental conflict to a new and visceral level,
triggering an aggressive set of responses by California leaders and
no clear end to the turmoil in sight.70 Federal courts might ultimately
resolve these issues, although a future president could reverse the
Trump actions.
This episode raised the broader question of whether the United
States was lurching toward a permanent partisan and federalism
divide whereby presidents of one political party were destined to
engage in protracted political and legal combat with attorneys
general of the opposite party or whether alternatives might emerge
involving greater collaboration across parties, states, and levels of
government. As political scientist John Kincaid lamented, “Coercive
federalism has ironically relegitimized states’ rights as a consolation
prize for whichever party is out of power in Washington, D.C.”71
Under a Democrat like Barack Obama, Republicans found merit in
expanding state resistance to new federal policies. Under a
Republican like Donald Trump, Democrats found new virtues in
“progressive federalism” and expanded state authority. In short, was
this an inevitable new feature of American politics and federalism?

Scholars turned increasingly to other models and examples, some

drawn from beyond American boundaries, in beginning to envision
alternatives. Political scientist Donald Kettl released a major new
book on the “Divided States of America” in early 2020 just as the
COVID-19 pandemic began. He noted that “the great public policy
challenges of the 21st Century are health and climate. Both of them
raise questions that require redistributive answers, and the
redistributive answers inevitably require a robust federal role, in
leadership, policy, and funding.”72 Kettl invoked the ideas of
Alexander Hamilton in proposing a new federal compact, with the
federal government in a lead role in addressing profound problems
of inequality across states. However, he further emphasized the
need to allow states to play central roles in policy implementation
and pursue innovation that can offer national models. Finally, he
called for an expanded role for local governments in a revised
American intergovernmental system.

There were no immediate prospects to transition to such a system,

although a growing number of reform proposals with these qualities
began to surface in 2019–2020. During 2019 House climate policy
hearings, environmental policy scholar Tim Profeta unveiled a
“comprehensive state-federal partnership” approach, whereby the
federal government would establish enforceable greenhouse gas
emission reduction targets but allow each state to decide how to
achieve those reductions, permitting any revenues generated
through a state carbon price to be kept within that state.73 This
approach would also allow all existing state climate policy efforts to
continue and contribute to meeting emission reduction targets while
providing flexibility to laggard states in devising their own plans.
Enforcement would follow some of the traditional federalism patterns
established under air and water quality statutes.

Americans could actually look across their northern border to

Canada to see how such a system works in practice. Canada is a
federal system much like the United States, although somewhat
more decentralized in environmental policy through Constitutional
design that gives considerable authority to provinces and territories
to oversee their natural resources.74 Canada also is a major
producer of fossil fuels, particularly in Western provinces such as
Alberta and Saskatchewan, and struggled for decades to devise a
climate policy that was politically feasible and durable given the
many fault lines among different jurisdictions and their leaders.
Instead, a frequent Canadian climate policy approach involved
leaders of multiple parties making bold declaration of their climate
concern at international gatherings but then failing to deliver through
policy given deep divides between regions and parties over possible
next steps.

Justin Trudeau’s 2015 election as Prime Minister gave his Liberal

Party yet another chance to explore climate policy design and what
emerged was the 2018 Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act. This
built directly on the most innovative provinces, most notably British
Columbia and its bold carbon tax design that reduced emissions,
had no adverse economic impacts, and expanded political support
across parties over elections over its first decade.75 The emerging
Pan-Canadian Framework used this case as a model and called
upon all provinces and territories to develop some form of a carbon
price that would rise steadily and reach $50 per ton (Canadian) by
2022. But the federal government offered these jurisdictions
enormous latitude in policy design as long as they delivered
results.76 For provinces like British Columbia, compliance was
automatic since they were already committed to such policy. For
provinces willing to negotiate a plan with the federal government,
they could design and implement an approved proposal, keeping any
revenue and using it as they saw fit. For provinces unwilling to work
cooperatively, the federal government would impose a carbon tax
rising to $50 per ton upon them, collect the revenue, and return all of
it to every citizen of that province through an annual dividend check,
thereby denying provincial leaders any input into deciding how to
spend the money. This triggered many controversies and yet moved
relatively smoothly into implementation. Late 2019 elections not only
reelected Trudeau but 62 percent of Canadians voted for one of the
multiple national parties that had endorsed the strategy. Even amid
the COVID-19 crisis in March 2020, Trudeau announced that
Canada’s climate policy would continue to move forward.

Perhaps Canada provides a model of sorts for American

consideration. In turn, there were at least a few signs in the early
2020s that there might be some ways to develop more collaborative
relations across states and, possibly, between state and federal
governments. Political scientists Paul Nolette and Colin Provost
concluded that there were at least a few policy areas where states
were developing multistate partnerships and even partisan attorneys
general were able to work across divides. In particular, they noted
that issues such as opioids, tobacco use reduction, sex trafficking,
and elder abuse garnered unexpected ability to build coalitions
involving both Republican and Democratic states and even
partnerships between rural and urban jurisdictions.77 Some energy
policy analysts began to note that some of the greatest growth in
renewable energy deployment was occurring in the very states least
likely to have adopted major climate or environmental policies.78 This
included states such as Texas, which produces considerably more
wind energy than any other state. Wyoming, North Dakota, and
Nevada are the top-ranked states in terms of renewable energy
generated per capita. Wyoming’s Chokecherry and Sierra Madre
Wind Energy Project, scheduled to open in 2026, will be the United
States’ largest wind farm and one of the world’s biggest, with plans
to sell power to California.79

Gaining political support for siting renewable technologies and

needed transmission capacity may be easier in states with open
vistas, a history of energy production and policies amenable to new
development, and established systems of royalties that give property
owners financial incentives to welcome developers. In contrast,
states such as California and New York that are most likely politically
to adopt bold renewable energy standards and related climate
policies may face the greatest political opposition to actually siting
these facilities within their boundaries. This raises questions of
whether they force this development upon reluctant in-state localities
or import such energy from other states where siting is easier. It also
prompts the broader issue of the conditions under which disparate
states might find common cause moving forward, particularly in the
aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and lessons emerging from it
on ways to improve the performance of both federal and state
governments in responding to public policy challenges. Much as
Lord Bryce pondered centuries ago, it is possible, at least in theory,
to envision a political system in which multiple levels of government
work toward the common good on such issues as environmental
protection.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Environmental Council of the States (www.ecos.org) The

Environmental Council of the States represents the lead
environmental protection agencies of all fifty states. The site
contains access to state environmental data and periodic
“Green Reports” on major issues.

Georgetown Climate Center (www.georgetownclimate.org)

The Georgetown Climate Center provides extensive data bases
and reports on different dimensions of state climate and energy
policy. This includes a State Energy Analysis Tool that provides
highly detailed information on state energy sources and usage
and updates on the Transportation Climate Initiative, where it
has played a central convening role among participating states.

National Conference of State Legislatures (www.ncsl.org)

The National Conference of State Legislatures conducts
extensive research on a wide range of environmental, energy,
and natural resource issues for its primary constituency of state
legislators, as well as for the general citizenry. The organization
offers an extensive set of publications, including specialized
reports and monthly review of state policy developments.

National Governors Association (www.nga.org) The National

Governors Association maintains an active research program
concerning state environmental protection, natural resources,
and energy concerns. It has placed special emphasis on
maintaining a database on state “best practices,” which it uses
to promote diffusion of promising innovations and to
demonstrate state government capacity in federal policy
deliberations.
State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, New York
University School of Law (www.law.nyu/centers/state-
impact.edu) The State Energy & Environmental Impact Center
keeps close tabs on the actions of state attorneys general and
state governments in environmental policy. This includes
databases on multistate litigation and other strategies in
instances where states choose to challenge federal
environmental policy decisions.
NOTES
1. John Kincaid, “Dynamic De/Centralization in the United States,
1970–2010,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 49 (October 2018):
166–93.

2. John Dinan, State Constitutional Politics: Governing by

Amendment in the American States (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2018).

3. Paul Teske, Regulation in the States (Washington, DC: Brookings

Institution Press, 2004), 9.

4. Martha Derthick, “Compensatory Federalism,” in Greenhouse

Governance, ed. Barry Rabe (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution
Press, 2010), 66.

5. Christopher McGrory Klyza and David Sousa, American

Environmental Policy: Beyond Gridlock, updated and expanded
edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 247.

6. Stephen Goldsmith and Donald F. Kettl, eds., Unlocking the Power

of Networks (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009).

7. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of

Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1990); Elinor Ostrom, A Polycentric Approach to Climate
Change (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2009).

8. Barry G. Rabe, Statehouse and Greenhouse: The Emerging

Politics of American Climate Change Policy (Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution Press, 2004).

9. Michelle Pautz and Sara Rinfret, The Lilliputians of Environmental

Regulation: The Perspective of State Regulators (New York:
Routledge, 2013).
10. Andrew Karch, Democratic Laboratories: Policy Diffusion Among
the American States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2007).

11. American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, 2019 State

Energy Efficiency Scorecard (Washington, DC: ACEEE, 2019).

12. Evan J. Ringquist, Environmental Protection at the State Level:

Politics and Progress in Controlling Pollution (Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe, 1993).

13. Daniel Fiorino and Riordan Frost, “The Pilot Eco-Efficiency

Index: A New State Environmental Ranking for Researchers and
Government” (paper presented at the Association for Public Policy
Analysis and Management’s fall research conference, Washington,
DC, November 4, 2016),
www.researchgate.net/publication/315736703_The_Pilot_Eco-
Efficiency_Index_A_New_State_Environmental_Ranking_for_Resea
rchers_and_Government.

14. Kathy Kinsey, “Neither of These Bills Address the Law’s

Failings,” Environmental Forum 31 (May–June 2014): 48.

15. Linda Breggin, “Broad State Efforts on Toxic Controls,”

Environmental Forum 28 (March–April 2011): 10.

16. Christopher Bosso, ed., Governing Uncertainty: Environmental

Regulation in the Age of Nanotechnology (Washington, DC:
Resources for the Future, 2010), 105–30.

17. Barry G. Rabe, Can We Price Carbon? (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2018), 239–40.

18. Glen Stubbe, “Walz Announces Climate Change Subcabinet,”

Minnesota Star-Tribune (December 2, 2019).

19. Andrew Kear, “Natural Gas Policy Path—Built to Boom,” Journal

of Policy History 30 (2018): 334–65.
20. Jonathan M. Fisk, The Fracking Debate: Intergovernmental
Politics of the Oil and Gas Renaissance (New York: Routledge,
2018).

21. Nathan Hultman et al., Accelerating America’s Pledge: Going All-

In to Build a Prosperous, Low-Carbon Economy for the United States
(New York: Bloomberg Philanthropies, 2019), Chapter 3.

22. Gilbert E. Metcalf, Paying for Pollution: Why a Carbon Tax is

Good for America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

23. Barry G. Rabe and Christopher Borick, “Carbon Taxation and

Policy Labeling: Experience from American States and Canadian
Provinces,” Review of Policy Research 29 (May 2012): 358–82.

24. Samantha McBride, Recycling Reconsidered: The Present

Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United
States (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

25. Leigh Raymond, Reclaiming the Atmospheric Commons: The

Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and a New Model of Emissions
Trading (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

26. Roger Karapin, Political Opportunities for Climate Policy:

California, New York, and the Federal Government (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2016).

27. Vivian E. Thomson, Sophisticated Interdependence in Climate

Policy: Federalism in the United States, Brazil, and Germany
(London: Anthem Press, 2014).

28. Nathan Hultman et al., Accelerating America’s Pledge.

29. Kelly Trumbull, Colleen Callahan, Sarah Goldmuntz, and

Michelle Einstein, Progress Toward 100% Clean Energy in Cities &
States Across the US (Los Angeles: UCLA Luskin Center for
Innovation, 2019).
30. David Vogel, California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became
an Environmental Leader (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2018).

31. Barry G. Rabe, “Leveraged Federalism and the Clean Air Act:
The Case of Vehicle Emissions Control,” in Lessons from the Clean
Air Act: Building Durability and Adaptability into U.S. Climate and
Energy Policy, ed. Ann Carlson and Dallas Burtraw (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2019), Chapter 4.

32. Ben Merelman, Conservative Innovators: How States are

Challenging Federal Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2019); Paul Nolette and Colin Provost, “Change and Continuity in the
Role of State Attorneys General in the Obama and Trump
Administrations,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 48 (Summer
2018): 469–94.

33. Paul Nolette, Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and

National Policymaking in Contemporary America (Lawrence, KS:
University Press of Kansas, 2015).

34. David J. Hayes et al., 300 and Counting: State Attorneys General
Lead the Fight for Health and the Environment (New York: State
Energy & Environmental Impact Center, 2019).

35. Frank J. Thompson, Kenneth K. Wong, and Barry G. Rabe,

Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism (Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2020).

36. William R. Lowry, The Dimensions of Federalism: State

Governments and Pollution Control Policies, rev. ed (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997), 125.

37. Jacob M. Grumbach, “From Backwaters to Major Policymakers:

Policy Polarization in the States, 1970–2014,” Perspectives in
Politics 16 (June 2018): 416–35; Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo and Mirya
R. Holman, “Climate Change Policymaking in the States: A View at
2020,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 50 (Summer 2020): 446–
72.

38. In Wisconsin, for example, Governor Scott Walker oversaw

significant reductions in state environmental staff and research
capacity, with a primary focus on accelerating approval time for
proposed development. See Steven Verberg, “DNR to Alter Handling
of Pollution, Parks, Enforcement,” Wisconsin State Journal
(December 1, 2016); Evan Osnos, “Chemical Valley,” New Yorker
(April 7, 2014), 38–49; and Trip Gabriel, “Ash Spill Shows How
Watchdog Was Defanged,” New York Times (February 28, 2014).

39. R. Steven Brown, Status of State Environmental Agency Budgets

(Washington, DC: Environmental Council of the States, 2012).

40. Linda K. Breggin, “Stringency Laws Widely Adopted,”

Environmental Forum 32, no. 3 (May–June 2015): 18.

41. John A. Hoornbeek, “The Promise and Pitfalls of Devolution:

Water Pollution Policies in the American States,” Publius: The
Journal of Federalism 35 (Winter 2005): 87–114.

42. Shama Gamkhar and J. Mitchell Pickerill, “The State of American

Federalism 2011–2012,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 42
(Summer 2012): 357–86.

43. Sheldon Kamieniecki, Corporate America and Environmental

Policy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 253.

44. William Lowry, Repairing Paradise: The Restoration of Nature in

America’s National Parks (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution
Press, 2010), Chapter 4.

45. Barry G. Rabe, Claire Kaliban, and Isabel Englehart, “Taxing

Flaring and the Politics of State Methane Release Policy,” Review of
Policy Research 37 (2020): 6–38.
46. Nathan Borney, Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2017).

47. Anna Clark, The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American
Urban Tragedy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2018).

48. David Switzer and Manuel P. Teodoro, “The Color of Drinking

Water: Class, Race, Ethnicity and Safe Drinking Water Act
Compliance,” Journal of American Water Works Association 108, no.
8 (2017): E416–E424; Sara Hughes, “Flint, Michigan, and the
Politics of Safe Drinking Water in the United States,” Perspectives in
Politics 18 (July 2020): 1–14.

49. Benjamin Y. Clark and Andrew B. Whitford, “Does More Federal

Environmental Funding Increase or Decrease States’ Efforts?”
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 30 (Winter 2010): 136–
52.

50. Keene Kelderman et al., The Thin Green Line: Cuts in State
Pollution Control Agencies Threaten Public Health (Washington, DC:
Environmental Integrity Project, 2019).

51. Michael E. Kraft, Mark Stephan, and Troy D. Abel, Coming

Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

52. Matthew J. Hoffmann, Climate Governance at the Crossroads

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Michael E. Kraft, Using
Information Disclosure to Achieve Policy Goals: How Experience
with the Toxics Release Inventory Can Inform Action on Natural Gas
Fracturing, Issues in Energy and Environmental Policy No. 6 (Ann
Arbor, MI: Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy, March 2014).

53. Paul Posner, “Networks in the Shadow of Government: The

Chesapeake Bay Program,” in Unlocking the Power of Networks, ed.
Stephen Goldsmith and Donald F. Kettl (Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution Press, 2009), Chapter 4; Barry G. Rabe and Marc Gaden,
“Sustainability in a Regional Context: The Case of the Great Lakes
Basin,” in Toward Sustainable Communities: Transition and
Transformations in Environmental Policy, ed. Daniel A. Mazmanian
and Michael E. Kraft, 2nd ed (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009),
266–69.

54. Donald F. Kettl, The Divided States of America: Why Federalism

Doesn’t Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 119.

55. Denise Scheberle, Federalism and Environmental Policy: Trust

and the Politics of Implementation, rev. ed (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2004), Chapter 7.

56. Michelle Pautz and Sarah Rinfret, The Lilliputians of

Environmental Regulations, 50–51.

57. Paul Teske, Regulation in the States; Pautz and Rinfret, The
Lilliputians of Environmental Regulation.

58. John D. Donahue, Disunited States: What’s at Stake as

Washington Fades and the States Take the Lead (New York: Basic
Books, 1997); Paul E. Peterson, The Price of Federalism
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1995), Chapter 4.

59. William T. Gormley Jr., “Intergovernmental Conflict on

Environmental Policy: The Attitudinal Connection,” Western Political
Quarterly 40 (1987): 298–99.

60. David M. Konisky and Neal D. Woods, “Exporting Air Pollution?

Regulatory Enforcement and Environmental Free Riding in the
United States,” Political Research Quarterly 63 (2010): 771–82.

61. William Boyd, “The Clean Air Act’s National Ambient Air Quality
Standards,” in Lessons from the Clean Air Act, ed. Ann Carlson and
Dallas Burtraw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 15–
18.

62. Irene C. Dedoussi, Sebastian D. Eastham, Erwan Monier, and

Steven R.H. Barrett, “Premature Mortality Related to United States
Cross-State Air Pollution,” Nature 587 (February 13, 2020): 261–68.

63. Kincaid, “Dynamic De/Centralization in the United States, 1790–

2010,” 180.

64. Daniel J. Sherman, Not Here, Not There, Not Anywhere

(Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 2011).

65. Alice Rivlin, “Rethinking Federalism for More Effective

Governance,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 42 (Summer
2012): 357–86; Jenna Bednar, The Robust Federation (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008); R. Daniel Keleman, The Rules
of Federalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

66. John Buntin, “25 Years Later, What Happened to ‘Reinventing

Government’?” Governing (September 2016).

67. Klyza and Sousa, American Environmental Policy, 1990–2006,

253.

68. Alan Greenblatt, “State Budget Fallout: A Hurricane That Hits All
Over the Country,” Governing (April 9, 2020).

69. Leah Stokes, Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the
Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

70. Thompson, Wong, and Rabe, Trump, the Administrative

Presidency, and Federalism, 96–104.

71. John Kincaid, “Introduction: The Trump Interlude and the States
of American Federalism,” State and Local Government Review 49
(September 2017): 165.

72. Kettl, The Divided States of America, 200.

73. David Obey, “House Panel Showcases Federalism Framework

for Broad GHG Cuts,” Inside EPA/Climate (December 6, 2019); Tim
Profeta, “Using the Old to Solve the New—Creating a Federal/State
Partnership to Fight Climate Change,” Duke Nicholas Institute for
Environmental Policy Solutions Policy Brief (October 2019).

74. Andrea Olive, The Canadian Environment in Political Context

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).

75. Rabe, Can We Price Carbon?, 88–119.

76. Brendan Boyd and Barry Rabe, “Whither Canadian Climate

Policy in the Trump Era?” in Canada-U.S. Relations: Sovereignty of
Shared Institutions? ed. David Carment and Christopher Sands
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 239–60.

77. Nolette and Provost, “Change and Continuity in the Role of State
Attorneys General in the Obama and Trump Administrations,” 483–
87.

78. Miriam Fischlein et al., “Which Way Does the Wind Blow?
Analysing the State Context for Renewable Energy Development in
the United States,” Environmental Policy and Governance 24 (2014):
169–87; “A Renewable-Energy Boom is Changing the Politics of
Global Warming,” The Economist (March 14, 2020); Elizabeth
Weise, “Wind Energy Gives American Farmers a New Crop to Sell in
Tough Times,” USA Today (February 16, 2020).

79. Daniel Fiorino, Carley Weted, and Sabina Blanco Vecchi, “The
Politics of Energy Efficiency: Explaining Policy Variations in the
American States” (paper presented at the 2019 Conference of the
International Public Policy Association, Montreal).
3 POLITICS, PRICES, AND PROOF : AMERICAN
PUBLIC OPINION ON ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
—Christopher Borick and Erick Lachapelle
As the second decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close, climate change and other
environmental matters had become some of the American public’s most significant areas of concern.
Surveys during this period showed a majority of Americans accepted the existence of climate change,
were concerned about the impacts of this phenomenon, and wanted their government to take action to
mitigate the warming planet. Beyond climate matters, Americans were indicating increased concern for
an array of other environmental issues, including drinking water safety and local air quality conditions.1

In a representative democracy, such as the United States, it seems reasonable to expect that these
public concerns would be translated into significant efforts on the part of the federal government to
address them. However, this expectation would not be supported by an examination of national-level
environmental policy throughout this era. In fact, as Americans increasingly demonstrated concerns
regarding environmental matters between 2017 and 2020, the federal government under the Trump
presidency was aggressively scaling back major US climate regulations and an array of other
environmental policies and programs (see Chapter 4).2

The recent disconnect between the American public’s views on the environment and the policies and
actions of the federal government in the area of environmental protection raises a number of important
questions. Is this absence of alignment between opinion and policy in the area of the environment fairly
normal, or is the Trump era an outlier? If public opinion has varied effects on environmental policy
adoption, are there some dimensions of public opinion that have greater impact on policy efforts than
others? Finally, if public opinion can affect policy adoption under certain conditions, what factors
determine the public’s views on the environment? In this chapter we will attempt to answer these
questions and to provide insight into causes, forms, and impact of American attitudes, beliefs, and policy
preferences regarding the environment.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PUBLIC OPINION AND
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
Does public opinion regarding the environment affect environmental policy? The opening vignette would
seem to suggest that it doesn’t. Of course, any single period or example may not be indicative of
broader relationships. While many factors influence the adoption of environmental policies in the United
States, as earlier chapters in this volume have shown, the role of public opinion is considered by
scholars to be a crucial determinant of what issues governments will act upon.3 This relationship was on
full display during the 1970s when the US government significantly expanded its role in environmental
protection. As the 1970s dawned, surveys showed an increasing number of Americans were concerned
with environmental issues such as air and water pollution, and that a majority were calling for
government action to address these environmental threats.4 The increased public awareness and
support for government intervention culminated in an unparalleled array of legislation emerging from
Congress in the early 1970s, including landmark laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act
(1970), Clean Air Act (1970), Clean Water Act (1972), and Endangered Species Act (1973) (see
Chapter 1).

While the 1970s appear to provide evidence of congruence between opinion and policy in the realm of
environmental matters, and the recent Trump era demonstrates a high degree of opinion–policy
incongruence, much of the twenty-first century shows a more complicated and nuanced relationship
between what Americans think about the environment and what government does in terms of
environmental policy. One complicating factor is that the public’s views on environmental issues may
send mixed messages regarding preferences for action. The more complex nature of American views on
environmental protection was on display during the opening decade of the twenty-first century. Between
2000 and 2010, Gallup found a dramatic 30-point increase in the percentage of Americans who believed
economic growth should be given priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent.5 But as
Americans were increasingly willing to sacrifice a degree of environmental quality to attain economic
growth during the early 2000s, a majority continued to claim that the US government was doing too little
to protect the environment.

Opinion regarding environmental matters can also shift quickly as government is wrestling with policy
actions. Such was the case during the early stages of the Obama administration. In the decade leading
up to the 2008 election Americans had increasingly indicated that they thought global warming was
occurring. But as the Obama administration and Congress worked on passing major climate legislation,
public opinion shifted substantially, with acceptance of the underlying problem becoming much more
contested. The Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Americans who believed there was
solid evidence of global warming dropped from 71 percent in April 2008 to only 57 percent in October of
2009.6 The decline in public acknowledgment of climate change came as the United States was
experiencing its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a number of
scholars found the worsening economic conditions directly contributed to the shift in opinion.7 Other
research suggests that efforts by fossil fuel industries, Republican congressional leaders, and
conservative media figures helped to raise skepticism about climate science among portions of the
American public.8

During the second decade of the twenty-first century, as the nation climbed out of a deep recession to a
period of record economic growth, Americans increasingly expressed worries about environmental
quality, with concern regarding a number of environmental issues growing significantly.9 As can be seen
in Figure 3.1, since 2011 there was fairly steady growth in the number of Americans who believe
protection of the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth.
Description

Figure 3.1 Environmental Protection versus Economic Growth

During Obama’s second term government policy responded to the increased public support for
environmental protection efforts with executive actions such as the creation of the Clean Power Plan
and entry into the Paris Climate Agreement. Yet as we discussed in the introduction, despite strong
public concerns with environmental matters and desire to have government take greater actions to
protect the environment, the Trump administration undertook a historic rollback of existing
environmental rules and dismantling of Obama-era climate policy.

The inconsistent relationship between opinion and policy in the area of the environment leads us to
consider what might explain such variation. So far, we have discussed public opinion as a single
concept, but of course opinion is multidimensional, and it is in those dimensions that varied impacts on
policy adoption may rest. Indeed, much scholarship has explored aspects of public opinion and the
impact of those aspects on government engagement, particularly on environmental matters.10 In this
next section we seek to more fully explore the dimensions of public opinion regarding environmental
issues, and how those dimensions may affect environmental policy adoption in the United States. In
particular we examine aspects of public opinion including: (1) awareness and concern; (2) issue
saliency; and (3) policy preferences.

Awareness and Concern: What do Americans know about the environment, and how concerned is the
public about environmental issues? For years opinion researchers have tried to assess the public’s
awareness of environmental issues and to determine the degree to which individuals worry about
environmental matters. The results of this research paint a complex picture of American perceptions of
the natural environment. As noted in the previous section, Americans became increasingly aware and
concerned about environmental matters in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly with issues such as air and
water pollution. In numerous surveys during this period Americans reported that they believed the
nation’s air and water quality had substantially diminished over time, and that they were concerned
about the impacts of pollution on human health.11 Despite economic downturns and the energy crises of
the 1970s, environmental awareness and concern levels had become so consistent by the 1980s that
many analysts described pollution issues as “enduring concerns” of the American public.12

But as awareness of core environmental issues such as air and water pollution became established
during the 1970s and 1980s, new environmental issues and challenges began to emerge. In particular,
during the 1980s, environmental concerns such as depletion of the ozone layer, rainforest loss, acid
rain, and global warming were identified by scientists as significant threats. Polling showed fairly
widespread public awareness and concern about all these issues in the United States. For example, a
Gallup poll in 1989 found a majority of Americans (51 percent) worried a great deal about ozone
depletion, with these relatively high levels of concern persisting throughout the remainder of the
twentieth century. Concern regarding acid rain and rainforest destruction also became widespread and
fairly consistent throughout the late 1980s and 1990s.13

As perhaps the most significant environmental threat to emerge in the 1980s, global warming began to
receive greater media attention late in that decade. This attention arrived particularly after the record
warmth and severe drought of 1988, and the high-profile congressional testimony of NASA researcher
James Hanson regarding the scientific evidence of this phenomenon. When first surveyed about this
issue in 1986, just 39 percent of Americans indicated that they had heard or read about the greenhouse
effect (as global warming or climate change was commonly known as at the time), but by September
1988, 58 percent were aware of this matter. During the 1990s, global warming awareness levels would
rise to over 80 percent of the American public, and by the first decade of the twenty-first century
awareness would top the 90 percent mark.14

While most Americans were aware of the issue of global warming by the late 1980s, acceptance of the
presence of the problem and concern about the impacts of a warming planet were far less consistent. In
fact, there have been significant shifts in American acceptance of evidence of global warming since the
issue emerged in the 1980s. For example, between 1997 and 2008, Gallup found the percentage of
Americans that believed global warming had already begun increased from 48 percent to 61 percent.
Yet by 2011 the percentage of Americans who thought global warming was happening had dropped
back to 49 percent, or almost where it was in 1997. It would not be until 2017 that at least 61 percent of
Americans (the 2008 level) would report that global warming was already going on.

Public concern regarding global warming has also shifted substantially since Americans became aware
of the issue over three decades ago. When Gallup first asked about concern regarding global warming
in 1989, about one in three Americans indicated that they worried “a great deal” about this issue. Over
the course of the next two decades there would be modest shifts in concern levels, with a high of 40
percent concerned “a great deal” in 2007, and a low of only 25 percent greatly concerned in 2011.
However, the percentage of Americans who worry “a great deal” about global warming has risen steadily
since 2011, reaching a mark of 44 percent in 2019.

Notably, as concerns about climate change have increased, public worries about air pollution have
significantly declined during the last thirty years. In 1989, 63 percent of Americans indicated that they
worried a great deal about air pollution, compared with 43 percent that maintained the same level of
concern in 2019. Concerns with drinking water quality have also declined in the twenty-first century,
dropping from 72 percent of Americans that worried a great deal about this matter in 2000, to only 48
percent maintaining this level of concern in 2012. But since the record low levels of concern found in
2012, concerns have increased, peaking at 63 percent in 2017 in the wake of the Flint, Michigan,
drinking water crisis that emerged in 2015.15

Saliency: With a majority of Americans aware of an array of environmental challenges, and large
percentages concerned about environmental threats, it seems reasonable to expect government to
respond with policy efforts to address those concerns. As emphasized earlier in the chapter, the wave of
environmental policies during the 1970s aligned with the growing concerns of the American public
regarding the environment, thus indicating a general alignment of opinion and policy. But in terms of
significant policy effort to address global warming, public concerns have not necessarily translated into
major policy efforts, particularly at the federal level. While numerous factors may have contributed to
limited federal climate policy action, one aspect of public opinion seems likely to be affecting the
situation—issue saliency. Salience refers to the importance of an issue, particularly as it applies to the
constituents of elected officials.

Government officials in democratic systems may maximize the likelihood of reelection by attempting to
address the most salient concerns of their constituents. The public may hold and express concerns for
many issues, but given the limited time and resources available to officials, there is an increased
likelihood that only the most salient concerns will be acted on.16 As noted earlier, Americans generally
express concern for environmental issues, but how do those concerns compare with other issues that
are in play at the same time? To help answer this question we turn to a series of polls conducted by the
Pew Center over the last twenty-five years that examine the relative importance, or saliency, of issues
for Americans (Pew 2020).

The Pew findings demonstrate that while large portions of the American public think the environment
and climate change should be a top priority for government, even larger portions of the public think other
issues should be a top priority. During the period between 2010 and 2020, an annual average of 35
percent of Americans identified dealing with global climate change as a top priority for the federal
government, with 48 percent identifying protection of the environment as a top priority for the US
government. While those results certainly indicate that many Americans believe environmental issues
should be a top priority for the national government, other issues are rated much higher. For example,
during the 2010–2020 period, defending the country against terrorist attacks (74 percent), improving the
job situation (69 percent), and reducing health-care costs (63 percent) were among the issues that more
Americans identified as a top priority for the federal government than environmentally related options. In
fact, in most years during this period, dealing with climate change placed 18th out of 19 options that
Pew presented to respondents.17

Of course, in an era where party polarization is elevated, as it has increasingly been in the twenty-first
century,18 issue saliency may be quite varied for individuals across party divides. According to a 2020
Pew Research Center study, the divide in issue saliency between Democrats and Republicans is the
largest on environmental issues, and particularly climate change. As can be seen in Figure 3.2, while 78
percent of Democrats thought that climate change should be a top priority for the federal government in
2020, only 21 percent of Republicans maintained the same view. The 57-point gap regarding climate
change is far and away the highest among the 18 issues Pew tested, with the 46 percent gap on the
“environment” the second largest divide. While these differences in saliency by themselves may not
explain the Trump administration’s decision to dismantle federal climate and environmental regulations,
they certainly help provide insight into why the connection between aggregate measures of public
support for greater environmental protection may not result in policies that reflect these preferences.
Description

Figure 3.2 American Views on Top Priorities for the Federal Government by Political
Party

Differences in issue saliency can help explain a degree of the differences in state environmental policy
outcomes that were discussed in the federalism chapter in the first section of the book. While many
factors contribute to the stark differences in state environmental policies that Barry Rabe notes in
Chapter 2, a number of scholarly studies have shown that issue saliency is one of the determinants of
environmental policy adoption at the state level. In particular, a study by Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo and
John Poe19 finds that general concern among state residents regarding climate change is a fairly weak
predictor of state climate policy adoption, but when issue salience is considered, public opinion plays a
much greater role in explaining the strength of state efforts to address climate change.

Policy Preferences: As the previous discussion has shown, higher levels of awareness, concern, and
most importantly salience help increase the likelihood that governments at both the national and
subnational levels engage in policy development. Yet the presence of these conditions can’t necessarily
explain the types of policy actions that are selected. For any environmental problem there are often
numerous policy options available for policymakers to select from.

The wave of environmental policy action in the 1970s generally applied a traditional “command and
control” approach to environmental problems. Under this approach, governments set firm environmental
standards, monitor to make sure those standards are being met, and if not, enforce the law with some
form of penalty (e.g., fines). As noted in Chapter 10, command and control policies have been criticized
for their lack of flexibility and high administrative costs, although their political attractiveness is enhanced
by their ability to hide costs from consumers. In contrast, alternative policies that focus on economic
incentives and disincentives as the primary mechanisms are likely to prove far more cost-effective, but
can face greater political challenges because of their direct imposition of costs on consumers. Among
the tools most commonly applied under the “market based” approach are taxes and the establishment of
markets for the trade of pollution credits. Examples of economic-oriented approaches range from a city
charging residents a fee on garbage disposal that is determined by how much waste they produce, to
the creation of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) by northeastern states that oversees a
market to trade carbon dioxide credits and a similar one operated by California and the Canadian
province of Québec (see Chapter 2).

Given the varied policy tools that can be applied to environmental problems, does the public have clear
preferences for which approaches are best? The National Surveys on Energy and the Environment
(NSEE) have regularly asked Americans about their energy policy preferences since 2008, with the
results showing strong support for regulatory tools, but more mixed support for market-oriented
approaches.20 Substantial majorities of Americans have supported increasing federal fuel efficiency
standards for automobiles during both the Obama and Trump administrations, and at the state level
policies that require the use of renewable energy have been consistently popular, even across partisan
divides. Americans were also largely opposed to the Trump administration’s proposal to scale back
existing automobile fuel efficiency standards in 2018.

While Americans strongly support the use of tax incentives for individuals to purchase electric and
hybrid vehicles, they are less supportive of marked-based policies such as energy taxes. For example,
they are generally opposed to increasing gas taxes as a means of reducing fossil fuel use. In a series of
NSEE polls between 2008 and 2017, support for increasing the gas tax as a means of reducing fossil
fuel emissions never surpassed 30 percent. A broader tax on carbon also receives lower rates of
support than regulatory options though it elicits more nuanced reactions from the American public. A
carbon tax, which places a fee on all fossil fuels, has become a much discussed policy option in climate
policy debates.21 As with a gas tax, a majority of Americans have opposed a carbon tax since the
concept has been tested in polls in the twenty-first century.22 However, the scope and design of the
carbon tax, and the use of the revenue generated from this tool, have significant impact on public
support levels. Studies have found that the way the carbon tax is described to individuals can
significantly enhance the level of support that this policy option garners.23 Additionally, using the
revenues from a carbon tax to enhance the development of renewable energy, or to offset other taxes
by returning the revenue to taxpayers, helps to significantly increase public support for this policy tool
among survey respondents.24

American views on cap-and-trade systems have also been fairly mixed as this policy alternative has
emerged over the last three decades. Originally heralded by economists as a more efficient approach to
address environmental problems such as air pollution, cap-and-trade systems became popular among
conservatives in the 1980s, culminating with the establishment of a sulfur dioxide market as part of the
1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.25 The success of the sulfur dioxide market helped make a carbon
dioxide cap-and-trade system a key component of 2009 national climate policy efforts in Congress. But
as the debates evolved, Republican opposition to the legislation, including the branding of cap-and-
trade as “cap-and-tax,” led to the demise of the efforts.26 Indeed, public concerns with the costs of cap-
and-trade were significant at the time, with majority support (53 percent) for the general concept of cap-
and-trade falling to only 42 percent when a $15 a month cost was affixed to the policy, and 22 percent
when the cost rose to $50 a month.27
While efforts to establish a national cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases may have received
mixed reviews from the American public, the largest existing market for greenhouse gases has drawn
more positive public reactions. The RGGI noted earlier has remained fairly popular among citizens of
the northeast states where it is centered, with a 2016 poll showing a substantial majority of residents in
that region supporting the continuation of this market for greenhouse gases.28 This may reflect its
unique pattern of revenue use among its participating states, which has built public support, as well as
its relatively modest price to date, which has served to minimize possible public opposition over costs.

One final perspective on public opinion regarding environmental policies relates to the levels of
government that individuals want engaged on environmental matters. Once again, the federal system in
the United States allows for varied levels of government to be involved in environmental protection.
David Konisky finds that Americans generally prefer the federal government take the lead in addressing
most environmental issues, and in particular those that relate to pollution, and have a national or global
scale (e.g., global warming).29 At the same time, the public prefers that state and local governments
take the lead on handling local or regional issues (e.g., managing urban sprawl). These results suggest
a desire among many in the public to match governmental policy assignment with the geographic scale
of the problem. However, the public might not always view the roles of government in a policy realm as
exclusive to one level. NSEE studies over the course of the last decade indicate that in the realm of
climate change, most Americans believe that all levels of government have responsibility to address the
warming planet. For example, in 2017 the NSEE found that approximately 7 out of 10 Americans
thought that federal, state, and local governments had responsibility to address global warming. In
essence, government engagement on climate change does not have to be thought about as a zero-sum
situation or as a dual federalism framework in which actions at one level preclude actions at another.30

We now move our discussion of public opinion regarding the environment to an examination of the
determinants of public views on environmental matters. A key question for scholars, and for those
interested in environmental politics, is how to understand differences in environmental public opinion
across people, places, and over time. To this end, a number of determinants have been identified as key
for understanding differences and change in public opinion. These can usefully be categorized in terms
of either “aggregate” or “individual” level determinants. Whereas aggregate data—as the name suggests
—are compiled or summed to answer questions about groups or populations (usually among
geographical units like countries, counties, or states), individual-level data are measured at the micro-
level among units (usually people). We examine aggregate level and individual determinants here.
AGGREGATE-LEVEL DETERMINANTS
What explains shifts in environmental concern over time? A long-standing debate in environmental
politics concerns the extent to which the environment and economy are substitutes. This line of
reasoning can be traced back to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory31 which suggests the
environment is a luxury good—people may become concerned about environmental degradation, but
only after more basic needs for food, shelter, and security are met.32 From this perspective, it is
common to assume that the public is more likely to support environmental protection under more
favorable economic conditions, while they are likely to prioritize their immediate economic needs over
environmental protection during economic hard times. Empirical support for this idea is found in the
literature—at least at the aggregate level.

For example, Matthew Kahn and Matthew Kotchen find a dip in Google searches for “global warming”
following an increase in state unemployment rates, and that unemployment rates are also associated
with lower belief in global warming and support for climate policy as measured in national opinion
surveys.33 Analysis of aggregate data from national samples obtained in the United States between
2002 and 2010 finds that structural economic factors are among the best predictors (along with elite
cues) of shifting public concern over climate change.34 Similarly, Lyle Scruggs and Salil Benegal find
substantial evidence to support the claim that changes in macroeconomic conditions affect the priority
given to and beliefs in global warming.35 However, individual-level evidence from panel survey data has
challenged this general conclusion, suggesting that some caution is warranted when drawing
conclusions about micro-level opinion change from aggregate economic trends.36

Geography: Though useful for analyzing longer-term dynamics and trends, a focus on national-level
aggregate data is akin to looking at public opinion from 20,000 feet. It allows one to see the forest, but it
can also mask important differences among the trees (i.e., at more local levels). Focusing attention on
national-level aggregate data also ignores the potential importance of context, effectively treating public
opinion as if it comes from nowhere in particular. However, there are good reasons to expect that
differences in environmental and economic contexts shape opinion. For example, some of the earliest
literature37 expected to find differences in environmental concern across urban population centers
(which may be more polluted, overcrowded, or home to more highly educated professionals) and rural
settings (where many of the “extractive” industries like farming, logging, and mining are found). Since
then, it is common to find place-based variation in levels of environmental concern, though these
relationships are usually modest and can vary depending on the issues studied, measures used, and
the areas considered.

Analyzing data from a large number of surveys administered at the national and regional levels,
Lawrence Hamilton and colleagues document substantial place-to-place variation at the county level
and find that such variation helps predict individual climate beliefs.38 Other research has taken national-
level opinion data and “downscaled” them to develop opinion estimates at the congressional district and
county level.39 These estimates document the geographic distribution of public opinion on climate
change in the United States, providing an important resource for students, scholars, policymakers, and
practitioners interested in local climate opinions. The variation found in these data have both a regional
component (with greater concern along the coasts relative to inland) as well as an urban–rural divide,
and distribution of opinions in these data at the state level strongly correlate to the number of climate
policies enacted.40 The extent to which these regional differences are a result of varying levels of
vulnerability to environmental problems, however, remains an open question.

Experience: The question of whether or not, and the extent to which, experience with local
environmental problems helps shape levels of environmental concern is a long-standing one in the field.
Findings from this research have generally shown that while objective environmental conditions can
influence the public’s level of environmental concern, these effects tend to be modest and short-lived.
Some of the earlier work in this area explored attitudes toward nuclear energy and found—somewhat
surprisingly—that proximity to nuclear energy facilities was associated with higher levels of support for
nuclear energy.41 In a more recent study, Bradford Bishop finds that residence in counties that are more
economically dependent on the oil industry was not associated with greater support for offshore oil
drilling before the Deepwater Horizon incident, but that people living in these counties became more
supportive following the spill.42 However, the study found no relationship between living in a county
affected by the spill and opposition to offshore oil drilling, suggesting that local economic benefits trump
local environmental risks in the formation of public attitudes.

In the area of climate change, Konisky and colleagues merge survey data with micro-level geospatial
data on extreme weather events and find a modest relationship between experience with extreme
weather and the level of climate change concern, though these impacts are short-lived.43 Though it
might be tempting to conclude from these results that the public is largely unresponsive to changes in
objective environmental conditions, it remains possible that this might change in the future as the
consequences of major environmental problems like climate change become more severe, frequent,
and widespread across geographies that are less socially adapted to these impacts.
INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL DETERMINANTS
Compared to aggregate-level determinants, the research on micro-level predictors of environmental
concern is considerably larger. This reflects a seismic shift among social scientists in the 1960s and
1970s who began to eschew grand theorizing and sought instead to uncover micro-level explanations of
social phenomenon. Along these lines, environmental scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s took a great
interest in exploring the sociodemographic characteristics that could explain differences in
environmental concern. This early work found that younger and more educated Americans tended to be
more concerned about environmental quality and more supportive of measures to remedy
environmental problems. Since then, decades of research have established robust patterns over time,
with greater environmental concern found among younger, female, liberal, and better educated
Americans relative to their older, male, conservative, and less educated counterparts. Despite their
importance, however, the impact of demographic determinants of environmental public opinion has
come to be dwarfed and sometimes moderated by political partisanship. This is especially—though not
exclusively—true in the area of climate change public opinion.

Demographics: Some of the earliest work looking at environmental public opinion focused on age,
gender, and education, both to highlight the potential implications of these group-level differences for
policymakers, as well as to get a better sense of what types of people are more and less likely to show
heightened concern for environmental problems44

Age: Among the demographic determinants of environmental opinion, one of the most important is age.
Relative to older people, younger Americans are generally more concerned about environmental
problems, while also being more supportive of many of the environmental policy solutions discussed
above. The negative association commonly found between age and environmental concern has led to
some debate over the precise mechanism at play. One interpretation, rooted in Ronald Inglehart’s
postmaterialism thesis, suggests that values have changed over time from emphasizing material
economic and security conditions associated with survival to postmaterial values emphasizing autonomy
and self-expression.45 This thesis relies on the idea of generational replacement, whereby highly salient
historical events that occur during one’s adolescent and young adult life can have lasting consequences
as younger generations replace older cohorts.

However, to the extent that solving current environmental problems may require substantial change to
current institutions and lifestyles, and given that younger people are less invested in the dominant social
order, an alternative interpretation is that younger people are more concerned about the environment
precisely because they are young. From this perspective, people’s priorities change as they move along
the life cycle, such that more short-term economic needs gradually displace concern over the
environment. These different possibilities are directly relevant for thinking about the current youth
generation’s increasingly visible action on environmental issues (including climate strikes around the
world), as they imply very different consequences for the prospects for the continuation of heightened
public pressure for greater environmental protection (Table 3.1).
Table 3.1 Americans’ Attitudes About Global Warming, by Age

18 to 35 to 55 and Age Gap (18 to 34

34 54 Older minus 55+)
% % % pct. pts.
Think global warming will pose a serious threat 51 47 29 22
in your lifetime
Think global warming is caused by human 75 62 55 20
activities
Think problem of global warming is 48 38 31 17
underestimated in the news
 18 to 35 to 55 and Age Gap (18 to 34
34 54 Older minus 55+)
% % % pct. pts.
Think most scientists believe global warming is 73 69 58 15
occurring
Worry a great deal/fair amount about global 70 63 56 14
warming
Think effects of global warming have already 62 63 54 8
begun
Understand global warming issue very/fairly 82 80 76 6
well
Source: Gallup, May 11, 2018. https://news.gallup.com/poll/234314/global-warming-age-gap-younger-americans-worried.aspx. Results
are based on aggregated telephone interviews from four separate Gallup polls conducted from 2015 through 2018 with a random
sample of 4,103 adults, aged 18 and older.

Ethnicity and Gender: Unlike age differences, which are generally consistent in terms of their
predictive power over time, whether or not a “gender gap” exists in environmental concern has been
less conclusive. Initially, it was not uncommon to find weak, mixed, or null effects of gender on
environmental attitudes.46 However, more recent work suggests that women are more risk averse than
men.47 Moreover, in the area of climate change, women tend to display consistently higher levels of
belief and concern than do their male counterparts.48 Though usually included in studies as a control,
the persistent differences found between men and women have prompted more research to explain their
different levels of concern. Of the two most common accounts, the idea that gendered social roles (e.g.,
homemaker status, parenthood) lead to different levels of concern has received little empirical support.
However, an alternative “gender socialization” model has been found to be more compelling.49 This
model suggests that different values and social expectations taught to boys and girls at a young age
(e.g., competitiveness vs. cooperation, unemotional vs. compassionate) can have long-lasting
consequences in terms of environmental problem perceptions between women and men.

Yet another explanation for the gender gap is found in the “differential vulnerability hypothesis,” which
suggests that some demographic groups (like women and nonwhites) are more directly exposed to
environmental risks and are thus more aware and concerned. While nonwhite Americans (especially
Latinos) have been found to report higher levels of belief in and concern for climate change—a racial
spillover that seemed to increase during the Obama presidency,50 these kinds of ethnicity–environment
relationships may be complicated by other confounding factors, such as differences in income.51 Thus,
in addition to highlighting the importance of things like race and gender, this research points to the
importance of intersectionality, or the study of overlapping and interrelated power structures that
discriminate and disadvantage different social groups.52

Education: Given the complexity of environmental problems, education, knowledge, and overall
scientific literacy are commonly thought to play an important role in shaping public opinion. Take the
example of climate change; a complex problem, involving the concentration of invisible gases that alter
the Earth’s energy balance, raising the global average temperature, with wide-ranging effects spread out
over the short, medium, and long term. In light of its inherent complexity, and given mounting scientific
evidence regarding the existence of climate change and its human causes, it is reasonable to expect
that people with higher education are more likely to be exposed to and to be motivated to use their
analytical tools to develop a better understanding of this complex problem, to better understand the risks
involved, and thus become more concerned about the issue. The expected relationship between higher
education and greater environmental concern, however, has proven to be much more complicated.

To be sure, education has performed well as a predictor of general environmental concern both in terms
of its consistency, and at certain times, rivaling the predictive power of ideology.53 However, more recent
studies suggest that the straightforward relationship between education and environmental concern has
changed. Particularly in the area of climate opinion, education can be inconsistently related to concern
(i.e., having both a positive and negative association) depending on ideology, worldview, and
partisanship. Several studies have shown that higher education or self-reported knowledge of climate
change increases concern among Democrats, while among Republicans, these associations were found
to be weak, negative, and in some cases, null.54 To explain this inconsistent relationship, scholars have
identified the role of (affective) elite cues and media campaigns (like Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and
the conservative climate change countermovement) whose discourse is more likely to reach more
educated (attentive) and strongly identified partisans.55

Another influential approach that helps explain the inconsistent effect of education or knowledge on
climate change beliefs and attitudes points to the role of alternative cognitive frameworks. Based on a
key distinction in modes of reasoning between “system 1” (fast, instinctive, and emotional) and “system
2” (slower, deliberative, more logical), scholars have identified the role of cultural and identity-based
cues that can dominate information processing in the opinion formation process.56 Echoing the studies
mentioned earlier that show differential effects of knowledge and education conditional on ideology and
partisanship, Dan Kahan and colleagues57 have shown that rather than bridging the gap, scientific
literacy can polarize people with opposing cultural commitments, such that even when people are
perfectly capable of thinking analytically about complex problems (i.e., they score high on a battery of
science literacy measures), they may instinctively express opinions based on their underlying cultural
commitments and worldviews. This is because, for issues like climate change which are imbued with
cultural significance, individuals are motivated to deflect threats to their underlying identities and values.
To the extent that climate change—or environmental protection more generally—poses a fundamental
challenge to the prevailing capitalist order, for instance, people with more hierarchical and individualistic
worldviews are likely to intuitively downplay the risks of climate change, since accepting these risks
would invite more government regulation of commerce and industry. Meanwhile, people with more
egalitarian and communitarian values—for whom the prevailing capitalist order is the source of rising
inequality and a threat to core values—might be motivated to embrace the notion that climate change
and environmental degradation pose severe risks.

Ideology, Partisanship, and Polarization: Political divisions along the traditional liberal–conservative
spectrum also map closely onto the societal debate between those who criticize and those who defend
the industrial capitalist system.58 As a result, it should come as no surprise that, for decades, political
ideology has consistently been an important predictor of environmental concern.59 More recent studies
confirm that political ideology continues to be among the most important determinants of individual
opinion decades later.60 Conservatives tend to support business and industry and are thus more likely to
oppose environmental reforms, which usually entail government interventions to which conservatives
are opposed.

In contrast to ideology, partisanship has not always been an important predictor of environmental
attitudes. Four decades ago, initial studies found very weak associations between partisanship and
environmental public opinion. This prompted the conclusion that partisanship was “not a crucial variable”
for explaining differences in environmental concern among the general public (though at this time
partisan differences were more pronounced among political elites and the educated public) and led
some to anticipate that environmental concern would continue to broaden across partisan lines.61 Over
time, however, political partisanship emerged as a key determinant of environmental public opinion, as a
burgeoning literature in political science would soon show.

The importance of partisanship as a determinant of environmental attitudes can be illustrated by looking

at public opinion on climate change. In this area, one of the most robust generalizations is that, relative
to Republicans, Democrats are more likely to perceive human-caused global warming as real, be
concerned about its effects, and support greenhouse gas reduction policies.62 Typically, when
partisanship is considered, its association dominates other relationships (save for ideology, to which it is
strongly correlated). Moreover, partisanship moderates the influence of other variables, like knowledge
and education, as well as the impact of alternative issue labeling (e.g., “global warming” vs. “climate
change”), which can further widen the partisan gap.63 Looking at data from the NSEE (see Figure 3.3), it
is not uncommon to find a 30 percent gap in levels of belief on the basic question of whether or not the
Earth is warming,64 while on a range of measures, the size of the partisan gap appears to have
increased over time.65

In fact, a report by the Pew Research Center suggests that partisan polarization over climate change
was the widest ever in 2020, with a 52 percent gap between Republicans and Democrats on the
question of whether climate change should be a top priority for President Trump and Congress.66 At the
same time, emerging research suggests the ground may be shifting, with increasing numbers of
Americans categorized as being concerned or alarmed about global warming.67 Important work from
Hank Jenkins-Smith and colleagues, echoing evidence highlighted by Alexandre Morin-Chassé and
Erick Lachapelle, suggests that Republican attitudes may be more variable than expected, especially
among younger Republicans during recent years.68

Description

Figure 3.3 Percent of Americans Who Say There Is Solid Evidence of Global Warming,
by Party Affiliation

Much research has gone into understanding how environmentalism and climate change in particular
became such polarized topics. Here, it is important to note that political polarization was much less
prevalent before the 1990s. Moreover, there is strong evidence from congressional roll call votes that
polarization among partisan elites preceded polarization among the public.69 The general consensus is
that political partisans in the general population responded to elite cues over this period, a phenomenon
which continues to this day. Political campaigns like the climate denial countermovement, amplified by
partisan media, and reinforced through relatively closed information networks (or “echo chambers”),
have made the environment and especially climate change an identity marker.

Partisans are exposed to very different types of information and have differential incentives to assimilate
or discard information based on its consistency with their underlying identity and values. Though hardly
unique to the environmental issue area, this elite-driven process of partisan polarization is key to
understanding the divergent beliefs and policy preferences of Americans on environmental issues, as
well as the current political difficulty in enacting policies to address climate change. The past has shown
that the environment need not be a partisan issue. However, the extent to which recent dynamics
foreshadow change on the horizon, partly in response to changing environmental conditions and partly
due to the attitudes of younger generational cohorts, remains to be seen.
A BOLD NEW ERA OF PUBLIC OPINION?
While this chapter has argued that public opinion is important, numerous trends in the way individuals
communicate have posed a challenge to conventional theories of opinion formation and how opinion
itself is measured. Indeed, the rise of social media platforms as an important (if often polluted) medium
for communication and exchange about climate change has contributed to the further fragmentation of
the media environment and to increased polarization. This new reality, where people are exposed to
very different kinds of information about climate change, is emerging as an essential component of
understanding why Americans hold vastly different attitudes and preferences with respect to climate
change beyond the traditional types of aggregate and individual level determinants discussed in this
chapter. Meanwhile, the evolution of communication technologies is also changing the way scholars
measure public opinion. For instance, on-line data collection drawn from social media and on-line
panels have become increasingly popular, replacing traditional modes of data collection involving
telephone and mail-back surveys.

The evolution in mode of data collection has helped solve certain problems with declining response
rates over the telephone (as people are less inclined to want to answer questions over the phone, or
even own a landline), but this has also created new challenges for researchers relying on crowdsourcing
and voluntary opt-in panels (like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk), which raise new questions (and potentially
create new problems) related to the types of people answering questions, their level of attention, and
the generalizability of survey results more generally.70 At the same time, new approaches to collecting
public opinion and behavior over popular social media like Facebook and Twitter have also opened up
new research opportunities for public sentiment analysis, sampling, and learning about the influence of
bots while also creating further challenges in terms of data comparability over different modes.71 While
the relative merits and drawbacks of these different approaches continue to be the subject of close
scrutiny, the emerging generation of scholars have at their disposition a variety of tools they can use to
measure dynamics in environmental public opinion.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has provided an overview of the dimensions of American public opinion towards the
environment, the factors that shape such opinions, and the impact of these views on policymaking in the
United States. While by itself public opinion may not determine environmental policy adoption, the
public’s perceptions of environmental matters and their policy preferences have played an important role
in shaping expanded environmental policy engagement over the last 50 years. But as was shown in this
chapter, when environmental issues are less salient to the American public, government officials may
not prioritize efforts in this area. Such has been the case in the area of climate policy, where despite
widespread and growing public acknowledgment of the problem over the last decade, the federal
government has not expanded its climate policy efforts, but instead retreated from earlier commitments.

Notably, as the nation heads into the new decade, the saliency of climate change and environmental
protection in general are rising. In 2020, the National Surveys on Energy and the Environment found
that a record 75 percent of adult Americans believe that there is clear evidence that temperatures are
rising on the planet. In that same year, a study by the Pew Research Center found that for the first time
in the history of their survey, nearly the same amount of Americans (64 percent) said protecting the
environment should be a top national priority as they think strengthening the economy (62 percent)
should be a top priority for the Congress and President. And for the first time Pew found a majority of
Americans (52 percent) think that dealing with climate change should be a top policy priority for the
federal government. Such shifts in opinion may act as a catalyst for substantial climate and
environmental policy engagement in Washington, DC, during the decade of the 2020s. But as we
discussed in this chapter, opinions regarding the environment can shift quickly, and the increased
prominence of environmental, and in particular climate concerns, can retreat behind other priorities.
Certainly, the tremendous economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 will serve
as a great test of the most recent elevated saliency of environmental concerns in the United States. The
Great Recession a decade earlier helped erode an emerging American consensus on the need to
address climate change, and the even greater scope and scale of the economic challenges in the wake
of the pandemic may once again alter how Americans think about the environment and the
government’s role in protecting it.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Gallup (www.gallup.com) Gallup is one of the oldest and most established public opinion research
organizations in the United States. Gallup conducted some of the earliest surveys on public opinion
about environmental issues in the late 1960s and 1970s and maintains some of the longest time
series opinion data on American views about environmental matters.

National Surveys on Energy and the Environment (closup.umich.edu/national-surveys-on-

energy-and-environment/) The National Surveys on Energy and Environment (NSEE) is a biannual
national opinion survey on energy and climate issues.

Pew Research Center (www.pewresearch.org) The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact
tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the world, with regular
focus on environmental and energy topics.

Resources for the Future (www.rff.org/climatesurvey/) RFF’s Surveying American Attitudes toward
Climate Change and Clean Energy project is a polling partnership with Stanford University.

Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (www.ropercenter.cornell.edu) The Roper Center
collects, preserves, and disseminates public opinion data, including many international, national,
and state surveys on environmental matters.

Yale Program on Climate Communication (www.climatecommunication.yale.edu) The Yale

Program on Climate Communication (YPCC) conducts scientific research on public climate change
knowledge, attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior at the global, national, and local scales.
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55. Aaron McCright, “Political Orientation Moderates Americans’ Beliefs and Concern About Climate
Change: An Editorial Comment,” Climatic Change 104 (2011): 243–53; Alexandre Morin-Chassé and
Erick Lachapelle, “Partisan Strength and the Politicization of Global Climate Change: A Re-examination
of Schuldt, Roh, and Schwarz,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 10 (2020): 31–40.

56. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

57. Dan Kahan, Ellen Peters, Maggie Wittlin, Paul Slovic, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Donald Braman, and
Gregory Mandel, “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numercy on Perceived Climate
Change Risks,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 732–5.

58. Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, “Anti-Reflexivity: The American Conservative Movement’s
Success in Undermining Climate Science and Policy,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 2–3 (2010):
100–33.

59. Kent Van Liere and Riley Dunlap, “The Social Bases of Environmental Concern.”

60. Aaron McCright, Sandra Marquart-Pyatt, Rachael Shwom, Steven Brechin, and Summer Allen,
“Ideology, Capitalism, and Climate: Explaining Public Views About Climate Change in the United
States,” Energy Research & Social Science 21 (2016): 180–9.

61. Kent Van Liere and Riley Dunlap, “The Social Bases of Environmental Concern.”

62. Aaron McCright, Sandra Marquart-Pyatt, Rachael Shwom, Steven Brechin, and Summer Allen,
“Ideology, Capitalism, and Climate: Explaining Public Views About Climate Change in the United
States,” Energy Research & Social Science 21 (2016): 180–9.

63. Jonathan Schuldt, Sarah Roh, and Norbert Schwarz, “‘Global Warming’ or ‘Climate Change’?
Whether the Planet Is Warming Depends on Question Wording,” Public Opinion Quarterly 75, no. 1
(2011): 115–24.

64. Christopher Borick, Natalie Fitzpatrick, Sarah Mills, Erick Lachapelle, and Barry Rabe, “Belief (and
Disbelief) in Global Warming: 10 Years of Attitudes About Climate Change in the NSEE,” Issues in
Energy and Environmental Policy, 43 (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the
Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, October, 2019).

65. Riley Dunlap, Aaron McCright, and Jerrod Yarosh, “The Political Divide on Climate Change: Partisan
Polarization Widens in the U.S.” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 58, no.
5 (2016): 4–23; Riley Dunlap, “Partisan Polarization on the Environment Grows Under Trump,” Gallup
Blog, April 5, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/248294/partisan-polarization-environment-
grows-trump.aspx.

66. Nadja Popovich, “Climate Change Rises as a Public Priority, But It’s More Partisan than Ever,” The
New York Times, February 20, 2020.

67. Matthew Goldberg, Abel Gustafson, Seth Rosenthal, John Kotcher, Edward Maibach, and Anthony
Leiserowitz, For the First Time, the Alarmed Are Now the Largest of Global Warming’s Six Americas
(New Haven, CT: Yale University and George Mason University. Yale Program on Climate Change
Communication, January 16, 2020).

68. Alexandre Morin-Chassé and Erick Lachapelle, “Partisan Strength and the Politicization of Global
Climate Change”; Lawrence Hamilton, Joel Hartter, and Erin Bell, “Generation Gaps in US Public
Opinion on Renewable Energy and Climate Change,” PLoS One 14, no. 7 (2019): e0217608.

69. Patrick Egan and Megan Mullin, “Climate Change: US Public Opinion.”
70. Robert Groves, “Three Eras of Survey Research,” Public Opinion Quarterly 75, no. 5 (2011): 861–
71; Michael Chmielewski and Sarah Kucker, “An MTurk Crisis: Shifts of Data Quality and the Impact on
Study Results,” Social Psychology and Personality Science 11, no. 4 (2020): 464–73.

71. Emily Cody, Andrew Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Peter Sheridan Dodds, and Christopher Danforth,
“Climate Change Sentiment on Twitter: An Unsolicited Public Opinion Poll,” PLoS One 10, no. 8 (August
20, 2015): e0136092; S. Mo Jang and P. Sol Hart, “Polarized Frames on ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Global
Warming’ Across Countries and States: Evidence from Twitter Big Data” Global Environmental Change
32 (May 2015): 11–17; Baobao Zhang, Matto Mildenberger, Peter Howe, Jennifer Marlon, Seth
Rosenthal, and Anthony Leiserowitz, “Quota Sampling Using Facebook Advertisement,” Political
Science Research Methods (2018): 1–7. doi:10.1017/psrm.2018.49; Oliver Milman, “Revealed: Quarter
of All Tweets About Climate Crisis Produced by Bots,” The Guardian (February 2020),
www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-tweets-twitter-bots-analysis.
Descriptions of Images and Figures
Back to Figure

Based on the agreement of the statements: protection of the environment should be given priority, even
at the risk of curbing economic growth or economic growth should be given priority, even if the
environment suffers to some extent, the graph is plotted. Taken for the period 1985–2019, the
percentage for the two factors, protection of the environment and economic growth, are calculated.

Back to Figure

The table is a calculation of the percentage of the American population’s views of what should be top
priority for the Federal Government. Divided into Democrats and Republicans, each, what are viewed as
top priorities are as follows: terrorism, economy, health-care costs, education, environment, social
security, poor and needy, crime, immigration, budget deficit, climate change, drug addiction,
infrastructure, jobs, military, gun policy, race relations, and global trade.

Back to Figure

The graph represents the percentage of the American population who believe that there is evidence of
global warming. They are divided into three party affiliations: Democrat, Independent, and Republican.
The calculations are based on the period 2008–2019, alternating between Fall and Spring. The
Democratic population saw the highest percentage of between the 80–100% mark, with the
Independents falling just under within the 60–80% mark, and finally the Republicans holding at between
40–60%.
 PART II FEDERAL
INSTITUTIONS AND POLICY
CHANGE
4 PRESIDENTIAL POWERS AND
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
—Norman J. Vig

I have an Article II where I have the right to do whatever I

want as president.
President Donald J. Trump, July 23, 2019

Thanks to our bold regulatory campaign, the United States

has become the number-one producer of oil and natural
gas anywhere in the world, by far.
President Donald J. Trump, State of the Union Address, February 4,
2020

In early September of 2020, with the presidential campaign in full

swing, President Donald J. Trump gave a speech near Palm Beach,
Florida, to burnish his environmental credentials. He announced that
he was about to sign an executive order that would extend a 10-year
moratorium on oil drilling in the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico and
off the Atlantic coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, thus
reversing an unpopular policy he had announced two years earlier
(he later extended the moratorium to North Carolina as well). In
addition to the drilling moratorium, Trump claimed several
environmental achievements including signing of the Great American
Outdoors Act, an omnibus conservation bill recently passed by a rare
bipartisan majority in Congress after years of effort (Chapter 5). He
proclaimed the Act “the most significant investment in our national
parks in over a century” and went on to call himself “number one
since Teddy Roosevelt.”1 While these claims could be written off as
campaign hyperbole, they reflected the fact that environmental policy
had become an important issue in the presidential election. Trump,
who was widely regarded as the most anti-environmental president
in memory, thus felt it necessary to address a growing political
backlash over his environment record, at least in potential swing
states.

The event also highlighted two dominant trends in environmental

policy in recent decades. The first is the expansion of presidential
powers in defining national environmental priorities and policies. In
the absence of congressional action, what has been labeled “the
administrative presidency” has become the default mode for
environmental governance—that is, the use of executive rather than
legislative powers to control both the direction and the
implementation of these policies.2 The second trend is the growing
partisan divide over climate change and other environmental issues.
Although there are some signs of moderation, it appears that opinion
over environmental issues is more deeply polarized than at any time
in recent history (see Chapter 3).3 The result has been sharp policy
oscillations depending on which party wins the presidency.

Such presidential policy “cycling” has been especially obvious in the

case of environmental policy under Barack Obama and Donald
Trump. President Obama used expansive executive powers to
launch a series of domestic and international initiatives to attack
climate change for the first time and to extend the reach of previous
environmental laws through new rules and regulations. During the
2016 election campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly called climate change
a “hoax” and threatened to reverse Obama’s priorities: he promised
to repeal Obama’s Clean Power Plan and other climate change
regulations; to “cancel” the Paris Agreement on Climate Change; to
dismantle much of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and
to remove barriers to the rapid expansion of oil, gas, and coal
production as part of his “America First” energy plan. The result was
a stark reversal of nearly all of Obama’s achievements and, in some
cases, a weakening of basic environmental legislation dating back to
the 1970s. During the 2020 campaign, the Democratic presidential
nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., pledged to reverse all of these
changes and to enact environmental policies going well beyond
those of the Obama administration in which he had served as vice-
president (Chapter 15).

Article II of the Constitution does indeed grant the president broad

executive authority to conduct foreign and domestic policy, but
President Trump’s view of unfettered presidential power was
unprecedented.4 In this chapter I will compare the environmental
records of presidents since 1980. But first it is necessary to take a
closer look at the powers of the presidency as traditionally
understood and the criteria for comparing presidents’ environmental
policies.
PRESIDENTIAL POWERS AND
CONSTRAINTS
The formal roles of the president have been summarized as
commander in chief of the armed forces, chief diplomat, chief
executive, legislative leader, and opinion/party leader.5 If we look
only at environmental policy, the president’s role as chief executive
has been most important. But some presidents, including Teddy
Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon, have played a
leading role in enacting environmental legislation and in using the
“bully pulpit” to rally public opinion behind new environmental
policies. The role of chief diplomat has also become more important
as many environmental problems have required international
solutions; for example, Ronald Reagan supported and signed the
landmark Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone
Layer in 1987, and Barack Obama played a leading role in
negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. Finally, as
commander in chief of the armed forces, the president also deals
with a growing range of environmental issues, including the
destabilization of regions and governments affected by climate
change and threats posed by melting Arctic ice and rising sea
levels.6

Some of the president’s powers are “contextual”; that is, they shape
the general context of policymaking and the broad directions of the
administration. Presidents can draw attention to issues and frame
the political agenda through speeches, press conferences, and, as in
the case of Mr. Trump’s “twitter presidency,” the new social media;7
they can propose legislation and budgets; they nominate and appoint
cabinet members and other key officials; and they can reorganize
their staff and departments to better implement their policies. Other
powers of the president are more “unilateral” and allow the president
to influence policy decisions directly. These include the power to veto
legislation; to issue executive orders, directives, and proclamations;
to make executive agreements; and to monitor and control regulatory
processes.8 One unique power is the authority to designate national
monuments to protect areas of exceptional scenic, scientific, cultural,
or historical value under the Antiquities Act of 1906. Trump has also
claimed the authority to drastically alter monuments designated by
his predecessors.

Article II of the Constitution directs the president to “take Care that

the Laws be faithfully executed.” Most legislation passed by
Congress is quite broad, however, and leaves much to the discretion
of the president and the implementing agencies. The EPA, for
example, is charged by the Clean Air Act to formulate and issue
detailed standards, rules, and regulations to control the emission of
pollutants to ensure healthy air quality (see Chapter 7). These rules
and regulations are adopted through lengthy administrative
proceedings, and once finalized, they have the full force of law.
Presidents therefore try to centralize and control rulemaking to
ensure that it reflects their policy agendas. All presidents since Nixon
have required that important regulations be cleared by the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) before they are proposed by the
EPA and other regulatory agencies. Presidents can thus have a
major impact on policy decisions through controlling the bureaucracy
rather than passing new legislation.9

Ultimately, however, presidents cannot govern alone; they are part of

a government of “separated powers.”10 Their policies must be
grounded in statutes passed by Congress, and Congress also
determines the budgets and spending limits of all executive
agencies. The Senate can refuse to confirm the president’s
nominees for office and deny the ratification of treaties. Even with a
majority in both houses, the president may not have sufficient
support to pass new legislation. Without such legislation, executive
actions may be difficult to carry out. There can be considerable
resistance to policy change within the bureaucracy itself.11 Moreover,
most major rules and regulations, as well as many executive orders
and other presidential actions, are challenged in the courts by
affected parties, often tying up policies in litigation for years (see
Chapter 6). Executive orders can also be modified or rescinded by
subsequent presidents, so they are rarely permanent. Finally, in our
federal system, most environmental laws depend heavily on the
states for implementation. In recent years groups of states have
frequently challenged federal actions through lawsuits filed by their
attorneys general (see Chapter 2).
COMPARING ENVIRONMENTAL
PRESIDENCIES
Presidential leadership on environmental policy can be analyzed and
compared in different ways. We can examine how each president
performs the five basic roles noted in the previous section as they
pertain to the environment. Two of the political scientists who
developed this approach to presidents’ environmental records have
extended their analysis to twelve past presidents, focusing on four
differentiating factors: political communication, legislative leadership,
administrative actions, and environmental diplomacy.12 Presidents
were then ranked according to their positive or negative impacts on
the environment, yielding a “continuum of greenness.” Seven
presidents are classified as having had a positive impact (Franklin
Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard
Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton), three as having mixed
impacts (Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, and George H. W. Bush),
and two as having negative impacts (Ronald Reagan and George W.
Bush). Roosevelt and Nixon rank as the “greenest” by these
criteria.13 Roosevelt greatly expanded the conservation programs
pioneered by his cousin, Teddy Roosevelt; and Nixon proclaimed the
1970s the “environmental decade,” created the EPA by executive
action, and signed most of the landmark environmental legislation of
our era.14

For our purposes, a president’s overall environmental performance

can be evaluated by examining a few basic indicators: (1) the
president’s environmental agenda as expressed in campaign
statements, policy documents, and other pronouncements; (2)
presidential appointments to key positions in government
departments and agencies and to the White House staff; (3) the
relative priority given to environmental programs in the president’s
proposed budgets; (4) presidential legislative success; (5) executive
orders and other unilateral actions by the president; and (6)
presidential support for or opposition to international environmental
agreements. By these criteria, some presidents have been much
more favorable to the environment than others.

Space does not allow a full comparison of all recent administrations.

I will briefly summarize the environmental records of four presidents
since 1980: Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush. We can
see many contrasts in presidential leadership from these case
studies—as well as some of the dynamics of policy cycles over time.
Fuller attention will be paid to the Obama presidency’s
environmental policy and the actions of the Trump administration to
undo it.
THE REAGAN REVOLUTION:
ENVIRONMENTAL BACKLASH
The “environmental decade” of the 1970s came to an abrupt halt
with Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. Although the environment was
not a major issue in the election, Reagan was the first president to
come to office with an avowedly antienvironmental agenda.
Influenced by the Sagebrush Rebellion—an attempt by several
western states to claim ownership of federal lands—as well as by his
years of public relations work for corporate and conservative causes,
Reagan viewed environmental conservation as fundamentally at
odds with economic growth and prosperity. He saw environmental
regulation as a barrier to “supply side” economics and sought to
reverse or weaken many of the policies of the previous decade.15
Although only partially successful, Reagan’s agenda laid the
groundwork for renewed attacks on environmental policy in later
decades.

Because it came after a period of economic decline, Reagan’s

landslide victory appeared to reflect a strong mandate for policy
change. And with a new Republican majority in the Senate, he was
able to gain congressional support for the Economic Recovery Tax
Act of 1981, which embodied much of his program. He reduced
income taxes by nearly 25 percent and deeply cut spending for
environmental and social programs. Despite this initial victory,
however, Reagan faced a Congress that was divided on most issues
and did not support his broader environmental goals. On the
contrary, the bipartisan majority that had enacted most of the
environmental legislation of the 1970s remained largely intact.

Faced with this situation, Reagan turned to what has been termed an
“administrative presidency.”16 Essentially, this involved an attempt to
change federal policies by maximizing control of policy
implementation within the executive branch. The administrative
strategy initially had four major components: (1) careful screening of
all appointees to environmental and other agencies to ensure
compliance with Reagan’s ideological goals, (2) tight policy
coordination through cabinet councils and White House staff, (3)
deep cuts in the budgets of environmental agencies and programs,
and (4) an enhanced form of regulatory oversight to eliminate or
revise regulations considered burdensome by industry.

Reagan’s appointment of officials who were overtly hostile to the

mission of their agencies aroused strong opposition from the
environmental community. His selection of Anne Gorsuch to head
the EPA and James Watt as secretary of the interior provoked
controversy from the beginning because both were attorneys who
had spent long years litigating against environmental regulation.
Both made it clear that they intended to rewrite the rules and
procedures of their agencies to accommodate industries such as
mining, logging, and oil and gas. Watt was also designated head of
the new cabinet council to coordinate policies in all the
environmental and natural resource agencies, and to bring these
policies in line with the president’s agenda.

In the White House, Reagan lost no time in changing the policy

machinery to accomplish the same goal. He all but eliminated his
environmental advisers and instead appointed Vice President
George H. W. Bush to head a new Task Force on Regulatory Relief,
to identify and modify or rescind regulations targeted by business
and industry. More important, in February 1981 Reagan issued
Executive Order 12291, which carried White House control of the
regulatory process to a new level. All major regulations (costing over
$100 million) were now to undergo prepublication review by the
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the OMB.
They were to be accompanied by rigorous benefit–cost analyses
demonstrating that benefits exceeded costs, and they had to include
evaluation of alternatives to ensure that net social benefits were
maximized. OIRA consequently held up, reviewed, and revised
hundreds of EPA and other regulations to reduce their effect on
industry. The number of new environmental rules declined sharply in
the Reagan years.17 At the same time, Reagan’s budget cuts had
major effects on the capacity of environmental agencies to
implement their growing policy mandates. The EPA lost
approximately one-third of its operating budget and one-fifth of its
personnel in the early 1980s. The White House Council on
Environmental Quality (CEQ) lost most of its staff and barely
continued to function. In the Interior Department and elsewhere,
funds were shifted from environmental to development programs.18

Not surprisingly, Congress responded by investigating OIRA

procedures and other activities of Reagan appointees, especially
Gorsuch and Watt. Gorsuch came under heavy attack for
confidential dealings with business and political interests that
allegedly led to sweetheart deals on matters such as Superfund
cleanups. After refusing to disclose documents, she was found in
contempt of Congress and forced to resign (along with twenty other
high-level EPA officials) in March 1983. Watt was pilloried in
Congress for his efforts to open virtually all public lands (including
wilderness areas) and offshore coastal areas to mining and oil and
gas development, and he left office later in 1983.19 William
Ruckelshaus, the original EPA administrator, was brought back in to
run the EPA and gradually restored the funding and credibility of the
agency.

Because of these embarrassments and widespread public and

congressional opposition to weakening environmental protection,
Reagan’s deregulatory campaign was thus largely spent by the end
of his first term. Recognizing that his policies had backfired, the
president took few new initiatives during his second term. Congress
passed a series of amendments to existing laws such as Superfund,
the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Clean Water Act over Reagan’s
opposition (see Appendix 1). These laws mandated stricter
regulatory timetables and enforcement and were intended to reduce
the discretionary authority of the EPA and other executive agencies.
Indeed, the backlash against Reagan strengthened rather than
weakened key environmental statutes, thus reinforcing these policy
cycles.
PRESIDENT GEORGE H. W. BUSH:
CLEAN AIR LEGISLATION
George H. W. Bush’s presidency thus returned to a more moderate
tradition of Republican leadership, particularly in the first 2 years.
While promising to “stay the course” on Reagan’s economic policies,
Bush also pledged a “kinder and gentler” America. Although his
domestic policy agenda was the most limited of any recent president,
it included action on the environment. Indeed, during the campaign,
Bush declared himself a “conservationist” in the tradition of Teddy
Roosevelt and promised to be an “environmental president.”

If Bush surprised almost everyone by seizing the initiative on what

most assumed was a strong issue for the Democrats, he impressed
environmentalists even more by soliciting their advice and by
appointing environmental leaders to his administration. William
Reilly, the highly respected president of the World Wildlife Fund and
the Conservation Foundation, became EPA administrator; and
Michael Deland, formerly New England director of the EPA, became
chairman of the CEQ.

Bush pursued a bipartisan strategy in passing the Clean Air Act

Amendments of 1990, arguably the single most important legislative
achievement of his presidency. His draft bill, sent to Congress on
July 21, 1989, had three major goals: to control acid rain by reducing
by nearly half sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-burning power
plants by 2000, to reduce air pollution in eighty urban areas that still
had not met 1977 air quality standards, and to lower emissions of
nearly two hundred airborne toxic chemicals by 75–90 percent by
2000. To reach the acid precipitation goals—to which the White
House devoted most of its attention—Bush proposed a cap-and-
trade system rather than command-and-control regulation, so as to
achieve emissions reductions more efficiently.20 The act also
prohibited the use of CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals by
2000. Bush also signed the Intermodal Surface Transportation
Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991 which provided major funding for
mass transportation planning and development.

However, during his reelection campaign, Bush declared a

moratorium on further environmental regulation and retreated to a
more traditional Republican stance. He also threatened to boycott
the UN Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth
Summit) in June 1992 until he had ensured that the climate change
convention to be signed would contain no binding targets for carbon
dioxide reduction. He further alienated the environmental community
by refusing to sign the Convention on Biological Diversity, despite
efforts by his delegation chief, William Reilly, to seek a last-minute
compromise. Thus, despite Bush’s other foreign policy
accomplishments, the United States failed to lead in environmental
diplomacy (see Chapter 12).
THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY:
FRUSTRATED AMBITIONS
President Bill Clinton entered office in 1993 with high expectations
from environmentalists. His campaign promises included many
environmental pledges: to raise the Corporate Average Fuel
Economy (CAFE) standard for automobiles, support renewable
energy research and development, limit US carbon dioxide
emissions to 1990 levels by 2000, create a new solid waste
reduction program and provide other incentives for recycling, pass a
new Clean Water Act with standards for nonpoint sources, reform the
Superfund program and tighten the enforcement of toxic waste laws,
protect ancient forests and wetlands, preserve the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, sign the biodiversity convention, and restore funding
to UN population programs.21

Clinton’s early actions indicated that he intended to deliver on his

environmental agenda. The environmental community largely
applauded his appointments to key environmental positions. Perhaps
most important, Vice President Al Gore was given the lead
responsibility for formulating and coordinating environmental policy
in the White House. Several of his former Senate aides were also
appointed to high positions, including EPA administrator Carol
Browner. Other appointments to the cabinet and executive office
staffs were largely proenvironmental. The most notable
environmental leader was Bruce Babbitt, a former Arizona governor
and president of the League of Conservation Voters, who became
secretary of the interior. In contrast to his predecessors in the
Reagan and Bush administrations, Babbitt came to office with a
strong reform agenda for western public lands management.

Although Clinton entered office with an expansive agenda and

Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, his environmental
agenda quickly got bogged down. Two events early in the term gave
the administration an appearance of environmental policy failure.
Babbitt promptly launched a campaign to “revolutionize” western
land use policies; it included a proposal in Clinton’s first budget to
raise grazing fees on public lands closer to private market levels
(something natural resource economists had advocated for many
years). The predictable result was a furious outcry from cattle
ranchers and their representatives in Congress; Clinton backed
down and removed the proposal from the bill. Much the same thing
happened on the so-called BTU tax. This was a proposal to levy a
broad-based tax on the energy content of fuels as a means of
promoting energy conservation and addressing climate change.
Originally included in the president’s budget package at Gore’s
request, it was eventually dropped in favor of a much smaller
increase in the federal gasoline tax (4.3 cents per gallon) in the face
of fierce opposition from members of both parties in Congress.
Clinton was, however, able to get bipartisan support for the passage
of two relatively uncontroversial bills in 1996, the Food Quality
Protection Act, which established a new basis for regulating
pesticide uses, and the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments
(Appendix 1).

Clinton also relied heavily on his executive powers to pursue his

environmental agenda. A “reinventing environmental regulation”
initiative launched in 1995 created some fifty new EPA programs to
encourage voluntary pollution reduction and to reward states and
companies that exceeded regulatory requirements.22 EPA
administrator Browner also strengthened existing regulations and
enforcement. For example, in 1997, she issued tighter ambient air
quality standards for ozone and small particulate matter. In the final
year of the Clinton administration, the EPA proposed a series of new
regulations tightening standards on other forms of pollution, including
diesel emissions from trucks and buses and arsenic in drinking
water. It also established a legal basis for future regulation of carbon
emissions from cars and light trucks (see Chapter 7).

In addition to strengthening EPA regulations, the Clinton

administration took numerous executive actions to protect public
lands and endangered species. For example, it helped to broker
agreements to protect old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest,
the Florida Everglades, and Yellowstone National Park. The White
House actively promoted voluntary agreements to establish habitat
conservation plans to protect wildlife throughout the country.23
Clinton also used his authority under the Antiquities Act to establish
or enlarge twenty-two national monuments covering more than six
million acres. Finally, in January 2001, Clinton issued a long-awaited
executive order protecting nearly sixty million acres of “roadless”
areas in national forests from future road construction and hence
from logging and development. He could thus claim to have
preserved more public land in the contiguous United States than any
president since Theodore Roosevelt.24

However, the Clinton administration largely failed to develop an

effective response to the greatest challenge of the new century:
climate change. After defeat of the BTU tax in 1993, Clinton’s climate
change proposals called for only voluntary actions; and the
administration refused to commit the United States to binding
reductions prior to the Kyoto treaty negotiations in December 1997.
By then, the Senate had gone on record opposing any agreement
limiting US emissions.25 Ultimately, Clinton authorized Vice President
Gore to break the deadlock at Kyoto with an offer to reduce US
emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2008–2012, and the
United States signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1998. However, Congress
made it clear that it would not ratify the agreement and prohibited all
efforts to implement it.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
REGULATORY STALEMATE
George W. Bush took office in 2001 with a weak mandate to govern.
He had lost the popular vote to Al Gore and had been declared the
Electoral College winner only after several weeks of wrangling over
contested Florida ballots, a dispute culminating in the Supreme
Court’s intervention. However, in the wake of the September 11,
2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, his
powers were greatly enlarged. Like Reagan, Bush used the
executive powers of the presidency to advance an antiregulatory,
probusiness agenda, though not to the same degree. He exercised
the powers of appointment, budget, regulatory oversight, and
rulemaking to weaken environmental policies.26 Vice President Dick
Cheney played a leading role in selecting cabinet appointees and,
like previous vice presidents, in shaping energy and environmental
policies.

With the exception of Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor

of New Jersey who was picked to head the EPA, Bush’s initial
appointments to environmental and natural resource agencies were
largely drawn from business corporations or from conservative
interest groups, law firms, and think tanks. Among the more
controversial of these appointees were secretary of the interior Gale
Norton, a protégée of James Watt and a strong advocate of resource
development; J. Steven Griles, her deputy secretary and a longtime
coal and oil industry lobbyist; Julie MacDonald, deputy assistant
secretary of interior for fish and wildlife (responsible for the
Endangered Species Act); and Mark Rey, a timber industry lobbyist,
as undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and
environment (including the US Forest Service). All of these officials
left office under a cloud of investigation after ignoring numerous
statutory and regulatory limits on resource exploitation and were
replaced by more seasoned administrators in the second term.
President Bush’s first budget proposal, for fiscal year 2002, called for
a modest 4 percent increase in overall domestic discretionary
spending, but an 8 percent reduction in funding for natural resource
and environmental programs (the largest cut for any sector). The
EPA’s budget was to be slashed by nearly $500 million, or 6.4
percent, and the Interior Department budget was slated for a 3.5
percent cut.27 Congress, however, did not approve these budget
cuts. Total EPA spending remained near $8 billion through 2008 but
declined somewhat when adjusted for inflation. On the other hand,
federal outlays for the Departments of Energy and the Interior
increased significantly, and overall spending for natural resources
and the environment rose by about 25 percent between 2001 and
2008.28 Thus, environmental agencies did not suffer the budget cuts
they did during the Reagan administration.

After suspending or rejecting many of Clinton’s last-minute

regulations, the Bush White House reestablished the Reagan-era
rules for regulatory review. OIRA carried out an extensive analysis of
proposed regulations, demanding that agencies justify all new rules
by strict cost–benefit analysis. At the behest of business groups,
existing rules were also reviewed in order to reduce the burden of
regulation wherever possible.29 Going one better than Reagan, in
January 2007, the president issued a new executive order requiring
that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a
political appointee to manage the regulatory review process.30 The
order also granted OIRA new authority to review and edit “agency
guidance documents,” including scientific reports and memoranda,
and to hold up proposed regulations indefinitely. The result was a
highly politicized form of administration in which the political interests
of the president and his supporters frequently overrode scientific and
technical considerations in the bureaucracy.

President Bush’s energy and environmental agenda was quickly

shaped after he took office. During spring 2001, a national energy
plan was drafted in secrecy by a task force appointed by Vice
President Cheney. The plan called for major increases in future
energy supplies, including domestic oil, gas, nuclear, and “clean
coal” development, and for streamlining environmental regulations to
accelerate new energy production. A bill incorporating these and
other aspects of the Bush–Cheney plan quickly passed the House of
Representatives in 2001 but later stalled in the Senate when
authorization to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was
defeated. Eventually, an energy bill was passed in 2005 providing
large subsidies, loan guarantees, and other incentives to
conventional energy producers (see Appendix 1).

The administration’s “Clear Skies” bill, introduced in Congress in

2002, incorporated many of industries’ suggestions for scaling back
the pollution control requirements of the Clean Air Act. When this
legislation went nowhere, Bush proceeded to issue executive orders
that, in effect, implemented similar rules. For example, one of the
more controversial rules relaxed requirements for the installation of
new pollution equipment when power plants and oil refineries
expanded or increased production (see Chapter 7). A broader Clean
Air Interstate Rule issued in 2005 set standards for conventional air
pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and ozone in twenty-eight eastern
states, while another rule regulated mercury emissions from coal-
fired power plants. These rules raised current standards but were
less rigorous than those recommended by EPA scientists and, in
most cases, were overturned by the courts.31

Perhaps President Bush’s most significant executive action was his

rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change in 2001. Calling
the treaty “fatally flawed,” the president officially withdrew US
participation in the international regime for regulating greenhouse
gases. This was part of a larger shift away from international treaty
obligations in the Bush administration, but it presaged an 8-year
effort to block any mandatory requirements for controlling
greenhouse gases (despite Bush’s campaign promises to regulate
carbon dioxide). Instead, Bush supported continuing research
programs on climate science and technological development,
including new efforts to develop hydrogen energy and other
alternative fuels.32 The Energy Independence and Security Act of
2007 incorporated many of these proposals and also modestly
raised auto fuel efficiency standards for the first time in decades.33
But despite a landmark US Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts
v. EPA, in April 2007 holding that the EPA could regulate greenhouse
gases under the Clean Air Act, the White House refused to allow the
agency to develop a regulatory strategy for climate change or to
grant California a waiver to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from
motor vehicles (see Chapters 6 and 7).
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: CLIMATE
BREAKTHROUGH
Barack Obama took office in January 2009 with what appeared to be
a strong electoral mandate. Although he inherited the multiple
economic and foreign policy crises left by the Bush administration,
his campaign based on messages of “hope” and “change we can
believe in” seemed to provide an opening for far-reaching reforms.
Obama had also endorsed a strong environmental agenda. Among
other things, he promised to create a cap-and-trade program for
reducing US greenhouse gas emissions, to make massive
investments in renewable energy to create millions of new jobs, to
double auto fuel economy standards by 2025, to tighten air pollution
standards for mercury and other pollutants from power plants, to
make major improvements in energy efficiency standards for
buildings and in the national electricity grid, and to reverse Bush
administration policies on mining and the protection of roadless
areas.34 The Democratic Party also gained the largest majorities in
Congress in decades, making a legislative strategy appear feasible.

Obama’s climate change bill, the American Clean Energy and

Security Act of 2009, would have established a national cap-and-
trade system to reduce carbon dioxide emissions throughout the US
economy. The bill passed by a close, largely partisan, vote in the
House, but failed in the Senate after lengthy compromise
negotiations (Chapter 5). Once the Republicans regained a majority
in the House of Representatives in 2010, it became impossible to
enact any environmental legislation. Thus, like his predecessors,
Obama turned increasingly to an administrative strategy to carry out
his agenda. Following his reelection in 2012, he made it clear that he
would act with or without the support of Congress.35

President Obama’s choices for cabinet and top White House staff
positions were well regarded by environmentalists. His first-term
“green team” included Lisa Jackson, a chemical engineer who had
served in the EPA and as commissioner of the New Jersey
Department of Environmental Protection, as EPA administrator;
Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who directed the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as energy secretary; and
Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colorado, as interior secretary. Obama also
appointed several other top scientists to the administration, including
John Holdren, a Harvard physics professor, as White House science
adviser.36 Obama’s second-term appointments were considered
strong environmentalists but pragmatic administrators as well. Gina
McCarthy, the assistant administrator in charge of air and radiation at
the EPA, became the new EPA head; Ernest J. Moniz, a
distinguished physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, replaced Steven Chu at the Energy Department; and
Sally Jewell, an oil geologist and businesswoman, became secretary
of the interior. These and other scientists played a more prominent
role in decision-making than in any recent presidency.

Despite taking office amidst the worst recession since the 1930s and
strong opposition from Republicans to raising the national debt,
President Obama presided over a significant increase in federal
spending for energy and the environment. Many of his goals for
developing new energy technologies were incorporated into his
emergency “stimulus bill” (the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act of 2009), which included some $80 billion in new spending, tax
incentives, and loan guarantees to promote energy efficiency,
renewable energy sources, fuel-efficient cars, mass transit, and
cleaner fuel technologies. He also called for large increases in the
budget of the EPA and in the budgets of other environmental
agencies. His first budget (for fiscal year 2010) requested $10.5
billion for the EPA (48 percent more than requested by President
Bush in his final budget), and Congress approved $10.2 billion.
Actual EPA spending rose from $8 billion in 2009 to over $12.7
billion in 2012 and then fell back to an estimated $8.3 billion in 2016.
Overall spending for natural resources and the environment
increased from $35.5 billion in 2009 to a peak of $45.9 billion in 2011
before settling back to an estimated $39.5 billion in 2016.37
Given his experience as a senator, his criticism of George W. Bush’s
style of leadership, and his preference for legislative solutions, it is
not surprising that President Obama was slower to develop an
administrative presidency. Nevertheless, he utilized some executive
powers from the beginning. Upon taking office, he suspended or
revoked a number of Bush’s executive orders and regulations,
including those on California’s request for a waiver to regulate
greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, oil and gas leasing in
potential wilderness areas, and the political direction of regulatory
review. In March 2009, he issued a “Presidential Memorandum on
Scientific Integrity” to heads of agencies and departments to prevent
political misuse of scientific research and information such as was
alleged to have occurred during his predecessor’s tenure.38

Obama took a relatively cautious approach to the use of unilateral

powers during his first term. Nevertheless, among other regulations,
the EPA issued ones to control mercury and other toxic emissions
from industrial boilers, incinerators, and power plants; to tighten
standards for the emission of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and
particulates that drift downwind from twenty-eight eastern states and
the District of Columbia (the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule); and to
limit some carbon emissions from large industries. In August 2012,
following negotiations with the auto industry, environmentalists, and
energy experts, Obama raised fuel economy standards for cars and
light trucks to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.39

At the Copenhagen climate change conference in December 2009,

President Obama pledged to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions
by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, roughly the reduction
expected from passage of the climate change bill then pending in
Congress. Despite the failure of the bill, Obama continued to
espouse this goal and in his second term made its achievement a
top priority.

The president outlined his strategy for climate change in a speech at

Georgetown University in June 2013.40 The plan, which contained
some seventy-five specific proposals, relied heavily on executive
action and expansive interpretations of existing law. It included the
regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from new and existing power
plants and a continuing shift to cleaner fuels such as natural gas; a
redoubling of wind and solar energy production and opening public
lands and military bases to renewable energy construction; a new
goal for the federal government to consume 20 percent of its
electricity from renewable sources by 2020; increased preparedness
for the impacts of climate change through support of infrastructure
improvements; and the reassertion of American international
leadership on climate change. As part of reclaiming global
environmental leadership, the United States would negotiate
cooperative agreements with rapidly developing countries such as
China, end US aid and support for the construction of coal-fired
power plants abroad, and seek a new global treaty to cut carbon
pollution.41

In September 2013, the EPA proposed a carbon dioxide emission

standard for all new electric power plants that would make future
construction of coal-fired plants prohibitively expensive; and in June
2014, it issued a draft rule that would require existing coal plants to
reduce their carbon emissions by approximately 30 percent from
2005 levels by 2030. After a year of public comment and negotiation,
the “Clean Power Plan” rule was finalized in August 2015.42 The
regulations would give considerable flexibility to the states in
designing their implementation plans and allowed states up to 15
years to comply, but it was nevertheless denounced by the
Republican Party—and some Democrats—as a “war on coal” during
the 2014 congressional elections.

Despite losing the Senate in the election, President Obama followed

through on his promise to pursue a new international climate change
agreement. He announced a landmark executive agreement with
China a week after the elections. Under the agreement, China made
a commitment to limit its use of fossil fuels for the first time by
pledging that its carbon emissions will peak no later than 2030. On
its side, the United States pledged to reduce its carbon emissions by
26–28 percent by 2025, compared to 2005. This joint leadership by
the United States and China, as well as the Clean Power Plan to
limit domestic emissions, paved the way for the Paris Agreement in
December 2015 (see Chapter 12).43 The United States and China
also brokered an international agreement in 2016 to phase out use
of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are widely used as refrigerants
throughout the world but are potent greenhouse gases.44

However, Republican majorities in Congress continued to oppose all

actions to limit climate change. The Senate voted to block the power
plant regulations after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
urged states not to comply with them.45 Attorneys general from
twenty-nine Republican states together with dozens of corporations
and industry groups filed suit in the District of Columbia Circuit Court
to block them. After the court refused to grant a preliminary
injunction, the US Supreme Court, in an unusual move, intervened in
early 2016 to order an indefinite stay pending full review by the
appellate court.46 Several other rules, including EPA regulations
limiting emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants from power
plants and regulations to control oil and gas fracking on public lands,
were also held up by the courts.

President Obama continued to battle Congress on other fronts as

well. He delayed a decision on the controversial Keystone XL oil
pipeline, vetoed a bill passed by Congress to approve it, and finally
rejected the pipeline entirely on grounds that it would contribute
disproportionately to carbon emissions.47 After weeks of protests by
Native American and environmental groups, he also held up the
Dakota Access pipeline, which would transport oil from North Dakota
to Illinois. In the closing months of his administration, several other
important environmental decisions were promulgated, including EPA
rules to reduce carbon emissions from heavy-duty trucks and tractor-
trailers and to reaffirm fuel economy standards for cars and light
trucks through 2025 models; Interior Department regulations to limit
methane emissions from oil and gas operations on public lands and
to protect streams from mountain coal-mining discharges; and a
presidential order under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act
to permanently ban oil drilling along the Atlantic Seaboard and in
much of the Arctic Ocean.48 Republicans in Congress vowed to
reverse most if not all of these new regulations.

Finally, President Obama left a strong legacy of public lands

conservation by designating 29 new national monuments and
expanding several others. Among the most significant of the new
protected areas were the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears National
Monument in Utah and the Gold Butte National Monument in the
Mojave Desert in Nevada. Altogether, Obama designated more
monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906 than any previous
president.49
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP: POLICY
REVERSAL
Donald Trump came to the presidency with the most
antienvironmental agenda since Ronald Reagan. During the election
campaign, he had repeatedly attacked Barack Obama’s
environmental initiatives, especially Obama’s actions to limit climate
change. He promised to roll back these policies and to dismantle the
EPA “in almost every form.”50 Echoing Reagan—and most
Republicans—he argued that environmental regulations were “job-
killers” impeding economic growth and declared that he would
remove all rules and regulations deemed “unnecessary” and impose
a temporary moratorium on new ones. He called for the repeal of
Obama’s “war on coal,” stating that he would end restrictions on
America’s “untapped energy—some $50 trillion… in shale energy, oil
reserves and natural gas on federal lands, in addition to hundreds of
years of coal energy reserves.”51 Rarely has a presidential candidate
called for such total repudiation of his predecessor’s legacy.

Trump’s appointments reflected these priorities. Scott Pruitt, the new

EPA administrator, had filed 14 major lawsuits against the agency as
attorney general of Oklahoma. With the support of fossil fuel
interests, he had played a leading role in the multistate legal
challenge to the Clean Power Plan, the suit that had resulted in a
Supreme Court stay of the plan in early 2016.52 He denied any
scientific consensus on climate change and indicated that he would
seek to halt all EPA and other agency actions directed toward
limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Pruitt also hired several high-
level aides from the staff of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), the
leading critic of climate science in Congress, and called for the EPA
to return to its “core functions” of protecting clean air and water. He
also suggested that many of these responsibilities could be
transferred to the states.53
Trump’s other environmental and energy appointments were
somewhat less controversial but no less business oriented. Ryan
Zinke, a little-known congressman and outdoorsman from Montana,
was named secretary of the interior; former Texas governor Rick
Perry became secretary of energy; and ex-Georgia governor Sonny
Perdue was appointed agriculture secretary. Perry had long-standing
ties to the oil and gas industry, while Perdue had supported
corporate agricultural and timber interests throughout his career.
Indeed, nearly all of Trump’s high-level appointees came from
business and industry, red state governments, or conservative
lobbying firms or foundations that had opposed environmental
regulations.54 Many lacked scientific qualifications, and nearly all
were climate change deniers or skeptics.55

Many of Trump’s initial appointees had little or no experience in the

federal government and were soon enmeshed in ethical, legal, and
personal scandals. Like Anne Gorsuch and James Watt in the
Reagan administration and several top officials in the George W.
Bush administration, Pruitt and Zinke were forced to resign in 2018
amidst multiple investigations into their conduct.56 Perry also
resigned at the end of 2019 after being implicated in the Ukrainian
scandal that led to Trump’s impeachment trial. These and other
officials were replaced by more veteran operatives: Andrew Wheeler,
a former coal lobbyist, replaced Pruitt at the EPA; former oil lobbyist
David Bernhard became interior secretary; and deputy energy
secretary Dan Brouillette succeeded Perry.57 All of these
replacements continued to pursue the president’s deregulatory
agenda, but with less publicity and greater legal expertise and
effectiveness.58

Unlike previous presidents, Trump appointed no prominent science

advisers to the White House early in his term, and removed or
marginalized many other scientists throughout his administration
(see Chapters 7 and 9).59 He also disbanded numerous scientific
advisory panels in the EPA and other agencies and removed
information on climate change from government websites.60
According to 2018 a survey of more than 63,000 scientists in 16
federal agencies conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists,
scientific advice was frequently ignored, distorted, or blocked by
political appointees.61 Trump himself ignored or summarily dismissed
major scientific reports such as the Fourth National Climate
Assessment, completed in 2017 by thirteen federal agencies, the
Fifth Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
in 2018, and threat assessments by the Defense Department and
intelligence agencies regarding climate change.62 The president
eventually appointed Kelvin Droegemeier, a meteorologist from the
University of Oklahoma, as his science advisor and as director of the
Office of Science and Technology Policy, and brought retired
Princeton physicist William Happer, a well-known climate science
opponent, into the National Security Council, but it was not clear that
their advice was taken seriously.63

Trump’s initial budget proposal in 2017 called for massive cuts in

virtually all environmental and science programs. The EPA was
singled out for the steepest funding cuts of all: its budget was to be
reduced from about $8.3 billion to $5.7 billion, or about 31 percent,
with 20 percent of its staff and dozens of programs eliminated.64
Other agencies supporting research related to climate change were
also to be reduced sharply: spending by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was to be cut 18 percent, with
the largest reductions in the agency’s environmental satellite
programs; and the Energy Department’s nonnuclear programs were
to be reduced by about the same amount, including its national
laboratories and Office of Science. “As to climate change,” Trump’s
first budget director and later chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, stated
bluntly, “I think the president was fairly straightforward: We’re not
spending money on that anymore.”65

Congress refused to accept these proposed cuts and has since

passed a series of continuing resolutions that have roughly
maintained previous levels of spending (see Appendix 2). Trump has
nevertheless proposed deep cuts in environmental programs in each
of his subsequent budgets. His most recent budget, for Fiscal Year
2021, requested a 26 percent cut for the EPA and called for
elimination of nearly 50 programs; cut the Interior Department by 16
percent; and sliced the nonnuclear programs of the Energy
Department by 28 percent. Virtually all science and research
programs were to be cut drastically.66 Although such draconian
cutbacks were not likely to be acceptable to Congress, they reflected
Trump’s priorities. Moreover, the administration’s attitude toward
environmental programs has contributed to demoralization and loss
of personnel at agencies like the EPA, whose staffing is now at the
lowest levels since the Reagan administration (Appendix 3).67

Like previous presidents, Trump quickly utilized his authority to

revoke or suspend many of his predecessor’s executive orders and
to issue new directives of his own.68 All new regulations not yet in
effect were frozen, as were all pending EPA contracts and awards.
The president then issued a series of executive orders on regulatory
reform: Executive Order (EO) 13771 required that any new
regulation be offset by repeal of at least two other regulations that
would reduce compliance costs by at least the same amount; and
EO 13777 required the appointment of “regulatory reform officers”
and “regulatory reform task forces” in all agencies to “evaluate
existing regulations… and make recommendations to the agency
head regarding their repeal, replacement, or modification, consistent
with applicable law.”69 A further memorandum instructed the
Commerce Department to solicit comments from manufacturing
industries on which regulations to target. These mandates were
similar to those imposed by Ronald Reagan, but they appeared to go
even further in focusing on regulatory costs regardless of benefits.70

EO 13783 on “Promoting Energy Independence and Economic

Growth,” issued on March 28, 2017, took direct aim at President
Obama’s climate change policies. It required federal departments
and agencies to “immediately review all existing regulations that
potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced
energy resources and appropriately suspend, revise, or rescind” any
that are unnecessary; instructed the EPA administrator to begin the
process of withdrawing the Clean Power Plan; revoked all other
presidential directives related to the consideration of greenhouse gas
emissions, including environmental reviews under the National
Environmental Policy Act and calculation of the “social costs of
carbon”; ended the moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands; and
ordered the review of Obama-era rules regarding the control of
methane emissions and of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on public
lands.71

Trump delivered on all of these issues. Indeed, he rolled back, or

was in the process of modifying or eliminating, at least 100
environmental rules and regulations by mid- 2020.72 Space
obviously does not allow listing them all here, but many are
discussed in detail in other chapters of this volume.

The Trump administration reversed Obama’s climate change policies

in six fundamental ways to promote the president’s “energy
dominance” agenda:

withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, once again

isolating the United States in international environmental
diplomacy;73

revocation of the “Clean Power Plan” to reduce carbon

emissions from power plants and replacement with a much
weaker “Affordable Clean Energy” rule that would largely leave
regulation of individual plants to the states;74

replacement of the vehicle fuel economy standards negotiated

by Obama for the years 2022–2025 and revocation of
California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act to set higher mileage
standards;75

opening virtually all federal public lands and offshore waters to

oil and gas leasing, including parts of the Atlantic, Pacific, and
Arctic coasts, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and other
areas protected for endangered species;76
 elimination or weakening of Obama restrictions on fossil fuel
production and use, including stream protection, methane
releases, fracking practices, offshore drilling safety, oil pipeline
construction, power plant emissions of mercury and other toxic
pollutants, and disposal of toxic wastes;77

radical revision of cost–benefit analysis to discount future

benefits of carbon emission reduction and to exclude
consideration of climate change in federal rulemaking and
environmental impact assessment.78

In addition to these reversals, the Trump administration altered the

implementation of numerous other environmental laws dating back to
the 1970s. For example, environmental impact reviews of “major
federal actions” under the National Environmental Policy Act were to
be curtailed in duration, scope, and length to accelerate projects,
thus reducing public input and scientific evidence.79 The EPA also
proposed limiting the kinds of public health evidence that can be
used in setting environmental standards under the Clean Air and
Clean Water Acts and in making decisions on exposure to hazardous
chemicals such as pesticides.80 Trump rescinded the “Waters of the
United States” rule issued by Obama in 2015 after years of
negotiation to clarify which bodies of water are covered by the Clean
Water Act. As a result, most smaller streams, seasonal ponds, and
agricultural wetlands may no longer be protected.81 Criteria for listing
of threatened and endangered species under the Endangered
Species Act were also tightened and large areas of protected habitat
were opened for development.82 Cleanups of numerous Superfund
sites were delayed, resulting in a growing backlog of untreated
sites.83 And in one of his most dramatic moves, Trump asserted
unprecedented authority to drastically alter the size and shape of
national monuments established by his predecessors: he reduced
the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument established by
President Clinton in the red rock canyons of Utah by nearly half, and
shrank the Bears Ears National Monument created by Obama on
ancient tribal lands by more than 80 percent (Chapter 9).84 It
remains unclear whether these interventions will be ruled legal under
the Antiquities Act of 1906, but at least some of the excluded areas
have been opened to oil, gas, and mining leasing.

In addition to rolling back regulations, enforcement of environmental

law declined sharply under Trump. For example, the amount of civil
penalties for violation of pollution standards by EPA dropped by 85
percent during the first 2 years of the administration.85 During the
COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the EPA further relaxed
requirements for detecting and reporting violations. The agency also
refused to tighten national air quality standards for particulate matter,
even though studies indicated that persons suffering from chronic
illnesses linked to pollution such as asthma were more vulnerable to
the virus.86

Overall, the pace of deregulation under President Trump was

unprecedented—surpassing even that of the Reagan era—and was
indicative of what former White House strategist Stephen Bannon
called the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”87 However,
undoing rules and regulations that have been adopted by formal
administrative procedures is difficult and time consuming, often
taking years. In many cases Trump appointees violated procedures
required by the Administrative Procedure Act or simply ignored the
advice of agency experts, inviting legal challenges on both legal and
scientific grounds.88 These and other major decisions are subjected
to ongoing court challenges and resistance from cities and states,
environmental and other interest groups, businesses, and citizens
(Chapter 6).
CONCLUSION
The Obama and Trump presidencies make it clear that the president
has become the most significant actor in national environmental
policymaking. The powers of the presidency have continued to
expand in the current era of ideological polarization and
congressional gridlock. The result is violent pendulum swings
between liberal and conservative policies, which reflect
fundamentally different views on the role of government, the nature
and place of science in designing environmental policies, and global
economic forces and trends. Obama’s reliance on executive powers
alone to impose climate policies was clearly a weakness, albeit a
necessary one given the opposition he faced in Congress. Donald
Trump then utilized his executive powers to an unprecedented
degree to erase his predecessor’s environmental legacy. In doing so,
he invoked nearly unlimited authority to impose his environmental
and energy policies throughout a “unitary executive.” Future
presidents may do the same, threatening ongoing legal and
constitutional crises. The uncertainty and division that are likely to
result could permanently weaken the nation’s commitment to
environmental goals.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (www.C2ES.org)

This site provides research from a leading think tank on climate
change policies.

Department of the Interior (www.interior.gov) The official

website for the department and bureaus within it.

Environmental and Energy Law Program, Harvard

University (www.eelp.law.harvard.edu/regulatory-rollback-
tracker/) This site tracks deregulation actions and their current
status.

Environmental Protection Agency (www.epa.gov) The official

website for the EPA offers information on environmental topics
and US environmental policy, laws, and regulations.

Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org) The website of this

nonprofit think tank offers research and analysis on energy and
environmental issues from a conservative perspective.

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia University

(https://climate.law.columbia.edu/climate-deregulation-tracker/)
This site documents changes in laws and regulations affecting
climate change.

White House (www.whitehouse.gov) The president’s official

website provides information on presidential actions, including
executive orders, and pending, signed, and vetoed legislation.
NOTES
1. Brady Dennis and Dino Grandoni, “In Reversal, Trump to Ban Oil
Drilling Off Coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina,”
Washington Post, September 8, 2020; Annie Karni and Lisa
Friedman, “Trump, Calling Himself ‘The No. 1 Environmental
President,’ Green Washes His Record,” New York Times, September
8, 2020.

2. Richard P. Nathan, The Administrative Presidency (New York:

Wiley, 1983); Frank J. Thompson, Kenneth K. Wong, and Barry G.
Rabe, Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism
(Washington, DC: Brookings, 2020).

3. Nadja Popovich, “Climate Change Rises as a Public Priority. But

It’s More Partisan Than Ever,” New York Times, February 20, 2020.

4. Charlie Savage, “Trump and His Lawyers Embrace a Vision of

Vast Executive Power,” New York Times, June 4, 2018; Michael
Brice-Saddler, “While Bemoaning Mueller Probe, Trump Falsely
Says the Constitution Gives Him ‘the Right to Do Whatever I Want,’”
Washington Post, July 23, 2019.

5. Dennis L. Soden, ed., The Environmental Presidency (Albany:

State University of New York Press, 1999).

6. For references, see “National Defense Strategy: Climate Change

in the Age of Great Power Competition,”
www.americansecurityproject.org/climate-change-in-the-age-of-
great-power-competition/, and Bruce Lieberman, “A Brief
Introduction to Climate Change and National Security,” July 23,
2019, www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/07/a-brief-introduction-
to-climate-change-and-national-security/.

7. Michael D. Shear, Maggie Haberman, Nicholas Confessore, Karen

Yourish, Larry Buchanan and Keith Collins, “Office of Presidency
Transformed by Force of Thousands of Tweets,” New York Times,
November 3, 2019.

8. Kenneth R. Mayer, “Going Alone: The Presidential Power of

Unilateral Action,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American
Presidency, ed. George C. Edwards III and William G. Howell
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 427–54.

9. David E. Lewis and Terry M. Moe, “The Presidency and the

Bureaucracy: The Levers of Presidential Control,” in The Presidency
and the Political System, 9th ed., ed. Michael Nelson (Washington,
DC: CQ Press, 2010), 367–400.

10. Charles O. Jones, The Presidency in a Separated System

(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994).

11. Robert F. Durant and William G. Resh, “Presidential Agendas,

Administrative Strategies, and the Bureaucracy,” in The Oxford
Handbook of the American Presidency, ed. George C. Edwards III
and William G. Howell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 577–
600.

12. Byron W. Daynes and Glen Sussman, White House Politics and
the Environment: Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (College
City: Texas A&M University Press, 2010).

13. Daynes and Sussman, White House Politics, 210–15.

14. See Douglas Brinkley, Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt

and the Land of America (New York: HarperCollins, 2016); Russell E.
Train, “The Environmental Record of the Nixon Administration,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly 26, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 185–96.

15. For a more detailed analysis of Reagan’s environmental record,

see Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft, eds., Environmental Policy
in the 1980s: Reagan’s New Agenda (Washington, DC: CQ Press,
1984).
16. Nathan, The Administrative Presidency.

17. Lewis and Moe, “The Presidency and the Bureaucracy,” 390;
Marc Allen Eisner, Governing the Environment: The Transformation
of Environmental Regulation (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007),
80–5.

18. On the impact of the Reagan budget cuts, see especially two
chapters in Environmental Policy in the 1980s: Reagan’s New
Agenda: Robert V. Bartlett, “The Budgetary Process and
Environmental Policy,” 121–42; J. Clarence Davies, “Environmental
Institutions and the Reagan Administration,” 143–60.

19. For a detailed summary of Watt’s policies, see Paul J. Culhane,

“Sagebrush Rebels in Office: Jim Watt’s Land and Water Policies,” in
Environmental Policy in the 1980s: Reagan’s New Agenda, 293–
317.

20. See Gary C. Bryner, Blue Skies, Green Politics: The Clean Air
Act of 1990 and Its Implementation, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: CQ
Press, 1995).

21. Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Putting People First (New York: Times
Books, 1992), 89–99.

22. On the “reinvention” effort, see Daniel J. Fiorino, The New

Environmental Regulation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006),
Chapter 5.

23. As an alternative way of implementing the Endangered Species

Act, the Clinton administration supported completion of more than
250 habitat conservation plans protecting some 170 endangered
plant and animal species while allowing controlled development on
twenty million acres of private land. William Booth, “A Slow Start
Built to an Environmental End-Run,” Washington Post, January 13,
2001.

24. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 948.

25. In particular, the Byrd–Hagel resolution (passed 95–0 on June
12, 1997) opposed any agreement that would harm the US economy
or that did not require control of greenhouse gas emissions by
developing countries.

26. Jonathan Weisman, “In 2003, It’s Reagan Revolution Redux,”

Washington Post, February 4, 2003; Bill Keller, “Reagan’s Son,” New
York Times Magazine, January 26, 2003.

27. “Bush’s Budget: The Losers,” Washington Post, April 10, 2001.

28. Budgets for the EPA and other agencies since 1976 can be
found at www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals.

29. Joel Brinkley, “Out of Spotlight, Bush Overhauls U.S.

Regulations,” New York Times, August 16, 2004; Bruce Barcott,
“Changing All the Rules,” New York Times Magazine, April 4, 2004;
and Christopher Klyza and David Sousa, American Environmental
Policy, 1990–2006 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 135–52.

30. C. W. Copeland, “The Law: Executive Order 13422: An

Expansion of Presidential Influence in the Rulemaking Process,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly 37 (2007): 531–44.

31. For details on these actions and their outcomes, see Klyza and
Sousa, American Environmental Policy: Beyond Gridlock, 2008
Chapters 4 and 9.

32. In his 2007 State of the Union address, Bush called for
mandatory standards requiring that 35 million gallons of renewable
and alternative fuels be produced by 2017, nearly a fivefold increase.

33. See John M. Broder, “Bush Signs Broad Energy Bill,” New York
Times, December 19, 2007.

34. “Barack Obama and Joe Biden: Promoting a Healthy

Environment”
(https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/edg/media/Obama_Cap_and_Tra
de_0512.pdf) and “Barack Obama and Joe Biden: New Energy for
America”
(https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/edg/media/Obama_New_Energy_
0804.pdf).

35. Emmarie Huetteman, “Aides Say Obama Is Willing to Work with

or without Congress to Meet Goals,” New York Times, January 26,
2014; Charles M. Blow, “A Pen, a Phone and a Meme,” New York
Times, February 7, 2014.

36. Gardiner Harris, “4 Top Science Advisers Are Named by

Obama,” New York Times, December 21, 2008; “A New Respect for
Science,” editorial, New York Times, December 22, 2008.

37. See Note 28. These numbers refer to budget outlays rather than
budget authority.

38. “Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and

Agencies—Subject: Scientific Integrity,” March 9, 2009,
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-
office/memorandum-heads-executive-departments-and-agencies-3-
9-09.

39. John M. Broder, “Obama Seeking a Steep Increase in Auto

Mileage,” New York Times, July 4, 2011. These rules were also
converted to greenhouse gas emission limits; see Bill Vlasic, “U.S.
Sets High Long-Term Fuel Efficiency Goals for Automakers,” New
York Times, August 29, 2012.

40. See “Remarks by the President on Climate Change,” June 25,

2013, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/25/remarks-
president-climate-change; “At Last, an Action Plan on Climate,”
editorial, New York Times, June 26, 2013.

41. See Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, “President

Obama’s Climate Action Plan: One Year Later,” June 2014,
https://www.c2es.org/publications/president-obamas-climate-action-
plan-one-year-later, for a list of proposals and actions taken.
42. Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Obama Unveils Plan to Sharply Limit
Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” New York Times, August 3, 2015.

43. Coral Davenport, “Deal on Carbon Emissions by Obama and Xi

Jinping Raises Hopes for Upcoming Paris Climate Talks,” New York
Times, November 12, 2014; Davenport, “Nations Approve Landmark
Climate Accord in Paris,” New York Times, December 12, 2015.

44. Alexander Ovodenka, “140 Countries Will Phase Out HFCs.

What Are These and Why Do They Matter?” Washington Post,
November 3, 2016.

45. Coral Davenport, “McConnell Urges States to Defy U.S. Plan to

Cut Greenhouse Gas,” New York Times, March 5, 2015; Davenport,
“Senate Rejects Obama Plan to Cut Emissions at Coal-Burning
Plants,” New York Times, November 18, 2015; and David M.
Herszenhorn, “As Obama Pushes Climate Deal, Republicans Move
to Block Emissions Rules,” New York Times, December 1, 2015.

46. Coral Davenport, “Numerous States Will Sue to Stop New

Climate Rules,” New York Times, October 22, 2015; Adam Liptak
and Coral Davenport, “Supreme Court Deals Blow to Obama’s
Efforts to Regulate Coal Emissions,” New York Times, February 9,
2016. The 5–4 decision was unusual, as the Supreme Court rarely
blocks a regulation prior to review by a federal appeals court.

47. Coral Davenport, “President Rejects Keystone Pipeline to

Transport Oil,” New York Times, November 7, 2015.

48. Brady Dennis, “Obama Administration Will Keep Tough Fuel

Standards in Place,” Washington Post, November 30, 2016; Coral
Davenport, “Obama Leans On a 1953 Law to Ban Drilling,” New York
Times, December 21, 2016; and Juliet Eilperin, “In a Race to the
Finish, Obama Administration Presses Ahead with Ambitious Rules,”
Washington Post, December 1, 2016.

49. Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “With New Monuments in

Nevada, Utah, Obama Adds to His Environmental Legacy,”
Washington Post, December 28, 2016.

50. Coral Davenport, “Climate Policy Faces Reversal by New

Leader,” New York Times, November 11, 2016.

51. John W. Miller, “Donald Trump Promises Deregulation of Energy

Production,” Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2016.

52. Chris Mooney, Brady Dennis and Steven Mufson, “Trump to

Name Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma Attorney General Suing EPA on
Climate Change, to Head the EPA,” Washington Post, December 7,
2016; Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton, “Choice for E.P.A. has Led
Battles to Constrain It,” New York Times, December 8, 2016.

53. Coral Davenport, “E.P.A. Nominee Criticizes Rules to Protect

Climate,” New York Times, January 19, 2017; Davenport, “Scott
Pruitt is Seen Cutting the E.P.A. with a Scalpel, Not a Cleaver,” New
York Times, February 5, 2017; and Davenport, “E.P.A. Chief Doubts
Consensus View of Climate Change,” New York Times, March 9,
2017.

54. Eric Lipton, Ben Protess and Andrew W. Lehren, “Raft of

Potential Conflicts in President’s Appointments,” New York Times,
April 16, 2017; Lisa Friedman and Claire O’Neill, “Who Controls
Trump’s Environmental Policy?” New York Times, January 14, 2020.
According to the latter report, “Of 20 key officials across several
agencies, 15 came from careers in the oil, gas, coal, chemical or
agricultural industries, while another three hail from state
governments that have spent years resisting environmental
regulations. At least four have direct ties to organizations led by
Charles G. Koch and the late David H. Koch, who have spent
millions of dollars to defeat climate change and clean energy
measures.”

55. Coral Davenport, “New Administrator Stacks the E.P.A. with

Climate Change Skeptics,” New York Times, March 8, 2017; Emily
Holden, “Climate Change Skeptics Run the Trump Administration,”
Politico, March 7, 2018.
56. Scott Pruitt, “Man of Little Shame,” editorial, New York Times,
April 18, 2018; Lisa Friedman, “13 Reasons Scott Pruitt Lost His Job
as E.P.A. Chief,” New York Times, July 5, 2018; and Juliet Eilperin,
Josh Dawsey and Darryl Fears, “Interior Secretary Zinke Resigns
Amid Investigations,” Washington Post, December 15, 2018.

57. Lisa Friedman, “Andrew Wheeler, Who Continued Environmental

Rollbacks, Is Confirmed to Lead E.P.A.,” New York Times, February
28, 2019; Juliet Eilperin, Josh Dawsey and Darryl Fears, “Trump to
Nominate David Bernhardt, a Former Lobbyist, as the Next Interior
Secretary,” Washington Post, February 4, 2019; Coral Davenport,
“Senate Confirms Bernhardt as Interior Secretary Amid Calls for
Investigations Into His Conduct,” New York Times, April 11, 2019;
and Friedman, “Senate Confirms Dan Brouillette to Lead Energy
Department,” New York Times, December 2, 2019.

58. Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman, “In Rush to Kill Obama-Era
Rules, Pruitt Puts Own Agenda at Risk” New York Times, April 8,
2018; Juliet Eilperin, Josh Dawsey and Brady Dennis, “Shift at EPA
shows Technocrats are Replacing Big-Personality Cabinet
Members,” Washington Post, July 6, 2018.

59. Chris Mooney, “Trump Has Filled Just 15 Percent of the

Government’s Top Science Jobs,” Washington Post, June 6, 2017;
Mooney, “Trump Has Taken Longer to Name a Science Adviser than
any Modern President,” Washington Post, October 16, 2017; and
Annie Gowen, Juliet Eilperin, Ben Guarino and Andrew Ba Tran,
“Science Ranks Grow Thin in Trump Administration,” Washington
Post, January 23, 2020.

60. Toly Rinberg and Andrew Bergman, “Censoring Climate

Change,” New York Times, November 22, 2017.

61. Pamela Worth, “Federal Scientists Speak on the State of

Science Under President Trump,” Union of Concerned Scientists,
Catalyst, Fall 2018. See also Coral Davenport, “In the Trump
Administration, Science is Unwelcome. So Is Advice,” New York
Times, June 9, 2018; Dino Grandoni and Juliet Eilperin, “EPA Scraps
Pair of Air Pollution Science Panels,” Washington Post, October 13,
2018; Jacob Carter, Emily Berman, Anita Desikan, Charise Johnson
and Gretchen Goldman, The State of Science in the Trump Era,
Center for Science and Democracy, Union of Concerned Scientists,
January 2019; and for a good short summary, Brad Plumer and
Coral Davenport, “Science Under Attack: How Trump Is Sidelining
Researchers and Their Work,” New York Times, December 28,
2019.

62. Coral Davenport, “Trump Administration’s Strategy on Climate:

Try to Bury Its Own Scientific Report,” New York Times, November
25, 2018; Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis and Missy Ryan, “As White
House Questions Climate Change, U.S. Military Is Planning for It,”
Washington Post, April 8, 2019; Eilperin, Josh Dawsey and Dennis,
“White House Blocked Intelligence Agency’s Written Testimony
Calling Climate Change ‘Possibly Catastrophic,’” Washington Post,
June 8, 2019; and Hiroko Tabuchi, “A Trump Insider Embeds Climate
Denial in Scientific Research,” New York Times, March 2, 2020.

63. Tony Room, “Trump Intends to Nominate Extreme-Weather

Expert for Top White House Science and Tech Role,” Washington
Post, August 1, 2018; Scott Waldman, “Why a High-Profile Climate
Science Opponent Quit Trump’s White House,”
www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/why-high-profile-climate-
science-opponent-quit-trump-white-house.

64. Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin, “Trump’s Budget Takes a

Sledgehammer to the EPA,” Washington Post, March 16, 2017;
Juliet Eilperin, Chris Mooney, and Steven Mufson, “New EPA
Documents Reveal Even Deeper Proposed Cuts to Staff and
Programs,” Washington Post, March 31, 2017.

65. Henry Fountain and John Schwartz, “Researchers Bristle at

Extent of Cuts,” New York Times, March 17, 2017.

66. Joel Achenbach, Laurie McGinley, Amy Goldstein and Ben

Guarino, “Trump Budget Cuts Funding for Health, Science,
Environment Agencies,” Washington Post, February 10, 2020; David
Malakoff and Jeffrey Mervis, “Trump’s 2021 Budget Drowns Science
Agencies in Red Ink, Again,” February 10, 2020,
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/trump-s-2021-budget-
drowns-science-agencies-red-ink-again.

67. Lisa Friedman, Marina Affo and Derek Kravitz, “E.P.A. Officials,
Disheartened by Agency’s Direction, Leave in Droves,” New York
Times, December 23, 2017; Timothy Cama, “EPA Staffing Falls to
Reagan-Era Levels,” The Hill, January 9, 2018.

68. Peter Baker, “Analysis: Trump Adopts Obama Approach While

Seeking to Undo a Legacy,” New York Times, October 13, 2017.

69. See White House, “Presidential Executive Order on Reducing

Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs,” January 30, 2017;
“Presidential Executive Order on Enforcing the Regulatory Agenda,”
February 24, 2017.

70. Juliet Eilperin, “Trump Undertakes Most Ambitious Regulatory

Rollback Since Reagan,” Washington Post, February 12, 2017.

71. White House, “Presidential Executive Order on Promoting

Energy Independence and Economic Growth,” March 28, 2017. For
further summary and commentary see Juliet Eilperin and Brady
Dennis, “Trump Moves Decisively to Wipe Out Obama’s Climate-
Change Record,” Washington Post, March 28, 2017; Coral
Davenport and Alissa J. Rubin, “Trump Signs Rule to Block Efforts
on Aiding Climate,” New York Times, March 29, 2017.

72. Nadia Popovich, Livia Albeck-Ripka and Kendra Pierre-Louise,

“The Trump Administration Is Reversing 100 Environmental Rules.
Here’s the Full List,” New York Times, July 10, 2020. Various other
organizations such as the Brookings Institution, the Environmental
and Energy Law Program at Harvard University, and the Sabin
Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University also track
deregulation by the Trump administration; see websites listed at the
end of this chapter.
73. Michael D. Shear, “Trump Abandoning Global Climate Accord,”
New York Times, June 2, 2017; Lisa Friedman, “Trump Serves
Notice to Quit Climate Accord, as Diplomats Plot to Save It,” New
York Times, November 4, 2019.

74. Juliet Eilperin, “Trump Administration Proposes Rule to Relax

Carbon Limits on Power Plants,” Washington Post, August 21, 2018;
Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A.’s New Coal Pollution Rules Will Lead to More
Deaths, Agency’s Numbers Show,” New York Times, August 21,
2018; Friedman, “E.P.A. Plans to Get Thousands of Deaths Off the
Books by Changing Its Math,” New York Times, May 20, 2019; and
Friedman, “E.P.A. Finalizes Its Plan to Replace Obama-Era Climate
Rules,” New York Times, June 19, 2019.

75. Coral Davenport and Hiroko Tabuchi, “U.S. Set to Blunt Pollution
Rules for Automakers,” New York Times, March 30, 2018;
Davenport, “Top Trump Officials Clash Over Plan to Let Cars Pollute
More,” New York Times, July 27, 2018; Davenport, “Trump Unveils
His Plan to Weaken Car Pollution Rules,” New York Times, August
2, 2018; Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “Trump Administration to
Revoke California’s Power to Set Stricter Auto Emission Standards,”
Washington Post, September 17, 2019; and Davenport, “Trump
Administration, in Biggest Environmental Rollback, to Announce
Auto Pollution Rules,” New York Times, March 30, 2020.

76. Lisa Friedman, “Trump Moves to Open Nearly All Offshore

Waters to Drilling,” New York Times, January 4, 2018; Darryl Fears
and Juliet Eilperin, “The Trump Administration Is Opening Millions of
New Acres to Drilling—And That’s Just the Start,” Washington Post,
March 15, 2018; Eilperin and Steven Mufson, “Trump Administration
Wants Drilling on More Than Two-Thirds of the Largest Swath of
U.S. Public Land,” Washington Post, June 25, 2020; Mufson and
Eilperin, “Trump Administration Opens Huge Reserve in Alaska to
Drilling,” Washington Post, September 13, 2019; and Eilperin,
“Trump Finalizes Drilling Plan for Iconic Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge,” Washington Post, August 17, 2020.
77. Hiroko Tabuchi, “G.O.P. Reverses Obama-Era Rule to Protect
Streams from Coal Mining,” New York Times, February 3, 2017;
Steven Mufson, “Trump Administration Scraps Limits on Methane
Leaks at Oil and Gas Sites,” Washington Post, August 13, 2020; Lisa
Friedman and Tabuchi, “U.S. to Roll Back Safety Rules Created After
Deepwater Horizon Spill,” New York Times, December 28, 2017;
Friedman, “E.P.A. Proposes Rule Change That Would Let Power
Plants Release More Toxic Pollution,” New York Times, December
28, 2018; Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “The EPA Is About to
Change a Rule Cutting Mercury Pollution. The Industry Doesn’t Want
It,” Washington Post, February 17, 2020; and Dennis and Eilperin,
“EPA Moves to Overhaul Obama-Era Safeguards on Coal Ash
Waste,” Washington Post, March 1, 2019.

78. Brad Plumer, “Trump Put a Low Cost on Carbon Emissions.

Here’s Why It Matters,” New York Times, August 23, 2018; Lisa
Friedman, “Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in
Infrastructure Planning,” New York Times, January 2, 2020;
Friedman, “ G.A.O.: Trump Boosts Deregulation by Undervaluing
Cost of Climate Change,” New York Times, July 14, 2020; and Jean
Chemnick, “Trump Slashed the Social Cost of Carbon. A Judge
Noticed,” E&E News, July 28, 2020.

79. Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “Nixon Signed This Key
Environmental Law. Trump Plans to Change It to Speed Up
Pipelines, Highway Projects and More,” Washington Post, July 14,
2020; Lisa Friedman, “Trump Weakens Major Conservation Law to
Speed Construction Permits,” New York Times, July 15, 2020.

80. Danny Hakim and Eric Lipton, “Once Trusted Studies Are
Scorned by Trump’s E.P.A.,” New York Times, August 26, 2018;
Steven Mufson and Chris Mooney, “EPA Excluded Its Own Top
Science Officials When It Rewrote Rules on Using Scientific
Studies,” Washington Post, October 3, 2018; Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A.
to Limit Science Used to Write Public Health Rules,” New York
Times, November 11, 2019; Friedman, “E.P.A. Updates Plan to Limit
Science Used in Environmental Rules,” New York Times, March 4,
2020; and Rebecca Beitsch, “EPA Looks to Other Statutes to
Expand Scope of Coming ‘Secret Science’ Rule,” The Hill, July 29,
2020.

81. Coral Davenport, “Trump Prepares to Unveil a Vast Reworking of

Clean Water Protections,” New York Times, December 10, 2018;
Juliet Eilperin and Brad Dennis, “Administration Finalizes Repeal of
2015 Water Rule Trump Called ‘Destructive and Horrible,’”
Washington Post, September 11, 2019; and Davenport, “Trump
Removes Pollution Controls of Streams and Wetlands,” New York
Times, January 22, 2020.

82. Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Trump Administration Takes On the

Endangered Species Act,” New Yorker, July 26, 2018; Coral
Davenport and Lisa Friedman, “Lawmakers, Lobbyists and the
Administration Join Forces to Overhaul the Endangered Species
Act,” July 22, 2018; and Friedman, “Trump Administration Weakens
Protection for Endangered Species,” New York Times, August 12,
2019.

83. Ellen Knickmeyer, Matthew Brown and Ed White, “Backlog of

Toxic Superfund Clean-ups Grows Under Trump,” Associated Press,
January 2, 2020.

84. Julie Turkewitz, “Trump Reverses U.S. Protections for 2 Utah

Sites,” New York Times, December 5, 2017; Nadia Popovich, “How
Trump’s Order Shrinks Bears Ears,” New York Times, December 9,
2017; and Eric Lipton and Lisa Friedman, “Oil Was Central in
Decision to Shrink Protected Utah Site, Emails Show,” New York
Times, March 5, 2018.

85. Eric Lipton and Danielle Ivory, “Under Trump, E.P.A. Has Slowed
Actions Against Polluters, and Put Limits on Enforcement Officers,”
New York Times, December 10, 2017; Juliet Eilperin and Brady
Dennis, “Civil Penalties for Polluters Dropped Dramatically in
Trump’s First Two Years, Analysis Shows,” Washington Post,
January 24, 2018; and Lindsay Dillon, Chris Sellers, and Phil Brown,
“EPA Staff Say the Trump Administration Is Changing Their Mission
from Protecting Human Health and the Environment to Protecting
Industry,” Salon, June 10, 2018,
https://www.salon.com/2018/06/10/epa-staff-claims-trump-
administration-is-changing-their-mission_partner/.

86. Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A., Citing Coronavirus, Drastically Relaxes

Rules for Polluters,” New York Times, March 26, 2020; Juliet
Eilperin, Dino Grandoni, and Brady Dennis, “Trump Officials Reject
Stricter Air Quality Standards, Despite Link Between Air Pollution,
Coronavirus Risks,” Washington Post, April 14, 2020; and Siddhi
Doshi and Cayll Baker, “Six COVID-Related Deregulations to
Watch,” Brookings, April 30, 2020.

87. Philip Rucker, “Bannon: Trump Administration Is in Unending

Battle for ‘Deconstruction of the Administrative State,’” Washington
Post, February 23, 2017.

88. See, e.g., Eric Lipton, “Resolute Rush to Deregulate Hits

Obstacles,” New York Times, October 7, 2017; Juliet Eilperin, “Judge
Voids Nearly 1 Million Acres of Oil and Gas Leases, Saying Trump
Policy Undercut Public Input,” Washington Post, February 27, 2020;
and Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “EPA Staff Warned That
Mileage Rollbacks Had Flaws. Trump Officials Ignored Them,”
Washington Post, May 19, 2020.
5 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY IN
CONGRESS
—Michael E. Kraft

The sun is setting on the dirty energy of the past. Today

marks the dawn of a new era of climate action.
Senator Edward Markey, D-Massachusetts, co-chair of the Senate
Climate Task Force, upon introducing the Green New Deal
resolution, February 20191

On February 7, 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York)

and Sen. Edward Markey introduced resolutions in both the US
House and Senate to create a Green New Deal (GND). They called
for a “10-year national mobilization” that would speed the
development of clean energy and shift the nation away from fossil
fuels as well as “provide unprecedented levels of prosperity and
economic security for Americans, and counteract systemic injustices”
in the nation. These goals could be achieved, they said, as part of an
ambitious effort to respond to “the existential challenge of climate
change.”2

The nonbinding resolution was brief at only six pages, yet it reflected
the convictions of many progressives in the Democratic Party, and
later in the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, that
business as usual was no longer acceptable in light of recent
scientific reports on climate change. They argued that dire forecasts
of the damage that climate change was likely to inflict on the nation
made it essential to act boldly and quickly to address the challenge.
They hoped that the congressional resolution would stimulate
national debate and spur Congress to act.
In the House, the resolution, H. Res. 109, with 91 cosponsors (all
Democrats), was referred to multiple committees and subcommittees
for consideration. The Senate measure, S. Res 59, with 12
cosponsors (11 Democrats and 1 Independent, Sanders), was
referred to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
The 116th Congress (2019–2021) saw many other resolutions and
bills on energy use and climate change, some 17 of them by early
May of 2019, and a number of those bills attracted some bipartisan
support, unlike the GND.3

Although unsuccessful legislatively, the GND spurred widespread

responses by the nation’s media, think tanks, and partisan
organizations, with some comparing it to long-standing calls for
sustainable development or green growth (see Chapter 14). For
example, by July 2019, the Center for American Progress and more
than 70 environmental and other progressive groups released a
major climate change proposal for the next Democratic
administration called the Equitable and Just National Climate
Platform that reflected views similar to the GND.4 As might be
expected, Republican and conservative groups that place a higher
priority on conventional economic development were sharply critical
of the resolution. They also indicated they would use it aggressively
against Democrats in the 2020 elections.5 Even with that risk,
introducing the GND resolution illustrated well the role that members
of Congress can play in framing issues and setting the political and
policy agendas even when there is insufficient support to enact
legislation.
ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND
POLITICAL CONSTRAINTS
The GND resolution and its short-term failure to move forward tells
us much about the way Congress deals with environmental, energy,
and natural resource issues today. It also speaks to the many
obstacles Congress will face in the future in trying to chart new policy
directions to better address twenty-first-century challenges such as
climate change and how to foster sustainable development that were
discussed in Chapter 1.6 The capacity of the 116th Congress to act
on these problems, like that of many Congresses before it, was
understandably affected by what political scientists have long called
an era of “partisan warfare” on Capitol Hill. Compromise between the
parties became exceptionally difficult as each sought to deny the
other any semblance of victory, even at the cost of stalemate in
dealing with pressing national environmental issues.7

Whichever party dominates Congress in the years ahead, we are

unlikely to see the kind of broad bipartisan support for environmental
policies that prevailed during the 1970s and even through the 1980s.
This is particularly the case for major policy actions, such as
rewriting the basic environmental laws, most of which were adopted
close to 50 years ago and ideally would be modernized and
integrated to better address today’s needs. It was not always so. For
nearly three decades, from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s,
Congress enacted—and over time strengthened—an extraordinary
range of environmental policies, typified by the 1970 Clean Air Act,
the 1972 Clean Water Act, the 1973 Endangered Species Act, and
the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (see Chapter 1
and Appendix 1). In doing so, members within both political parties
recognized and responded to rising public concern about
environmental degradation and its impacts on public health. For the
same reasons, they stoutly defended and even expanded those
policies during the 1980s when environmental legislation was
assailed by Ronald Reagan’s White House.8

This pattern of bipartisan cooperation and compromise changed

dramatically with the election of the 104th Congress in 1994, as the
new Republican majority brought to the Hill a very different position
on the environment. It was far more critical of regulatory
bureaucracies, such as the EPA, and of the environmental and
public health policies they are charged with implementing.9 On
energy and natural resource issues—from drilling for oil in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) or on offshore public lands to,
more recently, the Keystone XL pipeline controversy, oil and gas
drilling on public land, and especially actions to mitigate climate
change—Republicans have tended to lean heavily toward increasing
resource use and economic development rather than conservation or
environmental protection.

As Republican Party leaders pursued these goals from 1995 through

2020, they invariably faced intense opposition from Democrats who
were just as determined to block what they characterized as ill-
advised attempts to roll back years of progress in protecting public
health and the environment.10 The result has been that Congress
has been unable to approve either the sweeping changes sought by
Republicans or the moderate policy reforms preferred by most
Democrats.

We saw much the same pattern in the 116th Congress. Republicans

retained control of the Senate while Democrats won a solid majority
in the House. The result was frequent oversight and criticism of the
Trump administration by the House, but little comparable action in
the Senate, which was strongly supportive of the administration.
Moreover, legislative gridlock on public policy continued with only a
few exceptions, as noted later in the chapter. But misinterpretation of
this failure to act legislatively is common. For example, President
Trump frequently criticized what he called the “do-nothing
Democrats” in Congress, implying that Democrats were
accomplishing little beyond criticism of him and his administration. In
reality, the Democratic House under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-
California, passed hundreds of major bills, many with bipartisan
support, that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell (R-
Kentucky), chose not to consider.11 Many of those bills focused on
environmental issues.

Unfortunately, the ongoing partisan fights in Congress mean that

existing policies—with their many acknowledged flaws—have largely
continued in force. State and local governments have fostered
innovative policy actions that to some extent help to fill this void (see
Chapter 2). At the federal level, the Trump administration chose to
rely on administrative actions rather than seek congressional
approval for major policy changes (see Chapters 4 and 7).12 This
pattern is problematic for several reasons. Perhaps the most
important is that only Congress can redesign federal environmental
policy in a comprehensive and coherent way so that it might
successfully address complex problems such as climate change and
sustainability. Thus, it is important to understand how Congress
makes decisions on environmental issues and why members adopt
the positions and take the actions they do. The sections that follow
examine attempted policy changes on Capitol Hill and compare them
with the way Congress dealt previously with similar issues. I give
special consideration to the phenomenon of policy stalemate or
gridlock, which at times, including most of the 2010s, has been a
defining characteristic of congressional involvement with
environmental policy, and may well reappear during the 2020s.
CONGRESSIONAL AUTHORITY AND
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
Under the Constitution, Congress shares authority with the president
for federal policymaking on the environment. In most years,
members of Congress make critical decisions on hundreds of
measures that affect environmental policy broadly defined. These
range from funding the operations of the EPA, the Department of the
Interior, and other agencies to supporting highways, mass transit,
forestry, farming, oil and gas exploration, energy research and
development, the protection of wilderness areas, and international
population and development assistance programs. These actions
are rarely front-page news and are not often the focus of television
news programs or social media commentary. Hence, the public may
hear little about them.13

As discussed in Chapter 1, we can distinguish congressional actions

in several different stages of the policy process: agenda setting,
formulation and adoption of policies, and implementation of them in
executive agencies. Largely because of extensive media coverage,
presidents have far greater opportunities than does Congress to set
the political agenda, that is, to call attention to specific problems and
define or frame the terms of debate. Yet members of Congress can
have a major impact on the agenda through legislative and oversight
hearings as well as through the abundant opportunities they have for
introducing legislation, requesting and publicizing studies and
reports, making speeches, taking positions, voting, and campaigning
for reelection.

All of these actions can assist them in framing issues in a way that
promotes their preferred solutions, as was evident in both House and
Senate resolutions on the GND, and on climate change, energy use,
and environmental issues broadly. One illustration is the introduction
of bills to put a price on carbon, such as the Energy Innovation and
Carbon Dividend Act of 2019, H.R. 763, introduced in both the
House and Senate with 80 cosponsors drawn from both parties.
Even when such legislation has little chance of approval, its
introduction and possible hearings, and thus publicity, can help to
shape national debate, which can be just as important. House
Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, for example, created a special House
committee on climate change to address what she called “the
existential threat of the climate crisis.” Yet, the committee’s purpose
was more to raise public awareness rather than to consider
legislation in the usual manner. It was to recommend policy actions
for other committees to consider.14

Because of their extensive executive powers, presidents also can

dominate the process of policy implementation in the agencies (see
Chapters 4 and 7). Here too, however, Congress can significantly
affect agency actions, partly through oversight hearings, but also
through its critical budgetary decisions. For example, shortly after he
took office, and in succeeding years, President Trump proposed
exceptionally deep budgetary and staffing cuts for the EPA and for
environmental science and energy technology research at the EPA,
Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), and National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA). However, Congress chose not to go along
for the most part, and agency budgets remained much the same.
Even so, as noted in Chapter 1, those budgets have rarely been
sufficient to support full implementation of existing laws and
programs, and many are now lower than in previous years.15

These congressional powers translate into an influential and

continuing role of overseeing, and often criticizing, actions in
executive agencies as varied as the EPA, Department of Energy, US
Geological Survey, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land
Management, and Forest Service.16 As one example of such
congressional oversight, the former Republican chair of the House
Science Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), frequently used
his influential position to criticize government scientists and their
research. He also held hearings to try to rein in the use of what he
termed “secret science” by the EPA, a controversial action to ignore
certain kinds of established scientific findings that the Trump EPA
also pursued through 2020 (see Chapter 7).17 For their part,
Democrats in the 116th Congress held some 15 hearings on climate
change just through early March 2020. They were not intended to
promote legislation, but as the press reported, to “gather testimony
from climate experts—and to stump about the urgency needed to
address global warming,” that is, to speak out about it.18

In addition to committee oversight authority, the Senate plays a

major role in choosing who will fill critical positions through its
constitutional power to advise and consent on presidential
nominations to the agencies and the courts. The Senate almost
always approves presidential nominees when the same party
controls both institutions, although when a president faces a
Congress controlled by the other party, approval is far less certain.
For example, President Trump’s nomination of Scott Pruitt to head
the EPA was among the most controversial of his appointments in
2017, and it drew widespread media coverage and condemnation
from Senate Democrats and environmental, scientific, and public
health organizations. Hundreds of current and former EPA
employees also urged the Senate to reject his nomination; the
Senate confirmed Pruitt, although on a relatively close party-line vote
of 52 to 46. In early 2019, Pruitt’s replacement at the EPA, Andrew
Wheeler, also faced tough questions from Democrats on the Senate
Committee on Environment and Public Works, as they pressed him
on the agency’s regulatory rollbacks and the president’s stance on
climate change.19

Even if it cannot compete on an equal footing with the president in

some of these policymaking activities and personnel decisions, in
many ways, Congress has been more influential than the White
House in the formulation and adoption of environmental policies. It
also brings exceptional institutional capacity to its many roles in
policymaking and oversight of implementation, including the work of
its support agencies and staffs, such as the Congressional Budget
Office, Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional
Research Service.20 Yet the way in which Congress exercises its
formidable powers at any given time is shaped by several key
variables, such as its institutional structure and norms, public opinion
and interest group pressure, whether the president’s party also
controls Congress—and by what margins—and members’
willingness to defer to the president’s recommendations.

Congress’s actions on the environment also invariably reflect its dual

mission to be deeply engaged with both lawmaking and
representation of constituents. In addition to serving as a national
legislative body, the House and Senate are assemblies of elected
officials who represent politically disparate districts and states. It is
hardly surprising that members are politically motivated to consider
local, state, and regional concerns and interests, such as coal
mining, oil and gas development, or vehicle manufacturing, which
can put them at odds with the president or their own party leaders.
Indeed, electoral incentives induce members of Congress to think at
least as much about local and regional impacts of environmental
policies as they do about the larger national interest.21 Such political
pressures led members in the early 2000s, for example, to drive up
the cost of President Bush’s energy proposals with what one
journalist called an “abundance of pet projects, subsidies and tax
breaks” to specific industries in their districts and states. Much the
pattern is evident today, for example, in the laws that Congress
enacted in spring 2020 to aid economic recovery in the midst of the
coronavirus pandemic.22

Another distinctive institutional characteristic is the system of House

and Senate standing committees, where most significant policy
decisions take place. Dozens of committees and subcommittees
have jurisdiction over environmental policy (see Table 1.1 in Chapter
1), which tends to fragment decisions and erect barriers to integrated
or holistic approaches to energy, the environment, and sustainable
development. Such a committee structure also means that the
outcomes of specific legislative battles often turn on which members
sit on and control those committees. For example, in the Senate,
James Inhofe often used his positions on the Senate Environment
and Public Works Committee (both as chair and ranking Republican
member) to question the science of climate change. Many of Inhofe’s
former aides on the committee were later hired for high-level
positions at the EPA or at President Trump’s White House.23

Taken together, these congressional characteristics have important

implications for environmental policy. First, building policy consensus
in Congress is rarely easy because of the diversity of interests and of
members whose concerns need to be met and because of the
conflicts that can arise among committees and leaders. Second,
policy compromises invariably reflect members’ preoccupation with
the local and regional impacts of environmental decisions, for
example, how climate change policy will affect industries and
homeowners in coal-producing states and those heavily dependent
on coal-fired power plants, such as West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio,
and Indiana. Third, the White House matters a great deal in how the
issues are defined and whether policy decisions can be made
acceptable to all concerned, but the president’s influence is
nevertheless limited by the independent political calculations made
on Capitol Hill.

Given these constraints, Congress frequently finds itself unable to

make crucial decisions on environmental policy. The US public may
see a “do-nothing Congress,” yet the reality is that all too often
members can find no way to reconcile the conflicting views of
multiple interests and constituencies. It remains to be seen if this
pattern will change in 2021 and beyond.

However, there are some important exceptions to this common

pattern of policy stalemate. A brief examination of the way Congress
has dealt with environmental issues since the early 1970s helps to
explain this seeming anomaly. Such a review also provides a useful
context in which to examine and assess the actions of recent
Congresses and the outlook for environmental policymaking for the
early twenty-first century.
CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF
ENVIRONMENTAL GRIDLOCK
Policy gridlock refers to an inability to resolve conflicts in a
policymaking body such as Congress, which results in government
inaction in the face of important public problems. There is no
consensus on what to do, and therefore no movement occurs in any
direction. Present policies, or slight revisions of them, continue until
agreement is reached on the direction and magnitude of change.
Sometimes environmental or other programs officially expire but
continue to be funded by Congress through a waiver of the rules
governing the annual appropriations process. The failure to renew
the programs, however, contributes to administrative and public
policy drift, ineffectual congressional oversight, and a propensity for
members to use the appropriations process to achieve what cannot
be gained through statutory change.24

While usually seen as a negative characteristic, policy gridlock in

Congress also has had what environmentalists would see as positive
effects. For example, it has stimulated environmental policy change
at the state and local levels, which in turn may illustrate the political
feasibility or effectiveness of new policy directions (see Chapter 2). It
has pushed executive agencies to alter administrative decision-
making in creative ways to compensate for the lack of new
congressional directives (see Chapter 7). It also means that multiple
parties in policy disputes are more likely to turn to the courts to
resolve disagreements, which may lead to decisions that facilitate
environmental policy reforms even in the face of intense partisan
conflicts (see Chapter 6).25

Why does policy gridlock occur so frequently in Congress? There is

no single answer that fits every situation, but among the major
reasons are the sharply divergent policy views of Democrats and
Republicans, the influence of organized interest groups in both
elections and policymaking, and the inherent complexity of
environmental problems. The lack of public consensus on the issues
or unclear public preferences, the constitutionally mandated
structure of US government (especially the separation of powers
between the presidency and Congress), and weak or ineffectual
political leadership also make a difference.26

Most of these factors are easy to understand. For example,

Republicans and Democrats bring different political philosophies and
beliefs to the table, and those views are reinforced by the nature of
congressional elections today. Most members come from relatively
safe districts or states that lean strongly toward one party or the
other. For the House, district safety often is a consequence of strong
partisan gerrymandering that is intended to expand the party’s
political power. In recent elections, only about two to three dozen
House seats out of 435 have been truly competitive between the
major parties. One result is that the electoral system gives
exceptional clout to the majority party’s base or core voters,
particularly in low-turnout, off-year elections. Thus members are
forced to appeal more to these voters (such as the Tea Party forces
within the Republican Party in the early 2010s or to Trump’s base of
voters in the late 2010s) than to those in the political center or in the
other party. That political imperative tends to promote ideological
rigidity among members and also to discourage the kind of
compromise and consensus building in policymaking that long
prevailed in Congress until recent years.27

It is also understandable that when a given issue sparks involvement

by diverse and opposing interests (such as oil and gas companies,
renewable energy companies, electric utilities, the coal industry, the
automobile industry, labor unions, and environmentalists), finding
politically acceptable solutions can be exceptionally difficult.
Similarly, public opinion polls may show a strong public preference
for certain actions on the environment, energy, or climate change,
but the public tends not to be well informed on the issues, and these
issues also typically are low in salience for most people (see Chapter
3). Both factors limit the extent to which members of Congress are
likely to give public preferences much weight in their voting
decisions.28

Unfortunately, these conditions also significantly diminish the public’s

political influence. Absent a clear and forceful public voice, members
of Congress look elsewhere when deciding how to vote on measures
before them, and most people are not likely to notice how their
representatives are voting.29 It is for that reason that some groups,
such as the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, have tried to change the
political calculus. They organize grassroots campaigns on climate
change in congressional districts nationwide that are designed to
convince members of Congress from both parties that their
constituents do desire strong policies and that they are watching the
votes.30

The notable differences in policy preferences between Republicans

and Democrats on environmental and energy issues today reflect a
striking trend toward ideological polarization that has developed over
the past several decades. The shift has been well documented by
scholars, and it can be seen in public opinion surveys as well as
rankings of members’ voting on environmental issues.31 For
example, based on rankings by the League of Conservation Voters
(LCV), the parties showed increasing divergence from the early
1970s through the early 2000s. On average, they differed by nearly
25 points on a 100-point scale, and those differences grew much
wider over time.32 The gap is exceptionally large today, with
Republicans in both chambers in 2019 averaging about 13 percent in
comparison to an average for Democrats of 95 percent.33 Smaller
but still significant differences appear in surveys of the general
public, with Republicans generally less supportive of environmental
policy action than Democrats. Environmental policies have become
at least as polarizing as any other issue in the late 2010s, a striking
shift from the public consensus and bipartisanship that prevailed in
the 1970s (see Chapter 3).34

Despite these disagreements on the issues, members of Congress

come together on occasion to form bipartisan caucuses or
congressional member organizations that seek practical solutions
with broad public appeal. One illustration is the Climate Solutions
Caucuses. They were originally designed to have equal Republican
and Democratic membership, but today membership is equal only in
the Senate; in the House Democrats outnumber Republicans.35

Some of the caucuses and coalitions, however, attract most or all of

their members from one party. This has long been the case, for
example, for the House Sustainable Energy and Environment
Coalition; in 2020, all of its members were Democrats. In 2019,
Republicans in the House and Senate formed a bicameral
conservation caucus that they said was aimed at overcoming the
perception that their party lacked concern for climate change and
other environmental issues. They called it the Roosevelt
Conservation Caucus in recognition of the historic role of President
Theodore Roosevelt in public lands conservation. In a somewhat
parallel move, the Senate’s Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer (D-New
York), established a new Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on
the Climate Crisis when the Republican majority leader, Mitch
McConnell, refused to consider a resolution to create a bipartisan
select committee on climate change.36
FROM CONSENSUS IN THE
ENVIRONMENTAL DECADE TO
DEADLOCK IN THE 1990S
As Chapter 1 recounts, the legislative record for the environmental
decade of the 1970s is truly remarkable. The National Environmental
Policy Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act,
and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, among others, were
all signed into law in that decade, and most of them were enacted in
the 6-year period from 1970 to 1976. We can debate the merits of
these early statutes with the clarity of hindsight and in light of
contemporary criticism of them. Yet their adoption demonstrates
vividly that the US political system is capable of developing major
environmental policies in fairly short order under the right conditions.
Consensus on environmental policy prevailed in the 1970s, in part,
because the issues were new and politically popular, and attention
was focused on broadly supported goals such as cleaning up the
nation’s air and water rather than on the means to be used
(command-and-control regulation) or program costs. At that time,
there was also little overt and sustained opposition to these
measures.
Environmental Gridlock Emerges
These patterns of the 1970s did not last long. Congress’s
enthusiasm for environmental policy gradually gave way to
apprehension about its impacts on the economy, and policy
stalemate and retrenchment became the norm in the early 1980s.
Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 also altered the
political climate and threw Congress into a defensive posture. It was
forced to react to the Reagan administration’s aggressive policy
actions to turn back the clock. Rather than proposing new programs
or expanding old ones, Congress focused its resources on oversight
and criticism of the administration’s policies. Members were
increasingly cross-pressured by environmental and industry groups,
partisanship on these issues increased, and Congress and President
Reagan battled repeatedly over budget and program priorities.37 The
cumulative effect in the early 1980s was that Congress was unable
to agree on new environmental policy directions.
Gridlock Eases: 1984–1990
The legislative logjam began breaking up in late 1983, as the US
public and Congress repudiated Reagan’s antienvironmental agenda
(see Chapter 4). The new pattern was evident by 1984 when, after
several years of deliberation, Congress approved major
amendments to the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act;
these strengthened the program and set tight new deadlines for EPA
rulemaking on control of hazardous chemical wastes. The 99th
Congress (1985–1987) compiled a record very much at odds with
the deferral politics of the 97th and 98th Congresses (1981–1985). In
1986, the Safe Drinking Water Act was strengthened and expanded,
and Congress approved the Superfund Amendments and
Reauthorization Act, adding a separate Title III, the Emergency
Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), which
created the Toxics Release Inventory. Democrats regained control of
the Senate following the 1986 election, and Congress reauthorized
the Clean Water Act over a presidential veto. Still, Congress could
renew neither the Clean Air Act nor the Federal Insecticide,
Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act—the nation’s key pesticide control
act—nor could it pass new legislation to control acid rain.

However, with the election of George H. W. Bush in 1988, Congress

and the White House were able to agree on enactment of the
innovative and stringent Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the
Energy Policy Act of 1992. The latter was an important, if modest,
advancement in promoting energy conservation, and it restructured
the electric utility industry to promote greater competition and
efficiency. Success on the Clean Air Act, a truly landmark and far-
reaching piece of legislation, was particularly important because for
years it was a stark symbol of Congress’s inability to reauthorize
controversial environmental programs. Passage was possible in
1990 because of improved scientific research that clarified the risks
of dirty air, reports of worsening ozone in urban areas, and President
Bush’s leadership. He had vowed to “break the gridlock” and support
renewal of the Clean Air Act, and Sen. George Mitchell, D-Maine,
newly elected as Senate majority leader, was equally determined to
enact a bill.38 Unsurprisingly, the Senate approved the act by a vote
of 89 to 10 and the House by 401 to 25.
Policy Stalemate Returns in the 1990s
Unfortunately, approval of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments was
no signal that a new era of cooperative and bipartisan policymaking
on the environment was about to begin. Nor was the election of Bill
Clinton and Al Gore in 1992, even as Democrats regained control of
both houses of Congress. Most of the major environmental laws
were once again up for renewal. Yet despite an emerging consensus
on many of the laws, in the end, the 103rd Congress (1993–1995)
remained far too divided to act. Coalitions of environmental groups
and business interests clashed regularly on all of these initiatives,
and congressional leaders and the Clinton White House were
unsuccessful in resolving the disputes.

Partisan bickering escalated after the 1994 midterm elections. After

one of the most expensive, negative, and anti-Washington
campaigns in modern times, Republicans captured both houses of
Congress, picking up an additional fifty-two seats in the House and
eight in the Senate. They also did well in other elections throughout
the country, contributing to their belief that voters had endorsed the
Contract with America, which symbolized the new Republican
agenda.39 The contract had promised a general rolling back of
government regulations and a shrinking of the federal government’s
role, but with no specific mention of environmental policy. It drew
heavily from the work of conservative and probusiness think tanks,
which for years had waged a multifaceted campaign to discredit
environmentalist thinking and policies.40 In recent years, much the
same kind of effort can be seen in the reports of the Heritage
Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the CATO Institute,
and the Heartland Institute, all of which also were influential in
shaping the policy agenda of the Trump administration.41

Despite evidence showing no public mandate to roll back

environmental protection, the political result was clear. It put
Republicans in charge of the House for the first time in four decades
and initiated an extraordinary period of legislative action on
environmental policy characterized by bitter relations between the
two parties, setting the stage for a similar confrontation that emerged
following the 2010 elections and again after the 2016 elections.

The environmental policy deadlock in the mid-1990s should have

come as no surprise. With several notable exceptions, consensus on
the issues simply could not be built, and the Republican revolution
under Speaker Newt Gingrich failed for the most part. The lesson
seemed to be that a direct and well-publicized attack on popular
environmental programs could not work because it would provoke a
political backlash. Those who supported a new conservative policy
agenda turned instead to a strategy of evolutionary or incremental
environmental policy change through a subtler and far less visible
exercise of Congress’s appropriations and oversight powers. This
strategy included what is usually termed “regulatory reform.” Here
they were more successful.42 The George W. Bush administration
relied on a similar strategy from 2001 to early 2009, the quiet pursuit
of a deregulatory agenda, and there is evidence of a similar strategy
in the 115th and 116th Congresses in the late 2010s as well as in the
Trump administration’s reliance on environmental deregulation and
defunding instead of statutory reforms (see Chapter 4).
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ACTIONS IN
RECENT CONGRESSES
As discussed earlier, Congress influences nearly every
environmental and resource policy through exercise of its powers to
legislate, oversee executive agencies, advise and consent on
nominations, and appropriate funds. Sometimes these activities take
place largely within the specialized committees and subcommittees,
and sometimes they reach the floor of the House and Senate, where
they may attract greater media attention. Some of the decisions are
made routinely and are relatively free of controversy (for example,
appropriations for the national parks), whereas others stimulate often
intense political conflict.

The capacity of members of Congress to cooperate in the search for

environmental policy reforms became even more problematic during
the Trump administration as political polarization in both the media
and the nation increased sharply. Adding to the challenge was the
adoption by the administration of a largely uncompromising posture
on major environmental, energy, and natural resource issues, most
notably EPA regulation, oil and gas development on public lands,
and climate change (see Chapters 4, 7, 9, and 12). To put the recent
policy debates in context, a brief look backward at some of the most
notable congressional actions of the past 25 years is instructive.
These are presented within three broad categories: regulatory reform
initiatives (directed at the way agencies make decisions),
appropriations (funding levels and use of budgetary riders), and
proposals for changing the substance of environmental policy, with
emphasis on the last.
Regulatory Reform: Changing Agency
Procedures
Regulatory reform has long been of concern in US environmental
policy (see Chapters 1, 4, and 7). There is no real dispute about the
need to reform agency rulemaking, which has been long faulted for
being too inflexible, intrusive, cumbersome, and adversarial, and
sometimes based on insufficient consideration of science and
economics.43 However, much disagreement exists over precisely
what elements of the regulatory process need to be reformed and
how best to ensure that the changes are both fair and effective.

Beginning in 1995 and continuing for several Congresses, the

Republican Party and conservative Democrats favored omnibus
regulatory reform legislation that would affect all environmental
policies by imposing broad and stringent mandates on executive
agencies, particularly the EPA. Those mandates were especially
directed at the use of benefit–cost analysis and risk assessment in
proposing new regulations. Proponents of such legislation also
sought to open agency technical studies and rulemaking to
additional legal challenges to help protect the business community
against what they viewed as unjustifiable regulatory action.
Opponents of both kinds of measures argued that such impositions
and opportunities for lawsuits were not reform in any meaningful
sense and would wreak havoc within agencies that already faced
daunting procedural hurdles and frequent legal disputes as they
developed regulations (see Chapters 6 and 7).44

Ultimately, Congress did approve several bills that Republicans

characterized as regulatory reform, including the Unfunded
Mandates Reform Act (1995) and the Small Business Regulatory
Enforcement Fairness Act (1996). As part of the latter, the separately
named Congressional Review Act gives Congress the ability to reject
a newly approved agency rule if within sixty legislative working days
a simple majority in each house approves a “resolution of
disapproval” that is also signed by the president.

With the presidency of George W. Bush, the regulatory reform

agenda shifted from imposing these kinds of congressional
mandates on Clinton administration agencies to direct intervention
by the White House. Bush appointed conservative and probusiness
officials to nearly all environmental and natural resource agencies,
and rulemaking shifted decisively toward the interests of the
business community (see Chapter 4).45 Bush and his supporters saw
less need for congressional involvement in regulatory reform.

Barack Obama’s election coincided with another shift in regulatory

philosophy. In light of the financial meltdown on Wall Street in 2008
and reports of ineffective federal regulation of banking institutions
and of food, drugs, consumer products, and the environment, public
sentiment at least temporarily shifted back in favor of strong, or at
least “smart,” regulation that achieves its purposes without imposing
unreasonable burdens.46 However, following the 2010 elections,
Republicans once again controlled the House, and antiregulatory
sentiment returned as members sought to reduce perceived burdens
on the business community in a slowly recovering economy and to
limit or repeal regulations that they believed were hindering job
creation. Given opposition by the Obama White House, these efforts
had limited impact beyond helping to set a regulatory reform agenda
for the future.

By 2017, however, the political alignment changed radically with the

election of President Trump. This shift was evident in repeated
efforts in both Congress and in the administration to block the EPA
from using scientific studies in regulatory processes if those studies
were not fully public or transparent (see Chapter 7). It was equally
apparent in a broad Regulatory Accountability Act Congress
considered in 2017 and in a measure that the House passed on a
largely party-line vote in May of 2017: the Reducing Regulatory
Burdens Act of 2017, a measure intended to weaken regulation of
pesticides under the Clean Water Act.47 It was even more palpable
in the unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act to
overturn recently approved regulations and in the appointments of
Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler as administrators of the EPA, as
well as in their recruitment of top-level political staff to the agency
who were dedicated to the same deregulatory agenda.

Until 2017, the Congressional Review Act was not a useful tool for
regulatory reform, and it was employed only once by Congress, in
March 2001, to overturn a Clinton-era workplace ergonomics rule.
With the election of President Trump and Republican majorities in
both the House and Senate, the act became a convenient way to roll
back Obama-era environmental rules, among others, and to do so
quickly. Less than 1 month into the new administration, the House
had used the review act to nullify eight rules, as it considered dozens
more. Some quickly cleared Congress and were sent to the
president for approval. These included an EPA rule intended to
prevent coal mining waste from contaminating streams (the stream
protection rule) and a Fish and Wildlife rule that forbade the baiting,
trapping, and killing of bears and wolves in their winter dens in
Alaska’s national wildlife refuges.48 By May 1, the president had
signed thirteen such bills to erase new rules, leading one journalist to
describe his use of the act as a “regulatory wrecking ball.”49 The
Senate narrowly rejected one of the proposed rule changes, aimed
at overturning a Bureau of Land Management regulation that set
standards for limiting release of methane (a potent greenhouse gas)
by oil and gas drillers on federal land; three Republicans joined all
Democrats in opposing the measure.

Because political appointees at the EPA under Trump were

committed to an aggressive regulatory reform agenda, there was
little further need for congressional action on such reform.
Conservative members were confident that their concerns would be
addressed in the agency. As discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, these
regulatory rollbacks, however, faced strong opposition by scientific,
environmental, and public health groups, and eventually will be
addressed in multiple federal court challenges.
Appropriation Politics: Budgets and Riders
The implementation of environmental policies depends heavily on
the funds that Congress appropriates each year. Thus, if certain
policy goals cannot be achieved through changing the governing
statutes or altering the rulemaking process through regulatory
reform, attention may turn instead to the appropriations process.
This was the case during the Reagan administration in the 1980s,
which severely cut environmental budgets. Limiting such budgets
became a major element of the Republican strategy in Congress
from 1995 to 2006, as well as in the George W. Bush administration.
The importance of budgetary politics depends in part on which party
controls Congress and the White House. Democrats tend to favor
increased spending on the environment, and Republicans generally
favor decreased spending. Regardless of which party controls
Congress, however, the appropriations process has been used in
two distinct ways to achieve policy change. One is through reliance
on riders, loosely related legislative stipulations attached to
appropriations bills; they ride along with the bill, hence the name.
The other is through changes in the level of funding, either a cut in
spending for programs that are not favored or an increase for those
that are endorsed.

Appropriation Riders

The use of riders became a common strategy following the 1994

election. For example, in the 104th Congress, more than fifty
antienvironmental riders were included in seven different
appropriations bills, largely with the purpose of slowing or halting
enforcement of laws by the EPA, the Interior Department, and other
agencies until Congress could revise them.50

The use of riders continued in subsequent years, as has opposition

to the strategy by environmental groups. In 2011, a rider attached to
the fiscal year 2012 spending bill would have kept the Obama
administration EPA from issuing any proposed regulations on
emissions of greenhouse gases from power plants or industrial
facilities. Another would have prevented the Interior Department from
using any federal funds to limit oil, gas, or other commercial
development on public lands that might qualify in the future for
wilderness designation.51

Why use budgetary riders to achieve policy change rather than

introducing freestanding legislation to pursue the same goals? Such
a strategy is attractive to its proponents because appropriations bills,
unlike authorizing legislation, typically move quickly, and Congress
must enact them each year to keep the government operating. Many
Republicans and business lobbyists also argue that the use of riders
is one of the few ways they have to rope in a bureaucracy that they
believe needs additional constraints. They argue that they are
unable to address their concerns through changing the authorizing
statutes themselves, a far more controversial and uncertain path to
follow.52 Even if members fail, their efforts on such riders help to
assure critical constituency groups that their representatives are
determined to meet their needs.

Critics of the process, however, say that relying on riders is an

inappropriate way to institute policy change because the process
provides little opportunity to debate the issues openly, and there are
no public hearings or public votes. One example is the Data Quality
Act of 2000, a rider seemingly designed to ensure the accuracy of
data on which agencies base their rulemaking to which few would
object. Yet the act’s provisions were written largely by an industry
lobbyist with less benign motives—to make it easier for business
groups to challenge agency rulemaking. To escape public notice, the
rider’s twenty-seven lines of text were buried in a massive budget bill
that President Clinton had to sign.53 In a retrospective review in
2001, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) counted
hundreds of antienvironmental riders attached to appropriations bills
since 1995. Clinton blocked more than seventy-five of them, but
many became law, including the Data Quality Act. The practice has
continued since then.54

Cutting Environmental Budgets

The history of congressional funding for environmental programs

was discussed in Chapter 1, and it is set out in Appendix 2 for
selected agencies and in Appendix 4 for overall federal spending on
natural resources and the environment. These budgets have been
the focus of continuing conflict within Congress since the 1980s. For
example, in the 104th Congress in the mid-1990s, GOP leaders
enacted deep cuts in environmental spending only to face President
Clinton’s veto of the budget bill. Those conflicts led eventually to a
temporary shutdown of the federal government, with the Republicans
receiving the brunt of the public’s wrath for the budget wars. Most of
the environmental cuts were reversed, but disagreements over
program priorities have continued since that time.55

George W. Bush regularly sought to cut the EPA’s budget but was
rebuffed by Congress until 2004, after which it tended to go along
with the president. Since then, overall appropriations for the
environment and natural resources have increased, although only
slightly in real terms, while spending on pollution control (by the EPA,
for example) has declined markedly after adjusting for inflation (see
Chapter 1 and Appendix 4).

As reviewed in Chapter 1, Congress generally opposed deep cuts to

environmental spending proposed by the Trump White House, and
that pattern seems likely to continue, in part because both
Republican and Democratic members’ states and districts benefit
directly from that spending, and they recognize public support for
many of the programs that are affected by such budget cuts.56
Legislating Policy Change
As noted earlier, in most years, Congress makes decisions that
affect nearly all environmental or resource programs. In this section,
I highlight selective actions in recent Congresses that demonstrate
both the ability of members to reach across party lines to find
common ground and the continuing ideological and partisan fights
that often prevent legislative action.

Pesticides and Drinking Water

Among the most notable achievements of the otherwise

antienvironmental 104th and 105th Congresses are two conspicuous
success stories involving control of pesticides and agricultural
chemicals and drinking water. Years of legislative gridlock were
overcome as Republicans and Democrats uncharacteristically
reached agreement on new policy directions.

The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 was a major revision of the
nation’s pesticide law, long a prime example of policy gridlock as
environmentalists battled with the agricultural, chemical, and food
industries. The act required the EPA to develop a new, uniform,
reasonable-risk approach to regulating pesticides used on food,
fiber, and other crops, and it required that special attention be given
to the diverse ways in which both children and adults are exposed to
such chemicals. The act sped through Congress in record time
without a single dissenting vote because the food industry was
desperate to get the new law enacted after court rulings that would
have adversely affected it without the legislation. In addition, after
the bruising battles of 1995, GOP lawmakers were eager to adopt an
election year environmental measure.57

The 1996 rewrite and reauthorization of the Safe Drinking Water Act
sought to address many long-standing problems with the nation’s
drinking water program. It dealt more realistically with regulating
contaminants based on their risk to public health and authorized $7
billion for state-administered loan and grant funds to help localities
with compliance costs. It also created a new right-to-know provision
that requires large water systems to provide their customers with
annual reports on the safety of local water supplies. Bipartisan
cooperation on the bill was made easier because it aided financially
pressed state and local governments and, like the pesticide bill,
allowed Republicans to score some election-year points with
environmentalists. In late 2018 Congress also enacted the America’s
Water Infrastructure Act, one section of which added new
requirements for community drinking water systems to develop or
modify chemical risk assessments and emergency response plans.58

Brownfields, Healthy Forests, and Wilderness

Congress also completed action on a number of somewhat less

visible issues that demonstrated its potential to fashion bipartisan
compromises. In 2001, President Bush gained congressional
approval of important legislation to reclaim so-called urban
brownfields. House Republicans sought to reduce liability for small
businesses under the Superfund program, and Democrats wanted to
see contaminated and abandoned industrial sites in urban areas
cleaned up.59

In a somewhat similar action in 2003, the 108th Congress approved

the Healthy Forests Initiative over the objections of environmental
groups. The measure was designed to permit increased logging in
national forests, allegedly to lessen the risk of wildfires. Bipartisan
concern over communities at risk from wildfires was sufficient for
enactment. Wildfires struck Southern California only days before the
Senate voted 80 to 14 to approve the bill.60

Finally, throughout 2007 and 2008, Congress considered a dozen

proposals for setting aside large parcels of federal land for
wilderness protection, totaling about two million acres in eight states,
largely without significant media coverage. The measures were
broadly supported within both parties, in part because
environmentalists helped to build public support by working with
opposing interests at the local level. Progress like this was also
possible because of Democratic victories in the 2006 election, which
switched control of the House Natural Resources Committee from
Republican Richard Pombo of California to Democrat Nick J. Rahall
of West Virginia. Pombo was a fierce opponent of such wilderness
protection, and Rahall strongly favored it. Congress could not
approve the wilderness bills in 2008, but by March 2009, in a more
favorable political climate, they were approved as part of an
Omnibus Public Land Management Act.61

In a similar display of unusual bipartisanship, in early 2019 Congress

approved what the press called “the most sweeping conservation
legislation in a decade.” The John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation,
Management, and Recreation Act protected millions of acres of land
as well as hundreds of miles of wild rivers, and also created four
more national monuments, as well as reauthorizing the broadly
supported Land and Water Conservation Fund (see Chapter 9). The
expansive bill (662 pages long) passed the Senate by a vote of 92 to
8 and the House by a similarly large margin of 363 to 62. Its success
owed much to the way the bill was crafted. As one journalist put it in
describing Senate action, “the package is crammed full of provisions
for nearly every senator who cast a vote” for it, quoting one of the
bill’s Senate sponsors, Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, on the strategy
employed: “We have also worked for months on a bipartisan,
bicameral basis to truly negotiate every single word in this bill.” Her
House counterpart, Raul Grijalva, D-Arizona, called it “an old-school
green deal,” and noted that he and the top Republican on the House
Natural Resources Committee “are happy to work together to get this
across the finish line.” Much the same could be said for yet another
major land conservation measure enacted in mid-2020, the Great
American Outdoors Act. It provided more than $9 billion over the
next five years for long-delayed repairs and maintenance of national
park lands and facilities, and also assured $900 million in annual
support for the popular Land and Water Conservation Fund. The
measure easily passed both the Senate and House, with President
Trump endorsing its passage.62

National Energy Policy and Chemical Safety

In 2005, Congress finally enacted one of the Bush administration’s

priorities that the president had sought since 2001, the Energy Policy
Act of 2005. It was the first major overhaul of US energy policy since
1992. The original Bush energy plan, formulated in 2001 by a task
force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, called for an increase
in the production and use of fossil fuels and nuclear energy, gave
modest attention to the role of energy conservation, and sparked
intense debate on Capitol Hill because of its emphasis on oil and gas
drilling in ANWR. The Republican House quickly approved the
measure in 2001, after what the press called “aggressive lobbying by
the Bush administration, labor unions and the oil, gas, and coal
industries.”63 The vote largely followed party lines.

Competing energy bills were debated on the Hill through mid-2005

without resolution and served as another prominent example of
legislative gridlock. Neither side was prepared to compromise as
lobbying by car manufacturers, labor unions, the oil and gas industry,
and environmentalists continued. As one writer put it in 2002, the
“debate between energy and the environment is important to core
constituencies of both parties, the kind of loyal followers vital in a
congressional election year.”64 Finally, the House and Senate
reached agreement on an energy package, and the president signed
the 1,700-page bill on August 8, 2005.65 The thrust of the legislation
remained largely what Bush and Cheney had sought in 2001,
although the final measure included significant funding for energy
research and development and other measures that Democrats had
supported, such as new energy efficiency standards for federal office
buildings and short-term tax credits for the purchase of hybrid
vehicles.66
In 2007, Congress also approved the Energy Independence and
Security Act of 2007, which set a national automobile fuel economy
standard of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. In one of his most
consequential acts, President Obama later negotiated with
automakers to raise the fuel economy standard to 54.5 miles per
gallon by 2025. However, after several years of contentious
negotiations with auto makers, many of whom opposed the change,
and states that had actively sought them, the Trump administration
significantly weakened those standards, a decision certain to be
reviewed by federal courts (see Chapter 6).67

President Obama’s economic stimulus measure, which Congress

approved in February 2009, contained about $80 billion in spending,
tax incentives, and loan guarantees, including funds for energy
efficiency, renewable energy sources, mass transit, and technologies
for the capture and storage of greenhouse gases produced by coal-
fired power plants. Had these energy components been a stand-
alone measure, the New York Times observed, they would have
amounted to “the biggest energy bill in history.” In this case,
however, bipartisan cooperation was largely absent. In the end, only
three Republicans in Congress, all in the Senate, voted for the bill.68

Similarly, after several years of partisan gridlock, in April 2016, the

Senate approved a modest but bipartisan energy efficiency and
electrical grid infrastructure measure, the Energy Policy
Modernization Act, by a vote of 85 to 12. Republican Lisa Murkowski
of Alaska and Democrat Maria Cantwell of Washington State had
worked together for several years on the legislation. Nearly 5 months
earlier, in December of 2015, the House had approved a companion
bill. However, House Republicans attached a number of unrelated
and controversial environmental policy provisions that eroded almost
all Democratic support for the measure. As a result, the final House
vote was 249 to 174, with only nine Democrats voting in favor. The
Senate and House measures were so at odds that no compromise
legislation could clear the 114th Congress. Murkowski vowed to
reintroduce the bipartisan Senate bill in a later Congress.69 By 2020,
she had assembled a massive 555-page bill to shift the nation
toward cleaner sources of energy, this time in cooperation with Sen.
Joe Manchin III (D-West Virginia). The American Energy Innovation
Act combined about a dozen bills from the Senate Committee on
Energy and Natural Resources that had bipartisan support, but it
failed on a procedural vote on the Senate floor in early March 2020.
In the House, wide-ranging energy and climate change packages
considered in 2020 were supported by most Democrats, but not
Republicans, and stood little chance of passage in the Senate.70

Successful bipartisanship was more in evidence during a significant

reform of the widely criticized Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)
of 1976. After decades of unsuccessful efforts to modernize and
strengthen the act, in 2016, Congress approved the Frank R.
Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, a major
revision of TSCA. The new act mandated that the EPA evaluate
existing chemicals with a new risk-based safety standard, that it do
so with clear and enforceable deadlines, with increased
transparency for chemical information, and with assurances that the
agency would have the budgetary resources to carry out its
responsibilities for chemical safety.71

Continuing Partisan Conflict and Stalemate

The examples discussed previously and many more that could be

cited, such as approval of a historic Great Lakes Compact in 2008 to
prevent water diversion from the lakes and a new Higher Education
Sustainability Act in 2008, show that over the past decade Congress
has been able to move ahead on a wide range of environmental and
natural resource policies.72 Yet continuing partisan conflict has
blocked action on key federal laws such as the Superfund program,
the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air
Act, as well as on legislation to address climate change.

The Superfund program, for example, has not been reauthorized for
well over two decades, and except for the brownfields measure
discussed earlier, congressional agreement has not been
forthcoming. The Endangered Species Act presents a similar level of
conflict and lack of resolution. In 2001, then House Resources
Committee chair James V. Hansen, R-Utah, captured the dilemma
well: “We haven’t reauthorized it because no one could agree on
how to reform and modernize the law. Everyone agrees there are
problems with the Act, but no one can agree on how to fix them.”73

Climate change policy, of course, has long been something of a

poster child for legislative gridlock, whether it is a stand-alone
climate measure or part of an integrated energy bill. In 2009, the
House approved a cap-and-trade bill, the American Clean Energy
and Security Act of 2009, after extensive and prolonged negotiations
and major concessions for the various industries likely to be affected
by it. These included automakers, steel companies, natural gas
drillers, oil refiners, utilities, and farmers, among others. The final
vote was 219 to 212, with all but eight Republicans voting in
opposition, along with forty-four Democrats. However, the Senate
failed to pass comparable legislation, and Republicans won control
of Congress in the 2010 elections, ending any prospect of a
legislative solution to climate change. President Obama then had
little choice but to pursue administrative solutions, such as the auto
fuel economy rules and the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. As indicated
throughout the chapter, partisan disputes over climate change
continue even as a diverse assortment of climate and energy bills
have been introduced in both the House and Senate. In the absence
of congressional action, the states have become centers of
innovation on climate change (see Chapters 2 and 12).
CONCLUSION
The political struggles on Capitol Hill over the last several decades
reveal sharply contrasting visions for environmental policy. The
revolutionary rhetoric and anti-environmental stance of the 104th
Congress had dissipated by the 2000s, but it was replaced in the
2010s by similar views held by Tea Party Republicans, especially in
the House Freedom Caucus, and then by a solidly conservative
Republican Party in both houses following Donald Trump’s election
in 2016. The political alignment shifted once again when Democrats
recaptured the House in the 2018 midterm elections. As reviewed in
the chapter, from the mid-1990s through 2020, Congress did revise
several major environmental statutes and it adopted some new laws
in an uncommon display of bipartisan cooperation. Nonetheless, for
many other environmental programs, policy gridlock continued to
frustrate all participants, and deep partisan differences prevented
emerging issues such as climate change from being fully addressed.

Neither the election of President Obama in 2008 and 2012 nor the
success of Donald Trump in the 2016 election did much to alter
legislative prospects on the Hill. Republican opposition thwarted
most legislative proposals on the environment during the Obama
years, and Democratic resistance limited what the Trump
administration could hope to do legislatively. Instead, the Trump
White House turned to use of executive authority to further its
preferred policies. Congress did, however, successfully block the
Trump administration’s proposals for severe budgetary cuts for
environmental and natural resource agencies, indicating its
continuing support for long-established federal programs and
agencies.

Under these political conditions, it is no surprise that, by 2020, public

ratings of Congress remained near historic lows, with strong public
disapproval of both parties, even as the institution received
somewhat higher rating than previously following passage of a series
of congressional bills related to the coronavirus pandemic. Moreover,
Congress ranked near the bottom in the public’s confidence in
American institutions, well below big business, newspapers, and
television news, and far below the presidency and the courts.74 The
constitutional divisions between the House and Senate, and between
Congress and the White House, guarantee that newly emergent
forces, whether on the left or the right of the political spectrum,
cannot easily push a particular legislative agenda. The 2016
elections did not change this outlook, nor did the 2018 elections.

As of the fall of 2020, the outlook for the November elections and
environmental policy choices remained uncertain, particularly as the
nation and world struggled with the devastating effects of the
COVID-19 pandemic. What impacts will the pandemic and
governmental responses to it have on the American public’s views
and behavior? Will people now see other threats to their health and
safety, including environmental risks, as more important? Will people
be more likely in the future to turn to the federal government for
leadership on national and global challenges such as climate
change, or less likely given the halting federal response to the
pandemic and its inability to prevent horrific loss of life and great
damage to the economy? Will we see more or less bipartisanship,
and how will that affect congressional action on environmental
challenges? It is encouraging that the House and Senate acted
swiftly and mostly cooperatively in the spring of 2020 to approve
trillions of dollars of economic support in response to the
pandemic.75

The environmental policy battles of the past several decades offer

other lessons. They remind us that in the US political system,
effective policymaking will always require cooperation between the
two branches and leadership within both to advance sensible
policies and secure public approval for them. The public has a role to
play in these deliberations, and the history of congressional
policymaking on the environment strongly suggests the power of
public beliefs and action. Public disillusionment with government and
politics both before and after the pandemic of 2020 creates
significant barriers to policy change. Regrettably, it also strengthens
the power of special interests to secure the changes they desire,
which often differ significantly from the public’s own preferences.
Ultimately, the solution can be found only in a heightened awareness
of the problems and active participation by the American public in the
political process.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Congress.gov (www.congress.gov) This site is one of the most

comprehensive public sites available for legislative searches.
See also www.house.gov and www.senate.gov for portals to the
House and Senate and to the committee and individual member
websites.

Environmental Protection Agency

(www.epa.gov/epahome/rule.html) The EPA site for laws, rules,
and regulations includes the full text of the dozen key laws
administered by the EPA. It also has a link to current legislation
before Congress.

Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org) One of the most

prominent and influential conservative think tanks, Heritage has
strong ties to Republican members of Congress and issues
frequent reports on a range of environmental, energy, and
natural resource issues.

League of Conservation Voters (www.lcv.org) The LCV

compiles environmental voting records for all members of
Congress.

National Association of Manufacturers (www.nam.org) This

leading business organization offers policy news, studies, and
position statements on environmental issues, as well as
extensive resources for public action on the issues.

Natural Resources Defense Council (www.nrdc.org) The

NRDC is perhaps the most active and influential of the national
environmental groups that lobby Congress.

Sierra Club (www.sierraclub.org) The Sierra Club is one of the

leading national environmental groups that track congressional
legislative battles.

US Chamber of Commerce (www.uschamber.com) The US

Chamber of Commerce is one of the nation’s leading business
organizations, and it frequently challenges legislative proposals
that it believes may harm business interests.
NOTES
1. The quotation comes from Sen. Markey’s press release on
introduction of the Green New Deal on February 7, 2019, available at
www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/senator-markey-and-
rep-ocasio-cortez-introduce-green-new-deal-resolution.

2. Zack Colman, “Green New Deal Resolution Calls for ‘National

Mobilization’ on Climate, Economy,” Politico, February 7, 2019.
Quotations from the resolution are taken from Sen. Markey’s news
release, cited above.

3. See, for example, the compilation by the Environmental and

Energy Study Institute, at www.eesi.org/articles/view/how-the-116th-
congress-is-addressing-climate-change.

4. See “Want a Green New Deal? Here’s a Better One,” by the

Editorial Board of the Washington Post, February 24, 2019; Steven
Ratner, “Yes, We Need a Green New Deal. Just Not the One
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Offering,” New York Times, May 20,
2019; and Brad Plumer, “A “Green New Deal” Is Far from Reality, but
Climate Action Is Picking Up in the States,” New York Times,
February 8, 2019. Support for the original proposal came well before
the resolution itself was introduced. See, for example, Greg Carlock
and Sean McElwee, “Why the Best New Deal Is a Green New Deal,”
The Nation, September 18, 2018. On the July proposal by the Center
for American Progress and the other groups, see Dino Grandoni,
“Broad Group of Green Organization Releases Climate Platform
Ahead of 2020 Election,” Washington Post, July 18, 2019.

5. Dino Grandoni, “The GOP Campaign Against the Green New Deal
May Be Working,” Washington Post, May 10, 2019.

6. See Daniel J. Fiorino, The New Environmental Regulation

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Marc Allen Eisner, Governing
the Environment: The Transformation of Environmental Regulation
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007); and Daniel A. Mazmanian and
Michael E. Kraft, eds., Toward Sustainable Communities: Transition
and Transformation in Environmental Policy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2009).

7. See Eric Schickler and Kathryn Pearson, “The House Leadership

in an Era of Partisan Warfare,” in Congress Reconsidered, 8th ed.,
ed. Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer (Washington, DC:
CQ Press, 2005), 207–26. See also Thomas E. Mann and Norman J.
Ornstein, The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and
How to Get It Back on Track (New York: Oxford University Press,
2006).

8. See Chapter 1 in this volume and Michael E. Kraft, “Congress and

Environmental Policy,” in The Oxford Handbook of U.S.
Environmental Policy, ed. Sheldon Kamieniecki and Michael E. Kraft
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 280–305.

9. Ed Gillespie and Bob Schellhas, eds., Contract with America (New

York: Times Books/Random House, 1994); Bob Benenson, “GOP
Sets the 104th Congress on New Regulatory Course,”
Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, June 17, 1995, 1693–705.

10. For a general review of much of this period, see Lawrence C.

Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, “A Decade of Republican Control:
The House of Representatives, 1995–2005,” in Congress
Reconsidered, 8th ed., ed. Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I.
Oppenheimer (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2005), 23–54.

11. By one count, the House passed over 400 bills by November of
2019, with 275 of them having bipartisan support, on which the
Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, would not allow debates or
votes. See Katrina vanden Heuvel, “Don’t Fall for Trump’s Lie.
Democrats Have Been Very Productive,” Washington Post, February
11, 2020. For an assessment of why legislative action is so difficult in
the Senate today, see an editorial by 70 former senators, “70 Former
U.S. Senators: The Senate Is Failing to Perform Its Constitutional
Duties,” Washington Post, February 25, 2020.
12. See Mazmanian and Kraft, Toward Sustainable Communities;
Eisner, Governing the Environment; Christopher McGrory Klyza and
David Sousa, American Environmental Policy: Beyond Gridlock,
updated and expanded edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013);
and Robert F. Durant, Daniel J. Fiorino, and Rosemary O’Leary,
eds., Environmental Governance Reconsidered: Challenges,
Choices, and Opportunities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2017).

13. For a general analysis of roles that Congress plays in the U.S.
political system, see Roger H. Davidson, Walter J. Oleszek, Frances
E. Lee, and Eric Schickler, Congress and Its Members, 17th ed.
(Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press, 2020).

14. Quoted in “Leader of New Climate Panel Talks of Need for ‘Bold
Action,’” MSN.com, February 8, 2019.

15. See, for example, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “White
House Eyes Plan to Cut EPA Staff By One-Fifth, Eliminating Key
Programs,” Washington Post, March 1, 2017; Jeffrey Mervis,
“Congress Again Rejects Trump Cuts, Smiles on Science Agencies,”
Science 367 (January 9, 2020): 13–4.

16. On the broad oversight powers that Congress can use, see Paul
C. Light, “How the House Should Investigate the Trump
Administration: Lessons from the Most Important House Probes
Since WW II,” Brookings Institution, March 8, 2019.

17. Rein, “Meet the House Science Chairman.” See also Smith’s
press release, “Statement of Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), H.R.
1430, Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017,
March 9, 2017.” For an update, see David Malakoff, “‘Secret
Science’ Plan Is Back, and Critics Say It’s Worse,” Science 366
(November 15, 2019): 783–4; Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A. to Limit
Science Used to Write Public Health Rules,” New York Times,
November 11, 2019; and Friedman, “E.P.A. Updates Plan to Limit
Science Used in Environmental Rules,” New York Times, March 4,
2020.
18. Dino Grandoni, “Congress Has Held At Least 15 Climate
Hearings Since Democrats Won the House,” Washington Post,
March 7, 2020.

19. See Coral Davenport, “Scott Pruitt, Trump’s E.P.A. Pick, Is

Approved by Senate Committee,” New York Times, February 2,
2017; Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin, “Hundreds of Current,
Former EPA Employees Urge Senate to Reject Trump’s Nominee for
the Agency,” Washington Post, February 6, 2017. On Wheeler’s
appearance before the committee, see Lisa Friedman, “Senators
Grill Andrew Wheeler, Former Coal Lobbyist and Trump’s Choice to
Lead the E.P.A.,” New York Times, January 16, 2019.

20. Kraft, “Congress and Environmental Policy.” For a recent review

of the strengths and weakness of Congress’s institutional capacity,
and recommendations for improvement, see the “Report of the Task
Force Project on Congressional Reform” (Washington, DC: American
Political Science Association, 2019). In addition to the three support
agencies noted, the report suggested revival of the former Office of
Technology Assessment, which for years aided Congress on
environmental policy, as described at length in Gary C. Bryner, ed.,
Science, Technology, and Politics: Policy Analysis in Congress
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992).

21. Davidson, Oleszek, Lee, and Schickler, Congress and Its

Members. See also Gary C. Jacobson and Jamie L. Carson, The
Politics of Congressional Elections, 10th ed. (New York: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2020).

22. Carl Hulse, “Consensus on Energy Bill Arose One Project at a

Time,” New York Times, November 19, 2003; Kenneth P. Vogel,
Catie Edmondson, and Jesse Drucker “Coronavirus Stimulus
Package Spurs a Lobbying Gold Rush,” New York Times, March 20,
2020.

23. See John M. Broder, “At House E.P.A. Hearing, Both Sides Claim
Science,” New York Times, March 8, 2011; Juliet Eilperin and Brady
Dennis, “How James Inhofe Is Upending the Nation’s Energy and
Environmental Policies,” Washington Post, March 14, 2017.

24. On the general idea of policy drift and failure to reform key public
policies, see Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All
Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its
Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

25. On the role of administrative agencies and the courts in policy

change, see Klyza and Sousa, American Environmental Policy.

26. One of the few scholarly analyses of the subject is Sarah A.

Binder, Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative
Gridlock (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003). Aside
from what the chapter covers, other factors also affect legislative
gridlock today. Among them are the constitutional specification that
the Senate be composed of two senators for each state (thus giving
small and often conservative states an oversized representation in
that body), the effects of legislative redistricting or gerrymandering
that can distort the public’s partisan preferences, and the weak
national laws on campaign financing in the wake of the Supreme
Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision. Even the filibuster in the
Senate plays a role; it prevents the majority party from taking action
without the sixty votes needed to overcome frequent filibusters by
the minority party.

27. See, for example, James A. Thurber and Antoine Yoshinaka,

eds., American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of
Political Polarization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015);
Jeffery A. Jenkins and Eric M. Patashnik, eds., Congress and Policy
Making in the 21st Century (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2016); and Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo, eds., Upending
American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizens
Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2020).

28. This was one of the more important conclusions about

constituency influence on congressional voting John Kingdon
reached in his influential Congressmen’s Voting Decisions, 3rd ed.
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989). For one of the most
thorough studies of public opinion on the environment, see David P.
Daniels, Jon A. Krosnick, Michael P. Tichy, and Trevor Tompson,
“Public Opinion on Environmental Policy in the United States,” in The
Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy, ed. Sheldon
Kamieniecki and Michael E. Kraft (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 461–86. See also a fascinating study of how
constituents’ preferences may be undercut by the way legislative
staff perceives and filters them, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Matto
Mildenberger, and Leah C. Stokes, “Legislative Staff and
Representation in Congress,” American Political Science Review
113, 1 (2019): 1–18.

29. Studies show that members of Congress generally do vote in a

way that is consistent with their campaign promises on
environmental issues but that Republicans are “far more likely to
break their campaign promises” and that proenvironmental campaign
promises are more likely to be broken than are others. See Evan J.
Ringquist and Carl Dasse, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Campaign
Promises? Environmental Legislation in the 105th Congress,” Social
Science Quarterly 85 (June 2004): 400–19. The quotation is from p.
417. See also Evan J. Ringquist, Milena I. Neshkova, and Joseph
Aamidor, “Campaign Promises, Democratic Governance, and
Environmental Policy in the U.S. Congress,” Policy Studies Journal
41, no. 2 (2013): 365–87.

30. See David Bornstein, “Cracking Washington’s Gridlock to Save

the Planet,” New York Times, May 19, 2017. Recent polls document
the continued low saliency of environmental issues, including climate
change, even though the public favors many policy actions on
climate change and has for several years, according to both the
Gallup poll and the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication
(See Chapter 3).

31. See, for example, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard
Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal
Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

32. See Charles R. Shipan and William R. Lowry, “Environmental

Policy and Party Divergence in Congress,” Political Research
Quarterly 54 (June 2001): 245–63.

33. See the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), National

Environmental Scorecard (Washington, DC: LCV, 2020). The
scorecard is published annually at the league’s website
(www.lcv.org); the party averages are taken from Rachel Frazin,
“Both Parties See Gains on Environmental Scorecard, The Hill,
March 12, 2020. For a detailed examination of these patterns over
time, see Riley E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright, and Jerrod H. Yarosh,
“The Political Divide on Climate Change: Partisan Polarization
Widens in the U.S.” Environment 58, no. 5 (September/October
2016): 4–22; Nadja Popovich, “Climate Change Rises As a Public
Priority. But It’s More Partisan Than Ever,” New York Times,
February 20, 2020.

34. See Aaron M. McCright, Chenyang Xiao, and Riley E. Dunlap,

“Political Polarization on Support for Government Spending on
Environmental Protection in the USA, 1974–2012,” Social Science
Research 48 (2014): 251–60.

35. The membership of both Senate and House caucuses can be

found at the Citizen Climate Lobby website:
https://citizensclimatelobby.org/climate-solutions-caucus/.

36. Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder, “Senate Democrats Form Special

Committee on Climate Change,” U.S. News and World Report,
March 27, 2019.

37. Mary Etta Cook and Roger H. Davidson, “Deferral Politics:

Congressional Decision Making on Environmental Issues in the
1980s,” in Public Policy and the Natural Environment, ed. Helen M.
Ingram and R. Kenneth Godwin (Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1985). See
also Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft, eds., Environmental Policy
in the 1980s: Reagan’s New Agenda (Washington, DC: CQ Press,
1984); Michael E. Kraft and Norman J. Vig, “Environmental Policy in
the Reagan Presidency,” Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 3 (Fall
1984): 415–39.

38. For a fuller discussion of the gridlock over clean air legislation,
see Gary C. Bryner, Blue Skies, Green Politics: The Clean Air Act of
1990 and Its Implementation (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1995).

39. Rhodes Cook, “Rare Combination of Forces May Make History of

‘94,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, April 15, 1995, 1076–
81.

40. Katharine Q. Seelye, “Files Show How Gingrich Laid a Grand

G.O.P. Plan,” New York Times, December 3, 1995. On the broader
history of conservative and business campaigns against
environmental policy, see Judith A. Layzer, Open for Business:
Conservatives’ Opposition to Environmental Regulation (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2012). For a somewhat parallel development in
recent years to discredit climate change, see Riley E. Dunlap and
Aaron M. McCright, “Challenging Climate Change: The Denial
Countermovement,” in Climate Change and Society: Sociological
Perspectives, ed. R. E. Dunlap and R. J. Brulle (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 300–32.

41. Groups such as Americans for Prosperity, part of what is often

termed the “Koch Network,” have been influential as well as major
contributors to congressional campaigns, and they have emphasized
an antienvironmental and pro-fossil fuels agenda at odds with public
preferences for environmental protection and action on climate
change. See Eric Lipton, “G.O.P. Hurries to Slash Oil and Gas Rules,
Ending Industries’ 8-Year Wait,” New York Times, February 4, 2017;
Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch
Network and Republican Party Extremism,” Perspectives on Politics,
14, no. 3 (September 2016): 681–99.

42. Allan Freedman, “GOP’s Secret Weapon against Regulations:

Finesse,” CQ Weekly, September 5, 1998, 2314–20; Charles Pope,
“Environmental Bills Hitch a Ride through the Legislative Gantlet,”
CQ Weekly, April 4, 1998, 872–75.

43. See Fiorino, The New Environmental Regulation; Eisner,

Governing the Environment.

44. See Sara R. Rinfret and Scott R. Furlong, “Defining

Environmental Rulemaking,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Environmental Policy, ed. Sheldon Kamieniecki and Michael E. Kraft
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 372–94.

45. See Michael E. Kraft and Sheldon Kamieniecki, eds., Business

and Environmental Policy: Corporate Interests in the American
Political System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

46. See Jackie Calmes, “Both Sides of the Aisle Say More
Regulation, and Not Just of Banks,” New York Times, October 14,
2008.

47. On the broad regulatory reform actions in Congress in 2017, see

William W. Buzbee, “Regulatory ‘Reform’ That Is Anything But,” New
York Times, June 15, 2017.

48. David Malakoff, “Republicans Ready a Regulatory Rollback,”

Science 354 (November 25, 2016): 951; Philip A. Wallach and
Nicholas W. Zeppos, “Is the Congressional Review Act About to
Supercharge Deregulation?” FIXGOV [blog of Brookings Institution],
April 4, 2017. The quotation is from Juliette Eilperin, “Trump
Undertakes Most Ambitious Regulatory Rollback Since Reagan,”
Washington Post, February 12, 2017. See also Michael Grunwald,
“Trump’s Secret Weapon Against Obama’s Legacy,” Politico, April
10, 2017.

49. Michael D. Shear, “Trump Discards Obama Legacy, One Rule at

a Time,” New York Times, May 1, 2017.

50. John H. Cushman Jr., “G.O.P.’s Plan for Environment Is Facing a

Big Test in Congress,” New York Times, July 17, 1995.
51. Robert B. Semple Jr., “Concealed Weapons against the
Environment,” New York Times, July 31, 2011.

52. Pope, “Environmental Bills Hitch a Ride.”

53. Andrew Revkin, “Law Revises Standards for Scientific Study,”

New York Times, March 21, 2002. See also Rick Weiss, “‘Data
Quality’ Law Is Nemesis of Regulation,” Washington Post, August
16, 2004; Paul Raeburn, “A Regulation on Regulations,” Scientific
American, July 2006, 18–19. Raeburn reported that by 2006,
perhaps one hundred Data Quality Act petitions had been filed with
dozens of different government agencies, most of them by industry
groups.

54. Susan Zakin, “Riders from Hell,” Amicus Journal (Spring 2001):
20–22. For recent use of riders, see New York Times Editorial Board,
“The Dirty Little Deals That Would Foul the Environment,” New York
Times, February 19, 2018.

55. Carroll J. Doherty and the staff of CQ Weekly, “Congress

Compiles a Modest Record in a Session Sidetracked by Scandal:
Appropriations,” CQ Weekly, November 14, 1998, 3086–87 and
3090–91.

56. Jeffrey Mervis and the Science News Staff, “Congress Trumps
President in Backing Science,” Science 356 (May 5, 2017): 470–71.
See also Lewis M. Milford and Mark Muro, “A Senate Panel Speaks
for Sound Clean Energy Policy—and Rebukes Trump,” Brookings
Institution, August 8, 2017, available at www.brookings.edu/blog/the-
avenue/2017/08/08/a-senate-rebukes-trump/.

57. David Hosansky, “Rewrite of Laws on Pesticides on Way to

President’s Desk,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, July 27,
1996, 2101–03; Hosansky, “Provisions: Pesticide, Food Safety Law,”
Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, September 7, 1996, 2546–
50.
58. David Hosansky, “Drinking Water Bill Clears; Clinton Expected to
Sign,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, August 3, 1996,
2179–80; Allan Freedman, “Provisions: Safe Drinking Water Act
Amendments,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, September
14, 1996, 2622–27.

59. Rebecca Adams, “Pressure from White House and Hastert Pries
Brownfields Bill from Committee,” CQ Weekly, September 8, 2001,
2065–66.

60. Mary Clare Jalonick, “Healthy Forests Initiative Provisions,” CQ

Weekly, January 24, 2004, 246–47.

61. Juliet Eilperin, “Keeping the Wilderness Untamed: Bills in

Congress Could Add as Much as Two Million Acres of Unspoiled
Land to Federal Control,” Washington Post (National edition), June
23–July 6, 2008, 35; Avery Palmer, “Long-Stalled Lands Bill Gets
Nod from Senate,” CQ Weekly, January 19, 2009, 128.

62. See Juliet Eilperin and Dino Grandoni, “The Senate Just Passed
the Decade’s Biggest Public Lands Package. Here’s What’s in It,”
Washington Post, February 12, 2019; Matthew Daly, “Congress
Passes Sprawling Plan to Boost Conservation, Parks, Washington
Post, July 22, 2020.

63. Chuck McCutcheon, “House Passage of Bush Energy Plan Sets

Up Clash with Senate,” CQ Weekly, August 4, 2001, 1915–17.

64. Rebecca Adams, “Politics Stokes Energy Debate,” CQ Weekly,

January 12, 2002, 108.

65. Carl Hulse, “House Votes to Approve Broad Energy Legislation,”

New York Times, April 22, 2005.

66. See Ben Evans and Joseph J. Schatz, “Details of Energy Policy
Law,” CQ Weekly, September 5, 2005, 2337–45.
67. Steven Overly, “Trump to Pull Back EPA’s Fuel Efficiency
Determination, Opening the Door for Reduced Standards,”
Washington Post, March 15, 2020.

68. Editorial, “An $80 Billion Start,” New York Times, February 18,
2009.

69. See Editorial Board, “An Energy Bill in Need of Fixes,” New York
Times, April 20, 2016.

70. Steven Mufson and Dino Gandoni, “Senate Prepares to Vote on

Big Energy Bill This Week,” Washington Post, March 2, 2020; Steven
Mufson and Dino Grandoni, “House Democrats Unveil Ambitious
Climate Package, Steering Toward a Net-Zero Economy by 2050,”
Washington Post, June 30, 2020. The House proposals did not go as
far as the Green New Deal, but nonetheless were remarkably
comprehensive and pathbreaking. Some termed the package the
Democrats’ green infrastructure bill.

71. See Coral Davenport and Emmarie Huetteman, “Lawmakers

Reach Deal to Expand Regulation of Toxic Chemicals,” New York
Times, May 19, 2016.

72. The education act was part of the Higher Education Opportunity
Act of 2008. It authorized competitive grants to institutions and
associations in higher education to promote the development of
sustainability curricula, programs, and practices. It was the first new
federal environmental education program in 18 years.

73. Cited in Science and Environmental Policy Update, the

Ecological Society of America online newsletter, April 20, 2001.

74. The Gallup poll reports regularly on the public’s approval of

Congress and its trust and confidence in governmental and other
institutions. In mid-April of 2020, 30 percent approved of “the way
Congress is handling its job,” while 66 percent disapproved. See
“Congress and the Public,” at
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx. On approval
of other institutions, see Gallup’s report at
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx.

75. See one report on the assistance in Emily Cochrane and

Nicholas Fandos, “Senate Approves $2 Trillion Stimulus After
Bipartisan Deal,” New York Times, March 25.
6 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY IN THE COURTS
—Kimberly Smith1
On January 2, 1900, the Chicago Sanitation District completed an ambitious civil engineering project: A
drainage canal that reversed the course of the Chicago River. Instead of fouling Lake Michigan—the
source of the city’s drinking water––the city’s sewage would now flow into the Des Plaines River and,
eventually, the Mississippi River. This engineering spectacle was rivaled by the legal spectacle that
followed: Missouri’s Attorney General Edward Crow sued the state of Illinois in the US Supreme Court,
arguing that the sewage created a nuisance by spreading filth and disease in St. Louis and other towns
along the Mississippi River. The lawsuit took 6 years to resolve, mobilizing hundreds of expert witnesses
and producing more than 100 exhibits. A 13,160-page report was presented to the Supreme Court in
May 1905, which issued its final decision in February 1906.2 Missouri lost. Despite the massive record,
the Court was not convinced that the sewage was harming human health.

This lawsuit opened a new era of environmental litigation in federal courts. By the 1920s, the Supreme
Court had become the principal forum for resolving, or trying to resolve, a host of interstate conflicts over
natural resources based on common law causes of action like nuisance.3 State attorneys general were
the driving force behind these lawsuits; it took the resources of a state government to pursue them.
They typically involved hundreds of hours of testimony, compiled records thousands of pages long, and
dragged on for years or even decades. And they were hard to win. Given the complexity and uncertainty
of environmental science, it was challenging to prove whose pollution was causing what sort of harm.
But in the absence of federal pollution legislation, states had little choice but to ask the federal courts to
decide these matters. As a result, for much of the twentieth century, federal courts decided how much
and what kind of waste the states could emit into the air and water.

With the passage of the Clean Air Act (CAA), Clean Water Act (CWA), and other federal environmental
statutes in the 1970s, the Supreme Court happily relinquished to Congress and the executive branch
the responsibility for setting transboundary pollution policy.4 But those days of judicial policymaking may
not be safely in the past. With Congress hampered by gridlock, environmental activists––along with a
growing contingent of state attorneys general––are reviving common law doctrines and asking federal
courts once again to take the lead in addressing new environmental problems like climate change. It’s
not a role that judges are used to playing.

To be sure, courts are important players in the environmental policy system, but their primary role today
is to supervise the administrative agencies that implement environmental statutes. In that role, courts
may force reluctant policymakers to act by enforcing statutory mandates, but more commonly they slow
down or moderate policy change. Judges affect the pace and scope of policy change by enforcing
statutory requirements on agencies, interpreting legal rules, and reviewing the constitutionality of
environmental policies.

Both state and federal courts can play this supervisory role, but the focus of this chapter is
environmental policymaking in the federal courts. First, I will profile the US court system and explain the
federal courts’ role in implementing environmental policy and overseeing administrative agencies. Next,
I will review how courts can force, delay, or shape environmental policymaking, as illustrated by several
case studies. I end the chapter by considering how the president’s appointment power and
congressional gridlock may affect the courts’ role in environmental policy in the coming years.
THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM
Although the US Supreme Court receives the most attention, most litigation in the federal courts begins
and ends in the trial court, called the District Court. When questions of law arise during the trial, the
question may be appealed to the intermediate appellate court (the Circuit Court). Questions of federal
law, whether arising in a state or federal court, may ultimately be reviewed and decided by the US
Supreme Court.

The authority to determine the meaning and application of regulations, statutes, and constitutional
provisions gives the courts influence in the policy system. Moreover, they can exercise that influence at
least somewhat independently of the other branches. The 860 federal judges staffing the regular federal
courts enjoy life tenure. Although appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, they cannot
be removed from office (barring serious malfeasance), nor can Congress lower their salaries. These
features insulate judges from partisan pressure and make them attractive audiences for policy
arguments that failed to prevail in the legislature. Thus, environmental advocates and their opponents
spend at least as much time in court, litigating over the interpretation and implementation of
environmental policy, as they do in lobbying Congress and the executive branch. Nevertheless, several
features of courts make it difficult for this branch to exert consistent influence on policy (see Figure 6.1).

Description

Figure 6.1 The Dual Judicial System

First, courts are largely passive institutions; they must wait for plaintiffs to bring cases to them rather
than actively seeking out policy conflicts to resolve. Although a judge may (in an opinion, article, or
public speech) indicate an interest in addressing certain legal questions, it is the plaintiffs who decide
whether and, often, in which court to bring suit. Environmental organizations and their opponents
typically have sophisticated litigation strategies, seeking out conflicts that are suitable for resolution in
court, finding sympathetic plaintiffs and fact situations that favor their side. This is also the role often
played by state attorneys general, since states may have standing to sue—that is, a legally cognizable
interest—even when no private parties do.

Second, the sheer multiplicity of courts means that questions about a law may arise in many different
forums and be decided by different panels of judges, leading to conflicting outcomes. Eventually, of
course, some of those questions may be resolved by the US Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court,
which has broad discretion over its docket, hears only a very small fraction of cases each year. Most
decisions on federal law by state and federal lower courts will not be reviewed, so conflicting decisions
among circuits can persist for years.

Finally, courts have very limited power to enforce their decisions. They rely on the cooperation of the
other branches, and their only means of persuading those actors is through well-reasoned legal
argument and the general public respect for the courts. Without the support of the political branches,
judicial decisions may be rendered meaningless simply by being ignored.

Despite these limitations, courts do influence environmental policy. First, the courts supervise how
federal agencies implement environmental laws. Some statutes authorize judicial review directly, but
most administrative decisions are also reviewable under the Administrative Procedure Act5 (APA), which
sets out the basic procedures by which federal agencies carry out their rulemaking and enforcement
duties. Because it provides for judicial review of agency actions, the APA is the basis for a great deal of
environmental litigation. It requires agencies to follow certain procedures (such as giving notice and
collecting comments from the general public) before making a new rule to implement a statute. It also
allows the court to strike down a rule as “arbitrary and capricious” (lacking adequate justification) or
exceeding the agency’s statutory mandate. In all these decisions, judges have some discretion in
interpreting the APA’s requirements and evaluating the agency’s actions. However, the usual result of an
adverse decision by the court is that the agency simply has to make another attempt at rulemaking. A
determined agency can usually win judicial approval, if it is careful and persistent.

Courts also exercise discretion in interpreting statutes. But here, also, they do not have the last word.
The legislature may respond to a judicial interpretation of a statute by amending the statute to clarify its
meaning. Only when a court finds a rule or statute unconstitutional altogether can it block a legislative
policy. Thus, while courts do have some influence on the direction of environmental policy change, they
have much more influence on the pace of change. The following sections discuss four ways in which
courts exercise that influence: they can force reluctant policymakers to act; delay the implementation of
a new policy; shape policy directly through statutory interpretation; and put roadblocks in the way of
policy change through constitutional review.
FORCING POLICY ACTION
Congress often instructs administrative agencies to address environmental problems but gives them no
specific deadlines. A long list of mandates combined with no deadlines is a recipe for agency inaction. A
good deal of environmental litigation is therefore aimed at getting agencies to carry out their statutory
mandates. Climate change provides a good example of how courts can be useful, if not entirely
successful, at prodding a reluctant agency into action.

In 1999, a group of environmental advocacy organizations petitioned the Environmental Protection

Agency (EPA) to address climate change by regulating four greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide,
methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons) emitted by new motor vehicles. The petitioners argued
that the EPA had authority, and indeed was mandated, to regulate greenhouse gases under the CAA.6
The EPA—when it finally addressed the petition four years later—disagreed. The petitioners challenged
that denial in court, and the result was Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency,7 the 2007
Supreme Court decision directing the EPA to take action on greenhouse gases under the CAA.

Since methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons were already regulated under the CAA, the legal
dispute centered on carbon dioxide. Section 202(a) (1) of the CAA provides that “the Administrator [of
EPA] shall by regulation prescribe… standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any
class or classes of new motor vehicle… which in his judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which
may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” The EPA argued that carbon
dioxide wasn’t “air pollution” within the meaning of the CAA, which was aimed at addressing ground-
level pollutants rather than those that occur high in the atmosphere.8 According to the EPA, Congress
did not intend for the CAA to address climate change. On the contrary, it had considered and rejected a
proposal to address climate change when that Act was amended in 1990. In short, the EPA and
petitioners disagreed about how to interpret the CAA.

The petitioners appealed the agency’s decision to the US District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which
upheld the EPA’s refusal. The petitioners, now joined by several state and local governments,
successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case. On April 2, 2007 (8 years after the
original petition), the Supreme Court reversed the lower court.

The Supreme Court focused on two questions. First, EPA argued that the petitioners did not have
standing to challenge its decision. The standing requirement derives from Article III of the Constitution,
which authorizes federal courts to hear “ cases and controversies.” The Supreme Court has interpreted
that provision to mean that the party bringing an action to court must have a real stake in the conflict.
This stake, a particular injury that can be addressed by a legal remedy, gives the party “standing” to sue.
Only one petitioner needs to satisfy the standing requirement, however, and the Court (in the majority
opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens) concluded that the state of Massachusetts did so. Following the
line of decisions that started with Missouri v. Illinois, discussed above, the Court held that
Massachusetts had standing as a “quasi-sovereign” with an interest in defending “all the earth and air
within its domain.”9

On the main question, the Court concluded that Sec. 202(a) (1) clearly does cover carbon dioxide. The
CAA has a “sweeping definition of ‘air pollutant’” which includes “any physical, chemical… substance or
matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air.”10 It rejected EPA’s argument that
Congress didn’t intend for EPA to address climate change, noting that the fact that Congress didn’t
address climate change in the 1990 amendments “tells us nothing about what Congress meant when it
amended § 202(a) (1) in 1970 and 1977.”11 The Court concluded that “EPA has offered no reasoned
explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change.
Its action was therefore ‘arbitrary, capricious, … or otherwise not in accordance with law’”—that is, with
the APA.12
The Court therefore ordered EPA not to start regulating carbon dioxide immediately but to make a
decision as to whether carbon dioxide “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or
welfare.” Only if the agency decides that carbon dioxide does endanger the public is it required to
regulate these emissions under the CAA. It took two more years (and a new administration) for the EPA
to issue its finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases do endanger public health and
welfare.13 President Obama used that finding both to raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy
(CAFE) mileage standards for cars and light trucks, and to curtail stationary source carbon emissions
from power plants in his Clean Power Plan (Chapter 4). However, the latter plan was enjoined by the
Supreme Court in 2016 and was later repealed by the Trump administration.

Indeed, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency itself may be vulnerable to being

overturned. Recently appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have expressed reluctance
to allow agencies to address “major questions” of public policy under statutes that weren’t clearly aimed
at addressing those questions. For example, Justice Kavanaugh used a statement on the Supreme
Court’s decision not to review a case to state that he supports this “major question” doctrine. The
statement has no authority as precedent; rather, it is a good example of how judges invite plaintiffs to
bring cases that would allow them to develop doctrine in this way.14 If the Trump administration’s
replacement of the Clean Power Plan—the “Affordable Clean Energy” rule—ends up in the Supreme
Court after being challenged by attorneys general from Democratic states, it could serve as an
opportunity to overturn Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency on these grounds (see
Chapters 2 and 7).

Even if Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency stands, however, the pace of EPA action
under the CAA has been very slow, and climate policy advocates are trying other legal strategies to
force action on climate change. One high-profile case is Juliana v. United States, in which a group of
young people argue that the federal government’s failure to address climate change violates their
“substantive due process rights to life, liberty, and property” (a constitutional claim) and “their obligation
to hold certain natural resources in trust for the people and for future generations” (a common law claim
invoking “public trust” doctrine).15 The plaintiffs asked the federal court to order the US government to
“develop a plan to reduce CO2 emissions.”16

Given federal courts’ experience with common law environmental litigation in the early twentieth century,
they are likely to be reluctant to encourage these lawsuits. In this case, the District Court agreed that
plaintiffs have standing to bring the suit, but the Ninth Circuit reversed that decision, dismissing the case
before even considering whether the constitutional or public trust arguments have merit.17 Nevertheless,
such litigation at least provides an incentive for Congress or state legislatures to take some action, in
order to preempt the courts from wading into this complex and contentious policy area.
DELAYING POLICY ACTION
Where courts are most effective is in delaying changes in environmental policy. Presidents seeking to
roll back environmental regulations often face substantial obstacles in the form of adverse judicial
decisions. The Trump administration’s deregulatory efforts offer a case in point. Most administrative
regulations cannot simply be repealed by executive order; they must be replaced through the same
rulemaking process by which they were created in the first place. Any effort to change an existing
regulation may be challenged on the grounds that the agency failed to meet the APA’s procedural
requirements, that the agency’s action is “arbitrary and capricious,” or that the action exceeds statutory
authority (see Chapter 7).

So far, most of the Trump administration’s environmental regulations have either been struck down by
federal courts or remain held up by litigation. The Institute for Policy Integrity is tracking the
administration’s regulatory efforts, and as of October 1, 2020, only 22 out of 138 agency actions
challenged in court have survived judicial review.18 Fifteen of the successful lawsuits concerned
environmental regulation, but most of those have very limited effects, such as a postponement of
compliance dates for restrictions on toxic metal wastewater discharges from power plants.19 Other
unsuccessful lawsuits have challenged individual permits or leases, and one actually upheld the
designation of a Superfund site against an industry challenge.20 The Trump administration’s record in
court was unusually poor during its first 3 years, however—an administration typically wins about 70
percent of its lawsuits.21 And a loss in court doesn’t always doom the deregulatory effort, since the
agency can make another attempt to satisfy the rulemaking requirements. But sometimes a loss in court
is enough to discourage or at least moderate an administration’s efforts.

These dynamics are illustrated by California v. United States Bureau of Land Management.22 The case
concerns a regulation issued by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) during the Obama
administration, restricting the venting, flaring, and leaking of natural gas during oil and natural gas
production on federal lands. The rule took effect in January of 2017 and was immediately challenged in
the Wyoming District Court by some of the regulated companies.23 At the same time, President Trump
issued Executive Order 13783, directing agencies to “suspend, revise, or rescind those that unduly
burden the development of domestic energy resources beyond the degree necessary to protect the
public interest or otherwise comply with the law.”24 Following that directive, in June 2017 the BLM gave
notice that it was postponing compliance dates for some sections of the rule. The states of California
and New Mexico immediately filed suit, asking the District Court for the Northern District of California to
vacate the postponement.

The California Northern District Court agreed with California and New Mexico. The BLM had not
complied with the usual notice and comment requirements in issuing the postponement, nor had it
offered any new information that would justify the delay. Instead, the agency had relied on APA section
705, which allows it to postpone the effective date of a rule “when an agency finds that justice so
requires.” The BLM argued that this provision allowed it to postpone compliance dates as well, and that
the postponement was necessary to “preserve the status quo” until the Wyoming case challenging the
rule was decided.25 The court rejected this reasoning. The APA does not authorize agencies to change
compliance dates once a rule has gone into effect, and the postponement would not in fact preserve the
status quo but bring to a halt efforts already underway to comply with the rule. The court noted that while
“new presidential administrations are entitled to change policy positions,” the APA requires them to “give
reasoned explanations for those changes.”26 The BLM appealed the decision but then dropped the
appeal, abandoning the effort.

This did not end the saga, however. The BLM continued to work on suspending the rule and replacing it
with a different, more lenient one. In the meantime, the Wyoming case was proceeding. In April 2018,
the Wyoming District Court issued an order to stay (prevent) the implementation of the original rule, in
order to allow the BLM to complete its revision. While the court expressed frustration with its options, it
decided that postponing the compliance dates in the original rule would “provide certainty and stability
for the regulated community and the general public while BLM completes its rulemaking process, will
allow the BLM to focus its limited resources on completing the revision rulemaking, and would prevent
the unrecoverable expenditure of millions of dollars in compliance costs.”27 Delay, it turns out, can work
both ways.

The BLM’s plans for oil and gas extraction on public lands continue to run into judicial roadblocks,
however. For example, in February 2020, an Idaho District Court suspended oil and gas leases in sage
grouse habitat on the grounds that the BLM did not allow adequate public comment on its leasing plan,
as required by the APA. That case is discussed in more detail in Chapter 9.28
SHAPING POLICY
Courts may have a more direct influence on environmental policy when asked to consider how a statute
drafted several decades ago should be applied under new conditions. This sort of “updating” can look
very much like the implementing agency crafting a new policy altogether—a task that courts may be
reluctant to allow. That was the concern behind the 2018 Supreme Court decision Weyerhaeuser
Company v. United States Fish and Wildlife Service.29

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) administers the Endangered Species Act30
(ESA), and in 2001 it listed as endangered the dusky gopher frog, which lives in upland pine forests in
coastal Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The frog’s habitat needs are fairly specific: it breeds in
ephemeral ponds in open-canopy forests. Open canopies ensure that there is sufficient ground-level
vegetation to support the insect populations that the frog feeds on. Unfortunately, such open-canopy,
longleaf pine forests have become rare in the Southeast, and the frog’s numbers have declined
precipitously. Shrinking habitat makes the frog more vulnerable to climate disruption and other threats.
Accordingly, the USFWS plan for its conservation seeks to protect not only its current habitat but
additional areas that the frog might be able to inhabit in the future. The agency faces similar challenges
for many species, as climate change alters habitats and forces species to migrate into new territory. The
Weyerhaeuser case raises questions about the agency’s power to deal with those climate-induced
changes under the ESA.

A provision of the ESA requires the USFWS to designate as “critical habitat” any geographical area
within the species’ habitat that is essential to its conservation, including “specific areas outside the
geographical area occupied by the species … upon a determination by [the USFWS] that such areas
are essential for the conservation of the species.”31 Following this somewhat confusing statutory
mandate, the USFWS designated as critical habitat not only the areas in which the dusky gopher frog is
currently found but also a 1,544-acre site in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana. That area, a closed-canopy
timber plantation owned by Weyerhaeuser, contains some high-quality ephemeral ponds, and could be
turned into the open-canopy forest needed by the frog with (in the USFWS judgment) “reasonable
effort.” Such a designation, however, might prevent Weyerhaeuser from logging the tract.32
Weyerhaeuser therefore brought suit, asking the court to order the USFWS to remove the unit from its
critical habitat designation.

Weyerhaeuser argued that the tract cannot be “critical habitat” because, in its current condition, the frog
couldn’t survive there. In other words, it argued that the USFWS misinterpreted the statute, adopting too
broad a definition of “critical habitat” to include territory outside the frog’s habitat altogether. The District
Court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the USFWS, deferring to its expertise, but
the Supreme Court reversed the lower courts and rejected the agency’s interpretation of the statute.

The central question, according to Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion, was “whether ‘critical habitat’
under the ESA must also be habitat”—that is, whether the agency is limited to considering territory that
is already a suitable habitat for the frog.33 Put that way, he had no difficulty concluding that the term
“critical habitat” is so limited. In short, he rejected the agency’s attempt to give the key statutory term a
broad reading that would reach potential habitat. However, he didn’t give Weyerhaeuser a clear victory
either. The USFWS claimed that the frog could in fact inhabit the area in question, so the Court
remanded the case back to the lower court for further proceedings on that question.34 (It also decided
that the lower court improperly failed to review the USFWS’s consideration of the economic impact of
designating the area as critical habitat.)35

The USFWS’s approach to interpreting the phrase “critical habitat” illustrates the challenge of applying
the ESA in an era of climate change. Protecting endangered species may increasingly require agencies
to become more creative in interpreting statutes—to extend key terms, for example, such as reading
“critical habitat” to include new territories into which a species can migrate as their existing habitat is
altered by climate change. But such extensions or reinterpretations may subtly reshape the policy itself.
The issue raised by Weyerhaeuser Company v. United States Fish and Wildlife Service is whether the
courts will defer to agencies as they shape policy through such creative statutory interpretations.

There is reason to believe they may not. As mentioned above, some conservative jurists like Justices
Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are concerned to limit the scope of agency discretion, to ensure that major
policy questions are resolved by elected officials and not relatively obscure agency staff. A key point of
conflict in this debate focuses on the 1984 Supreme Court decision Chevron v. Natural Resources
Defense Council (NRDC).36 The case concerned (once again) EPA’s interpretation of the CAA. The EPA
allowed states (which give permits to emitters) to treat all of the pollution-emitting devices within the
same industrial groupings as though they were encased within a single bubble, as one “source” of
pollution rather than several different sources. That approach would give the facility some flexibility to
allow more pollution from one device by cutting down pollution from another. The NRDC, in contrast,
argued that this was not a reasonable interpretation of the statutory term “source,” and that such trade-
offs shouldn’t be allowed. The Supreme Court upheld the agency’s policy, holding that where the
language of the statute isn’t clear, courts should defer to the agency’s interpretation.

That principle of deference has come under attack recently by conservative critics of the administrative
state. Judge (now Justice) Neil Gorsuch has complained that the Chevron rule “permit[s] executive
bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal
power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’
design.”37 One worry is that it seems to give (politically accountable) agency staff rather than (neutral,
objective) courts the final word on the interpretation of statutes—even though the APA explicitly directs
reviewing courts to interpret statutes.38 The second worry is that the rule seems to delegate law-making
power to administrative agency staff—now described as remote from public view and politically
unaccountable––rather than in the (elected and accountable) legislature.39 Obviously the two critiques
are somewhat inconsistent: Are agencies too political or not political enough to exercise regulatory
power? Either way, of course, one might wish to see them more firmly checked by the judicial branch.
Environmental groups, in contrast, tend to worry that the courts are the institution to worry about
because they lack the agencies’ expertise and sense of mission. Under this view, refusing to defer to
agency decisions may prevent those agencies from implementing statutory protections effectively.

In practice, however, the debate over the Chevron rule may have little effect on the court/agency
relationship. As many scholars have noted, the rule has never prevented courts from overruling
agencies. On the contrary, it is “a principle often honored in the breach.”40 Under the Chevron rule,
deference is called for only when the statute is unclear or silent on the issue in question, which leaves
the court a good deal of discretion in deciding whether a statute is clear. In Weyerhaeuser, both lower
courts cited Chevron in upholding EPA’s interpretation of the statute, but the Supreme Court did not;
Justice Roberts found the statute crystal clear. Thus it may not matter much whether the Chevron
doctrine is rejected. The larger issue is whether courts will give agencies the flexibility to extend
statutory protections to address new environmental risks posed by climate change. If such judicial
deference is not forthcoming, those policies will have to come from Congress––or from state
government, which has its own constitutional authority to protect endangered species.
CONSTITUTIONAL REVIEW
The final area in which courts influence environmental policy is in determining the constitutional limits of
government power to protect the environment. Traditionally, the American federal system has left natural
resource management to state government as a part of the state’s “police power,” its general power to
protect the health, safety, and welfare of the community. The federal Constitution contains no provisions
explicitly empowering the federal government to protect or manage natural resources. However,
beginning in the early twentieth century, two constitutional provisions have been interpreted to give
Congress fairly broad power over many natural resources. The Property Power, found in Article IV of the
US Constitution, gives Congress power “to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations
respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.” This provision gives Congress
authority to manage the extensive federal land holdings (including more than 400 national parks, 560
national wildlife refuges, and nearly 250 million acres of other public lands) and to enact regulations
aimed at protecting that property. The Supreme Court has consistently given that power a very broad
reading, permitting Congress to address threats to those resources even if they originate beyond the
bounds of federal property. For example, in 1976 the Supreme Court upheld the federal government’s
power to protect wild burros and horses “as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands,”
even if they stray onto private property.41

The other power, however, has been more controversial. Article I section eight gives Congress the
power to regulate interstate commerce, which has been interpreted to give Congress authority to
manage and protect “navigable waters” (including lakes, rivers, and their tributaries).42 That may have
once seemed like a fairly limited power, but evolving ecological science challenges those limits. Given
the complex and interconnected nature of hydrological systems—and their connection to the global
climate system––Congress’ power to protect navigable waters threatens to extend its authority over
virtually the whole of industrial society.

Not surprisingly, both the courts and the opponents of federal environmental policy have sought for
some principled limit to this power. The result is a number of Supreme Court cases considering how far
the federal authority over water resources extends. The debate focuses on the CWA, which applies to
“waters of the United States.” But which waters are those? Strictly speaking, the cases addressing this
question are about statutory interpretation rather than constitutional power; that is, they focus on
whether the agencies implementing the CWA have interpreted the term “waters of the United States”
properly. But the Supreme Court has signaled quite clearly that it is looking for a definition of that term
that will limit Congress’s constitutional power over water resources.

The most recent decision in this line of cases is Rapanos v. United States.43 John Rapanos was fined
for filling three wetlands in order to develop them. The wetlands lay several miles from the nearest
navigable river, but each one was connected by either a man-made or natural drain to a river that
eventually emptied into Lake Huron. The EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers share authority for
implementing the CWA, and they concluded that the wetlands were covered by the Act because “there
were hydrological connections between all three sites and corresponding adjacent tributaries of
navigable waters.”44 To Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the opinion for the Court, the agencies’ action
were “a small part of the immense expansion of federal regulation of land use that has occurred under
the Clean Water Act…during the past five Presidential administrations.” The Corps and the EPA have
interpreted their jurisdiction to cover “270-to-300 million acres of swampy lands” as well as “virtually any
parcel of land containing a channel or conduit—whether man-made or natural, broad or narrow,
permanent or ephemeral—through which rainwater or drainage may occasionally or intermittently flow.”
As he correctly noted, “the entire land area of the United States lies in some drainage basin, and an
endless network of visible channels furrows the entire surface, containing water ephemerally wherever
the rain falls.” So “any plot of land containing such a channel may potentially be regulated as a ‘water of
the United States.’”45 However, Scalia’s opinion avoided considering whether Congress’ powers over
water resources could extend so far. Instead, he focused on interpreting the statutory term “waters of the
United States,” which in his view should be read to cover only relatively permanent standing or flowing
surface waters and wetlands with a surface connection to those water bodies. He would thus exclude
intermittent streams, man-made drains, and wetlands without a surface connection to a standing or
flowing water body. The Court thus vacated the lower court’s judgment for the government and
remanded the case for further proceedings.

Scalia’s opinion, however, was joined by only three other justices (Roberts, Alito, and Thomas). Justice
Anthony Kennedy concurred with the result but offered his own rationale. This opinion has since been
treated as the more important one because Kennedy served as the “swing vote” on this issue. (The
liberal Justices would have upheld the agencies’ actions.) Kennedy echoed an earlier ruling by Justice
Stevens, arguing that “waters of the United States” could cover any water or wetland having a
“significant nexus” to waters that are or were navigable in fact or that could reasonably be so made.46
The key point, in his view, was whether the regulated waters actually have an impact on the quality of
navigable waters. He would thus allow the agencies to regulate any wetlands adjacent to navigable
waters (whether or not they have a surface connection), as well as intermittent streams. He believed
that this approach would prevent federal regulation of those categories of waters “that appeared likely,
as a category, to raise constitutional difficulties and federalism concerns.”47

Rapanos’ fractured decision did not end the controversy, however. Justice Roberts’ concurrence noted
that “[a]gencies delegated rulemaking authority under a statute such as the Clean Water Act are
afforded generous leeway by the courts in interpreting the statute they are entrusted to administer”
(citing Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.).48 He thus urged those
agencies to define the term “waters of the United States” through the rulemaking process. The agencies
accordingly set out on a 9-year effort that finally, in 2015, resulted in a formal rule defining “waters of the
United States” (known as the WOTUS rule).49 That rule largely followed Kennedy’s guidance, including
water bodies with a significant hydrological connection to navigable waters. However, the rule was
repealed by the Trump administration, which issued a final rule reinstating the former (pre-2015)
regulatory definition in October 2019. That was not the end of the story, however. The Trump
administration also began a new rulemaking process that would more narrowly define “waters of the
United States”—excluding many wetlands, ephemeral streams, and man-made water bodies. It remains
to be seen whether that definition will survive judicial review or the next Presidential administration.

This debate has clearly generated intense partisan conflict, with liberals and conservatives both
assuming that a decision limiting federal authority will result in fewer or weaker protections for water
resources. But supporting state authority over environmental management doesn’t necessarily
undermine environmental protection. Consider, for example, United Haulers Assn., Inc. v. Oneida-
Herkimer Solid Waste Mgmt. Authority.50 This case arose over a waste management plan enacted by
Oneida and Herkimer counties. The plan required that all solid waste generated in the counties had to
be delivered to the Solid Waste Management Authority, a public agency that provided recycling services
but also charged higher fees than other (private) waste processing facilities. United Haulers Association
argued that the plan interfered with interstate commerce, invoking the “dormant Commerce Clause”
doctrine. Under this long-standing doctrine, state (and local) governments are prohibited from
unreasonably interfering with interstate commerce even if they are not violating any federal statute.

The counties’ plan clearly did have some impact on interstate commerce, since it prevented people from
contracting with private waste disposal companies that would take their waste out of state. One could
argue that the counties were essentially “hoarding” their waste for the benefit of the Solid Waste
Management Authority. But the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Roberts, upheld the plan.
Disposing of trash, he noted, has long been a traditional function of local government. The counties, he
concluded, treated both in-state and out-of-state waste management companies the same, since they
prevented residents from contracting with both in-state and out-of-state companies. The critical point
was that, although the ordinances did have some impact on interstate commerce, that impact was
outweighed by the benefits they confer on the county residents.51

The decision was a victory and possible bellwether for state and local environmental regulations. Such
regulations often interfere with interstate commerce to some extent. For example, some states may
attempt to combat climate change by restricting electric companies from contracting with out-of-state
coal-fired power companies.52 The United Haulers Ass’n decision suggests that the Court may look
favorably on such policies, as long as they are aimed at environmental management and not simply
protecting local industry from competition.

It is worth noting, however, that the case did not result in the standard conservative/liberal split. The
dissenters were Justices Alito, Kennedy, and Stevens (who was ordinarily considered a liberal jurist).
Justices Scalia and Thomas concurred in the judgment because they reject the “dormant Commerce
Clause” doctrine altogether. That is, they believe state and local laws should not be struck down unless
they conflict with a federal statute. The dissenters, in contrast, would strike down the ordinances on the
ground that they unjustifiably discriminated against interstate commerce (even though no federal law
explicitly prohibits such discrimination). This decision demonstrates the difficulty of predicting how the
Supreme Court will rule on a given environmental policy. Federal judges may be less concerned with the
goal of the policy than in which level of government is enacting the policy, how it was enacted, or the
means it uses to achieve its goal.

On one constitutional issue, however, the conservative and liberal Justices usually do find themselves at
odds: How far may any government, state or federal, restrict property owners’ rights to develop their
land? The federal Constitution prohibits the government from taking anyone’s property “without just
compensation.”53 This provision may come into play when a government enacts a regulation on private
property that ends up diminishing its economic value. That was the claim in Lucas v S. Carolina Coastal
Council,54 a 1992 Supreme Court decision concerning a state law prohibiting David Lucas from erecting
a permanent dwelling on two vacant lots on a barrier island near Charleston. The statute, aimed at
protecting fragile coastal areas, was enacted after Lucas bought the property; it effectively ended a
residential development project he was planning. Lucas sued, arguing that the regulation effectively
“took” his property by prohibiting all reasonable economic use of the land. The state trial court agreed
with Lucas, but the state Supreme Court reversed, holding that no compensation was required. The US
Supreme Court, in turn, reversed the state supreme court.

The South Carolina Supreme Court had followed an earlier US Supreme Court decision, Keystone
Bituminous Coal Ass’n v. DeBenedictis,55 which held that when a regulation diminishes the value of
someone’s property, the court should consider a variety of factors in deciding whether the regulation
constitutes a compensable “regulatory taking.” Those factors include (1) the economic impact of the
regulation; (2) the regulation’s interference with investment-backed expectations; (3) the character of the
government action (that is, whether there is a physical invasion of property); and (4) nature of the
State’s interest in the regulation. In the Lucas case, the South Carolina court weighed heavily the fact
that the state was trying to protect a valuable natural asset––its beaches—in concluding that the
regulation was a legitimate exercise of the state’s traditional power to protect natural resources, and not
a “taking.”56 Justice Scalia’s opinion, however, took a different approach.

Scalia acknowledged that the state did have the power to protect the coastal area by prohibiting its
development. However, he found it significant that the regulation in this case denied Lucas all
economically beneficial or productive use of land. The situation would be different, he argued, if the
regulation merely prohibited the owner from creating a public nuisance (by building a factory in a
residential area, for example). Landowners do not have the right to create a nuisance. But here, the
intended use of the land was authorized by law before the statute suddenly changed its status.57 In this
situation, where a regulation destroys all economic value of the land, the court should not balance the
various factors listed in the Keystone decision. Instead, it should treat the regulation as though the
government had actually taken the property away from the owner altogether, and order compensation.

Justice Blackmun, dissenting, complained that this new rule “launches a missile to kill a mouse.”58 He
and many others worried that the decision favored private property owners, and would invite them to
challenge any environmental or other health and safety regulations that impacted their development
projects as a “regulatory takings.” The cost of compensating all such properties owners could doom
environmental protection. (South Carolina, for example, eventually had to settle with Lucas, buying his
property and then selling it to another developer to recoup the cost.59)
The impact of the Lucas decision on government regulation, however, has not been quite so dramatic. A
2016 empirical study examining over 2000 cases decided between 1979 and 2012 concluded that
regulatory takings claims fail more often than they succeed because courts seldom find that a regulation
has destroyed all economic use of property; on the contrary, they “almost always defer to the regulatory
decisions made by government officials.”60 In fact, claims that regulation completely destroyed the
property’s economic value succeeded more often before the Lucas decision (18 out of 34 cases) than
after (8 out of 36 cases).61 Moreover, a recent Supreme Court decision62 has made it even more difficult
for landowners to claim that a regulation has destroyed all economic value of their property.63
Nevertheless, litigating these claims may impose a burden, especially on local governments.

The same concern, and qualification, applies to the extension of a “regulatory takings” regime to
international trade. The North American Free Trade Agreement was one of several trade agreements
that provided for compensation when a nation imposes environmental regulations that “indirectly
expropriate” the property of a foreign investor by reducing its investment value.64 Legal commentators
have noted that international arbitrators tend to draw on American regulatory takings doctrine in
resolving disputes under such provisions. For example, Transcanada Corps sued the US government in
2016 under the NAFTA provision, seeking $15 billion in compensation for the Obama administration’s
rejection of a permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The lawsuit was rendered moot when the Trump
administration granted the permit in 2017, but the threat of such lawsuits hovers over attempts to
address climate change through aggressive regulation.65 Few governments would welcome the
prospect of compensating investors for their investments in the fossil fuel infrastructure. Thus far,
however, that prospect seems fairly remote. International tribunals usually expect investors to take the
risk of regulation into account in making their investments, and the threat of greenhouse gas regulation
is easily foreseeable at this point.66
CONCLUSION
In sum, the federal courts’ chief role in environmental policy has been to slow down or moderate
dramatic policy shifts, in either a more liberal or more conservative direction. That role is unlikely to
change in the coming years. The president does, of course, have some influence on the judiciary by
making appointments to the federal bench (which must be confirmed by the Senate). However, even
two-term presidents are usually unable to make a substantial change to the partisan balance of the
judiciary. There are 860 federal judgeships, and since President Clinton, each president has appointed
between 300 and 400 judges (Clinton: 387; Bush: 340; Obama: 334).67

Presidents cannot fill seats until they become available, and federal judges often stay on the bench until
a president of their own party is in power. As a result, most appointments merely replace one judge with
another of the same party. For example, as of September 2020, Trump had 218 judges appointed and
confirmed (and one of those has left the bench), with 59 additional vacancies.68 He primarily replaced
Republican-appointed judges.69 His appointments have changed the partisan balance on some
appellate circuits, but overall the federal appeals courts are still fairly balanced between Democratic-
and Republican-appointed judges.

So far, President Trump has had the opportunity to appoint three Supreme Court Justices. One might
expect these appointments to shift constitutional and other important areas of doctrine in a more
conservative direction—but it is far from clear what that shift would mean for environmental regulation.
As mentioned above in the discussion of United Haulers Assn., Inc. v. Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste
Mgmt. Authority, it’s hard to predict how a liberal or conservative judicial philosophy will affect a given
environmental dispute. Some conservatives, for example, support state and local protections against
“dormant commerce clause” claims. Others may subject regulations repealing environmental protection
to less deferential scrutiny, thus impeding deregulatory efforts. Moreover, judicial philosophies are not
static over time, and neither are partisan principles. A judge who seems like a reliable conservative vote
when appointed might end up joining the liberal wing of the court—as did Justices Earl Warren
(appointed by President Eisenhower), Harry Blackmun (appointed by President Nixon), John Paul
Stevens (appointed by President Ford), and David Souter (appointed by the first President Bush).

This is not to suggest that it’s unimportant who is appointed to the federal bench. As discussed above, if
congressional gridlock continues, federal courts may be asked to play an expanding role in updating
policies to deal with new challenges like climate change. The courts may be reluctant to take up that
invitation, of course. But if neither Congress, federal agencies, nor federal courts are willing to address
pressing environmental policies, state governments will become even more important sources of
environmental policy––which will give state judiciaries an expanded role in environmental policy. State
courts can entertain suits based on state legislation, common law, and state and federal constitutional
law. Similarly, international tribunals may become more important to policymaking as international trade
and environmental law grows more extensive.

Finally, it is worth noting that courts also have the potential to shape political discourse. Arguments
made in court often find their way into the news media, giving environmental advocates a chance to
make their voices heard. Moreover, as a forum dedicated to reason and law, courts can require other
branches of government to support their actions with scientific evidence and reasoned argument. And
perhaps most importantly, as one of the most trusted government institutions, the courts can lend
legitimacy to environmental policy by articulating the rationale for government protection of natural
resources. In an era of partisan polarization, overheated rhetoric, and fake news, American courts can
serve as an outpost of sensible, fact-based policy discussion.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Environmental Law Institute (www.eli.org) This organization’s website provides expert,

nonpartisan research and education on current issues of environmental law.

Legal Planet (www.legal-planet.org) This blog is a collaboration between faculty at UC Berkeley

School of Law and UCLA School of Law, providing insight and analysis on energy and
environmental law and policy.

Natural Resources Defense Council (www.nrdc.org) The NRDC site provides expert analysis of
legal issues and reports relevant to ongoing policy debates.

NexisUni and Westlaw (www.nexisuni.com; www.westlaw.com) These commercial websites

provide access to federal, state, and international laws, judicial opinions, legal scholarship, and
other legal materials.

Regulations.gov (www.regulations.gov) This website is a portal to all federal regulations open for
comments from the public.

US Environmental Protection Agency (www.epa.gov/laws-regulations) This section of the

agency’s website provides links to environmental laws and information about current and pending
regulations.
NOTES
1. I would like to thank John C. Dernbach, a distinguished professor of law at Widener University and an
environmental lawyer, for his assistance on the chapter.

2. Missouri v. Illinois, 200 U.S. 496 (1906); Robert Percival, “The Clean Water Act and the Demise of the
Federal Common Law of Interstate Nuisance,” Alabama Law Review 55 (2004): 717–74.

3. “Nuisance” is a common law cause of action in which the complainant charges that the defendant
used his/her/their property in an unreasonable way, causing inconvenience or damage to the
complainant (for example, by emitting noxious odors or fouling a water source).

4. Ohio v. Wyandotte Chemicals Corp., 401 U.S. 493 (1971).

5. 5 U.S.C. Secs. 500–596.

6. 42 U.S.C. §7401 et seq. (1970).

7. 549 U.S. 497 (2007).

8. Notice of denial of petition, Control of Emissions From New Highway Vehicles and Engines, 68 FR
52922, September 8, 2003, at 52928.

9. 549 U.S. 581–519, quoting George v. Tennessee Copper Co., 206 U.S. 230, 237 (1907).

10. 549 U.S. 528–529, quoting Sec. 7602(g) of the CAA (Stevens’ emphasis.)

11. Ibid., 530.

12. Ibid., 534, citing APA, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 7607(d) (9) (A).

13. Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of
the Clean Air Act; Final Rule, 74 Fed Reg. 66496 (December 15, 2009).

14. Paul v. United States, 589 U.S. ___ (2019) (statement by Kavanaugh).

15. Juliana v. US, Case No. 6:15-cv-01517-TC, Opinion and Order (ED Oregon November 10, 2016).

16. Ibid., 2.

17. Juliana v. United States, Docket No. 6:15-cv-01517-AA (January 17, 2020). As of this writing, the
plaintiffs are petitioning for review of the dismissal by the full Ninth Circuit panel.

18. Round-Up: Trump Era Agency Policy in the Courts (Institute for Policy Integrity),
https://policyintegrity.org/deregulation-roundup (accessed March 31, 2020).

19. Clean Water Action et al. v. EPA et al., No. 18-60079, 2019 U.S. App. LEXIS 26001 (5th Cir. August
28, 2019).

20. Meritor, Inc. v. EPA 966 F.3rd 864 (D.C. 2020).

21. Connor Raso, Trump’s Deregulatory Efforts Keep Losing in the Court—And the Losses Could Make
it Harder for Future Administrations to Deregulate (Washington, DC: Brooking Institution, 2018),
https://www.brookings.edu/research/trumps-deregulatory-efforts-keep-losing-in-court-and-the-losses-
could-make-it-harder-for-future-administrations-to-deregulate/ (accessed December 10, 2019).
22. 277 F. Supp. 3d 1106 (N.D. Cal. 2017), appeal dismissed, 2018 WL 2735410 (9th Cir. March 15,
2018).

23. Wyoming v. DOI, 366 F.Supp. 3rd 1284 (D.Wyo. 2018).

24. Ibid., 1112.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 1123.

27. Wyoming et al v. DOI, 366 F.Supp.3rd, 1292.

28. Western Watersheds Project v. Zinke, 441 F.Supp.3rd 1042 (D. Idaho 2020).

29. 139 S.Ct. 361 (2018).

30. 16 U.S.C. secs. 1531 et seq.

31. 16 U.S.C. sec. 1532(5) (A).

32. 139 S.Ct., 365–366.

33. Ibid., 368.

34. Ibid., 369. The USFWS subsequently settled the case by withdrawing the critical habitat designation
for the unit in question. Laura Blies, “Frog Case Settled with No Decision on Habitat” (July 18, 2019),
Wildlife.Org (https://wildlife.org/frog-case-settled-with-no-decision-on-habitat-definition/ (accessed April
1, 2020).

35. Ibid., 372.

36. 467 U.S. 837 (1984).

37. Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, 834 F.3d 1142, 1149 (10th Cir 2016) (Gorsuch, J., concurring).

38. 5 U.S.C. sec. 706; Gutierrez-Brizuela, 1151.

39. Similar concerns animate Justice Gorsuch’s warnings concerning Congress’ delegation of
rulemaking authority to the executive branch. See Gundy v. U.S., 588 U.S. ___ (2019) (J. Gorsuch,
dissenting).

40. Michael Herz, “Chevron is Dead; Long Live Chevron,” Columbia Law Review 115 (November 2015):
1867–909.

41. Kleppe v. New Mexico, 426 U.S. 529 (1976).

42. Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824).

43. 547 U.S. 715 (2006).

44. Ibid., 730.

45. Ibid., 722.

46. Ibid., 759.

47. Ibid., 776.

48. Ibid., 758.

49. Definition of “Waters of the United States,” 80 Federal Register 37054 (June 29, 2015).

50. 550 U.S. 330 (2007).

51. Ibid., 334.

52. North Dakota v. Heydinger, 825 F.3d 912 (8th Cir. 2016).

53. U.S. Constitution, Amendments 5 and 14.

54. 505 U.S. 1003 (1992).

55. 480 U.S. 470 (1987).

56. Lucas v. S.C. Coastal Council, 304 S.C. 376 (S.C. 1991), 379.

57. 505 U.S. 1027.

58. Ibid., 1036.

59. William Fischel, Regulatory Takings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 61.

60. James Krier and Stewart Sterk, “An Empirical Study of Implicit Takings,” Wm. & Mary Law Review
58 (October 2016): 35–95.

61. Ibid., 60.

62. Murr v. Wisconsin, 137 S. Ct. 1933 (2017).

63. Stewart Sterk, “Dueling Denominators and the Demise of Lucas,” Arizona Law Review 60 (2018):
67–90.

64. North American Free Trade Agreement, December 17, 1992, 32 I.L.M. 289 (chs. 1–9), 32 I.L.M. 605
(chs. 10–22), at Article 1110.

65. Hao Zhu, “Dynamically Interpreting Property in International Regulatory Takings Regimes,” Columbia
Journal of Law and Social Problems 51 (Fall 2017): 129–75.

66. Ibid., 173–4. On the environmental implications of the trade agreement replacing NAFTA, see Scott
Vaughan, “USMCA versus NAFTA on the Environment,” International Institute for Sustainable
Development, https://www.iisd.org/blog/usmca-nafta-environment (accessed April 1, 2020).

67. U.S. Courts Administration website, https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/authorized-

judgeships (accessed December 10, 2019).

68. Ballotpedia, https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_judicial_appointments_by_president (accessed

December 10, 2019).

69. Russell Wheeler, Judicial Appointments in Trump’s First Three Years: Myths and Realities
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2020),
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/01/28/judicial-appointments-in-trumps-first-three-years-
myths-and-realities/ (accessed April 1, 2020).
Descriptions of Images and Figures
Back to Figure

The flowchart is a depiction of the US judicial system. They are of a dual nature. The US Supreme Court
is split into two parts: State courts and Federal system. Under the State courts we have the State
supreme courts, Intermediate court of appeals, and the County or state trials courts. Similarly, under the
Federal system we find the Circuit court of appeals and the Federal district courts.
7 THE ENVIRONMENTAL
PROTECTION AGENCY
—Richard N. L. Andrews
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the lead US agency
responsible for protecting the environment from air and water
pollution and for protecting people from the health hazards of
pollution and toxic chemicals in the environment. Created in 1970,
just a few months after the first Earth Day and before most of today’s
major pollution control laws were enacted, it regulates air pollution
from cars and smokestacks, water pollution from urban sewers and
industrial outfalls, hazardous wastes and municipal landfills, drinking
water contaminants, and pesticides and toxic chemicals; and under
President Obama, it also began to regulate carbon emissions from
motor vehicles as well as power plants and other industries that
contribute to global climate change. Environmental and public health
advocates see it as the government’s champion for those widely
shared values. Some critics, however, accuse it of imposing
excessive regulatory burdens and unjustified costs on businesses,
property owners, and state and local governments; and others
accuse it at least of not using the most economically efficient and
effective policy tools to achieve its goals.

The EPA itself pioneered the development of innovative policy tools

to try to reduce environmental risks in the most cost-effective ways.
Examples include “market-oriented” incentives, such as tradable
emission allowances; information disclosure requirements, such as
the Toxics Release Inventory which requires annual reporting by
most industries of quantities of toxic chemicals released to the
environment; and elaborate procedures for risk assessment. The
EPA also provides subsidized loans for drinking water and
wastewater treatment facilities, conducts research to reduce
pollution, and provides technical assistance and enforcement
cooperation to support state environmental protection programs (see
also Chapter 2 on state environmental policymaking).

The EPA can use only the policy tools that Congress has authorized,
however, and the primary tools Congress authorized for it are
regulations, which inherently place restrictions and costs on
influential businesses and state and local governments. This chapter
discusses how the EPA makes decisions in the face of constant
pressures—from advocates of environmental protection and the
news media, from businesses, and from the president, members of
Congress, state and local officials, and the courts—and in particular,
how its decision-making processes are being altered by the Trump
administration.
BACKGROUND1
The EPA was created in 1970 by President Richard Nixon, in the
midst of a widespread public outcry for the federal government to “do
something” about pollution.2 It was created not by an act of
Congress but through a presidential reorganization plan that pulled
together a number of separate programs into a single new agency.
Air pollution and waste management programs were transferred from
the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, water pollution
programs from the Department of the Interior, pesticide programs
from the Department of Agriculture, and some radiation protection
programs from the Atomic Energy Commission.

Beginning in 1970, Congress passed a series of far-reaching new

statutes to address pollution and other environmental health
hazards, and assigned them to the EPA to carry out. These included
the Clean Air Act, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the Safe
Drinking Water Act, and laws regulating pesticides, toxic substances,
and solid and hazardous wastes (see Chapter 1 and Appendix 1).
Since the EPA itself was created only by a presidential
reorganization plan rather than by an act of Congress, however, it
functions largely as an umbrella organization managing separate
programs to implement each of these laws, plus crosscutting units
for enforcement, legal counsel, research and development, and
more recently information and financial management. Its
administrator has only limited authority to integrate, coordinate, or
set priorities among its separate program units except through its
annual budget requests. And Congress often does not grant its
requests: in recent years, a gridlocked Congress often has passed
only continuing resolutions to maintain specified levels of existing
funding, not new appropriations bills—let alone new environmental
laws.

Federal administrative agencies such as the EPA can act only under
the authority of laws passed by Congress (“statutes”). In approving a
new statute, Congress authorizes the EPA to implement and enforce
the statute’s requirements, but also limits the ways in which the
agency may do so, either specifically or simply by not authorizing
other options. Appropriations legislation also determines how much
money the agency can spend each year to implement and enforce
each of its statutes. A regulation, in contrast, is a standard or rule
written by the agency to interpret a statute, apply it in particular
situations, and enforce it.

The authority to issue regulations was one of the main tools

Congress gave the EPA to carry out these laws. In short, Congress
authorizes the EPA to issue regulations to solve an environmental
problem, and the EPA must then write the details of the regulations
to do so: a process that is often challenging, contentious, and
politicized by those who are affected. If someone challenges a
regulation, decisions by the courts can either confirm or overrule the
agency’s interpretation. Statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions
all have the force of law.

In addition, Congress authorized the EPA to provide technical and

compliance assistance to state governments; to provide grants to
state and local governments to implement federal air and water
quality standards, monitor public water supplies, and clean up
hazardous wastes; and to provide low-interest loans to local
governments to build new drinking water and wastewater treatment
facilities. Many of these tools thus rely heavily on environmental
federalism, discussed in Chapter 2.3 In Fiscal Year 2019, the EPA
had a budget of $8.8 billion, just two-tenths of 1 percent of the
overall federal budget; but only a small fraction of this was used to
pay its fourteen thousand staff members, while nearly half was spent
on grants and assistance agreements to state and tribal
governments.4

To reduce air pollution, for instance, Congress directed the EPA to

set National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) specifying how
clean the air around us must be in order to protect public health; and
it required states to produce state implementation plans (SIPs) for
achieving these standards. The law also required all new stationary
sources of air pollution (such as factories and power plants) to obtain
EPA permits and to use the “best available control technology” to
minimize their emissions. Important amendments in 1990 set
drastically reduced limits on total emissions of sulfur from all large
power plants, and allowed polluters to buy and sell their shares of
that total—their “emission allowances”—so that companies that do
better than the requirements could sell their allowances to
companies that found it cheaper to buy more allowances and keep
polluting while still achieving the specified overall level. This proved
to be one of the most dramatically successful environmental policy
innovations. The law also ordered the EPA to set tailpipe emission
standards for cars and trucks that all manufacturers must meet on
average across the “fleet” of new vehicles they sell each year.

The Federal Water Pollution Control Act authorized the EPA to

regulate all “point sources” of water pollution (such as factory outfalls
and municipal wastewater treatment plants), not just new sources as
in the case of air pollution. All point sources of water pollution must
get permits from the EPA (or in practice, from the state agency
administering the EPA permit program), and must use the “best
available technology” to purify their discharges. The EPA also
provides low-interest loans to fund construction of new publicly
owned wastewater treatment plants. However, the EPA was not
authorized to regulate pollution from “nonpoint” sources such as farm
runoff—due to the influence of the farm lobby—and as municipal and
industrial sources have been reduced, these nonpoint sources have
thus become some of the main remaining sources of water pollution
today (see Chapter 1). All treatment, storage, and disposal facilities
for hazardous wastes also must have EPA permits, as must
municipal landfills and incinerators; and all shipments of hazardous
wastes must be documented from the factory where they were
generated as waste to their ultimate disposal in a permitted facility.

Each of these statutes addressed a particular environmental

problem, but many of them affected the same industries, often with
conflicting consequences. Many electric utilities complied with air
pollution regulations in the 1970s, for instance, by building taller
smokestacks to disperse their pollutants so that they would reduce
health hazards immediately downwind; but this simply caused the
pollutants to rain out further away as acid rain, damaging forests and
fisheries.5 More recently, the EPA tightened regulations on sulfur
dioxide (SO2) and mercury emissions to protect public health, and to
comply, electric utilities put expensive “wet scrubbers” on their stacks
to capture these pollutants before they were released into the air; but
these materials then were piped into coal ash ponds, some of which
later leaked and caused serious water pollution.6 Similarly, sewage
treatment improves water quality by removing contaminants from
wastewater, but these materials then must themselves be managed,
often by landfilling, incineration, or spraying them on farmlands
where they may cause new hazards.

In an ideal world, the EPA would design an integrated set of policy

incentives to promote pollution prevention: minimizing the use of
polluting materials and energy all the way from the initial extraction
of resources through production, consumer use, reuse and recycling,
and eventual disposal. In practice, however, the EPA must use
limited and sometimes expensive regulatory tools aimed at separate
problems—such as technology-based standards for air and water
pollution—to try to solve complex environmental problems whose
outcomes are often environmentally interconnected. In a few cases
Congress has allowed the EPA to adopt more flexible tools to reduce
pollutants, such as cap-and-trade requirements, but these options
are available only for the specific uses for which Congress has
approved them, such as limiting sulfur emissions from power plants.

In writing its regulations, the EPA must satisfy a burden of proof to

show that its regulations are within its statutory authority and are
justified by a written record of substantial evidence: that is, that they
are not arbitrary or “capricious.” Throughout its history the EPA has
met this burden of proof through two primary sources of evidence:
scientific evidence that the proposed regulations accurately address
environmental problems and their risks in appropriate ways, and
economic evidence that their benefits to society are greater than
their costs.

For example, in addition to air and water quality, the EPA regulates
individual substances that have environmental health risks, such as
pesticides, drinking water contaminants, and toxic chemicals used in
manufacturing. Before doing so, it conducts an elaborate process of
“risk assessment” to determine how serious a hazard a substance is
and how many people might be exposed to it, and it then proposes a
regulation that balances that risk against the economic benefits and
costs of restricting it.

Finally, the EPA and the laws it administers have relied on a

philosophy of “environmental federalism,” under which the federal
government sets minimum standards and permit requirements—
especially for air quality and for water and waste management
facilities—but allows the states to implement and enforce them, and
to set tougher standards if they wish to, so long as they do not
violate federal minimum standards or interfere with the ability of
downwind or downstream states to meet the federal standards as
well. With a few exceptions, the EPA itself remains the primary
regulator for most products sold in interstate commerce, such as
cars and trucks, pesticides, and other toxic chemicals.

The EPA and the laws it administers were created with broad
bipartisan support, and the agency itself and most of its laws were
even approved by Republican presidents. Supporters of the agency
argue that the EPA has made valuable and cost-effective
contributions, given the tools, funds, and limitations Congress has
given it, toward cleaning up air and water pollution and hazardous
wastes and preventing toxic chemicals from endangering public
health and the environment.7 Critics argue, however, that its
regulations are burdensome to the industries, small businesses, and
state and local governments that must comply with them, even
though most have been documented as having greater overall
benefits to society than their costs. Critics also charge that these
regulations hurt jobs and profits; that the EPA sometimes fails to do
its job effectively (for example, when it failed to protect drinking water
in Flint, Michigan, from lead contamination); and that the agency
should therefore be reined in or even abolished.8
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: A NEW
ERA?
Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, after a
campaign in which he promised to get rid of “burdensome”
environmental regulations—especially those addressing climate
change—and to drastically shrink or even abolish the EPA. He
immediately rescinded all of President Obama’s presidential
directives on climate change, and ordered the EPA to review and
rescind the Clean Power Plan (CPP), greenhouse gas (GHG)
emission standards for cars and trucks, and other major EPA
regulations. He also issued an executive order requiring that the
agency must rescind at least two existing regulations before
approving any new one, and that it should focus only on reducing
compliance costs and disregard the benefits of regulations. And he
appointed as EPA’s senior administrators a series of former lobbyists
for fossil fuel and other industries and former staff members to long-
time congressional critics of the agency.

In his initial budget blueprint, President Trump proposed narrowing

the EPA’s scope to focus on its “core legal requirements,” leaving
many of its responsibilities to the states and “easing the burden of
unnecessary regulations that impose significant costs on workers
and consumers without justifiable environmental benefits.” He
proposed to cut the EPA’s budget and staff by more than 30 percent
(though Congress repeatedly declined to do so): under his proposal,
support would continue for locally popular drinking water and
wastewater treatment grants programs, but the agency’s research
funds would be cut by nearly half, its enforcement budget by nearly a
quarter, and its hazardous waste cleanup funds by 30 percent.
Trump also proposed eliminating funds for the EPA’s climate change
programs, its cleanup programs for major multistate resources such
as the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay, and more than 50 other
programs. Despite his verbal support for the states and for
“environmental federalism,” moreover, his budget proposed leaving
many more responsibilities to the states while cutting the EPA’s
grants that support them by 44 percent.9

In short, the election of President Trump brought into office an

administration whose appointees sought to radically redirect the
agency’s activities: to weaken or eliminate many of its regulations, to
reduce its personnel and budget, to diminish its enforcement efforts,
and even to alter the scientific and economic criteria used to justify
its regulations. According to the New York Times, by December 2019
the Trump administration had either completed or initiated rollbacks
of 95 environmental rules, 35 of them involving the EPA; seven of
these were subsequently reinstated following legal challenges.10 The
agency’s future effectiveness will be profoundly influenced by
whether or not these initiatives endure and are upheld by the courts.

The following examples illustrate both the processes by which the

EPA has historically reached its decisions, and some of the most
significant changes initiated by the Trump administration.
Politics and “Grandfathering”: Air Pollution
From Electric Power Plants
Coal-fired power plants are one of the most significant sources of air
pollution, including particularly SO2, nitrogen oxides (NOx),
particulates, and mercury (as well as GHGs—discussed later). As of
2008, the United States had 1,466 coal-fired generating units, most
of them built before 1990; 58 percent of them were built even before
the landmark Clean Air Act requirements of 1970. By 2019 more
than a third of these facilities had been retired, mainly due to
declining demand growth and the falling cost of natural gas as an
alternative and more efficient fuel, but others continued to operate
even after more than 40 years.11

When Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, it directed the
EPA to set air pollution emission standards for all new facilities: each
must meet “new source performance standards,” based on “the best
emission reduction technology that had been adequately
demonstrated, taking into account its cost.” However, it exempted
existing power plants so long as they were not modified: retrofitting
existing plants would have been far more expensive, and Congress
therefore preferred to assume that these old sources would gradually
be phased out anyway. If an existing facility underwent “any”
physical change or change in method of operation that would
increase emissions, however, it would have to undergo review as a
new source (“New Source Review,” or NSR) and become subject to
the new source standards.12

The EPA faced the question, therefore, of how to interpret this

mandate. Did Congress really intend it to require costly new pollution
controls for literally “any” physical or operational change in an
existing facility? Or did Congress really mean to leave existing
facilities alone so long as changes to them did not cause significant
increases in air pollution? The EPA exempted “routine maintenance,
repair, and replacements,” as well as modifications that added only
minimal amounts of pollutants. But once new power plants were
more strictly controlled than existing ones, the utilities had a greater
incentive to keep the old plants operating longer, and also to
upgrade them as much as they could without triggering the NSR
process.13 The EPA tolerated these practices during the 1980s,
under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, but
President Bill Clinton’s EPA administrator, Carol Browner, began an
aggressive investigation into evasion of the NSR requirements by old
coal-fired power plants and filed suit against thirteen electric utilities
for violations at fifty-one plants in thirteen states.14 The utilities
fought back, arguing that the EPA was now trying to enforce a more
restrictive definition of “routine maintenance” than in the past; and
they also spent heavily to support George W. Bush’s successful
presidential campaign over Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore.

Once Bush was elected, the utilities lobbied vigorously to loosen the
NSR rules, and in 2003, Bush’s EPA officials proposed a new rule
that redefined “routine maintenance” as any upgrades that did not
cost more than 20 percent of the plant’s value—a huge loophole—
and announced a weaker enforcement policy, dropping some
seventy-five NSR enforcement investigations.15 Environmental and
public health groups objected strenuously, and fourteen states sued
to block the rule changes. In 2003, a court ruled that one of the
utilities had indeed violated the NSR rules eleven times at one of its
plants; and in 2005 and 2006, the US Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia rejected the Bush EPA’s rule changes, holding
that when Congress had originally applied NSR to “any” physical or
operational changes that would increase pollution, it did indeed
mean “any,” not just those costing more than 20 percent of the
facility’s value.16

In the closing months of the Bush administration, his EPA officials

tried once more to weaken NSR by substituting more discretionary
(and thus less enforceable) criteria for review. Once President
Obama took office, however, an environmental advocacy group
immediately petitioned the new EPA administrator to reverse this
change, and she did. After a decade and a half of litigation and a
reaffirmation of support for NSR by a new president, the EPA
ultimately took enforcement actions against some 45 percent of the
country’s electricity generating units, leading to 22 major settlements
covering 263 units.17

The issue did not end there, however. The Trump administration
issued new regulations promising that the EPA would no longer
review the accuracy of industries’ documentation of NSR decisions,
narrowing what counts as a “source,” and proposing to require NSR
only if a proposed modification would cause an increase both in total
annual emissions and in the hourly rate of emissions: that is, it would
not require NSR if an old plant were modified to run at the same
emissions rate but for many more hours per day, causing an
increase in total annual emissions. It also made a series of
piecemeal changes in policies and definitions through “guidance
documents” that had the effects of weakening the NSR requirements
without formally issuing new regulations, thus making it more difficult
for environmental advocacy groups to document their impact and
bring lawsuits to challenge them.18

What lessons does this case offer about how the EPA makes
decisions? First, the issues involved are complicated, and subject to
political influence on the technical details even when the plain
language of the law appears to be clear and the science persuasive.
Old coal-fired power plants clearly contribute to air pollution–related
illness and mortality, but upgrading them to the emissions standards
of new facilities would be a major expense: a political as well as
economic issue in regions such as the Midwest and the South,
where manufacturing is in decline yet electoral influence is high.

Second, the EPA itself is rarely the final decision-maker. Almost any
significant EPA decision will be challenged in lawsuits, either by the
regulated businesses or by environmental advocacy groups or both.
The courts thus play an essential role in EPA decision-making, often
supporting protective interpretations of the environmental laws, but
not always (see also Chapter 6 on environmental policy in the
courts).
Finally, the EPA’s decisions rarely remain settled. Its decisions
change economic outcomes for businesses that are regulated, thus
creating ongoing incentives for companies to challenge regulations
rather than comply. These challenges include not only petitions and
lawsuits but also attempts to reverse EPA policies by congressional
legislation or budget provisions and by electing presidents with
different philosophies.
Science and Politics: Particulate Matter as an
Air Pollutant
EPA’s use of science to justify its decisions also is vulnerable to
attempts to manipulate and politicize it by those affected by the
outcome. Ever since its creation the EPA has been directed to set
National Ambient Air Quality Standards for airborne particles and to
update these standards every 5 years. Airborne particulates include
particles of acids, organic chemicals, metals, and soot as well as
dust, pollen, mold, and soil. From 1970 to 1987 the agency set
standards only for “total suspended particulates,” but as new
scientific studies showed that small particles had the greatest health
risks, in 1987 it set standards specifically for particles less than 10
microns in size (“PM10”), including both a maximum annual average
(50 micrograms per cubic meter of air, or µg/m3) and a 24-hour limit
of 150 µg/m3. By 1997 further research showed that the most
serious health risks were associated with even smaller particles that
could be inhaled deeper into the lungs, and so the EPA set new
annual and 24-hour standards for particles less than 2.5 microns in
size (“PM2.5”). The 1997 standards were updated in 2006 (from 65
µg/m3 over 24 hours and 15 µg/m3 averaged over a year, to 35 and
15), and again in 2012 to 35 and 12.19 The next mandatory review
was due in 2017.

PM2.5 particles are extraordinarily small—less than 1/30 the width of

a hair—and originate from many sources, from fires and automobile
exhaust to industrial chemical reactions in the atmosphere. If not
controlled, they can cause premature deaths in people with heart or
lung disease, asthma attacks, decreased lung function and other
respiratory symptoms, as well as atmospheric haze and acid rain.
The smaller the particles and the tighter the standards, however, the
more costly and widespread the standards’ impact, and so the more
politically and economically controversial they become. As the
scientific evidence justifying tighter and tighter standards became
more compelling, therefore, the affected industries increasingly
attacked not just the proposed regulations but also the scientific
evidence and review processes that led to them.

The EPA’s review process normally includes a comprehensive

review of the scientific literature across all relevant fields of research,
by EPA professionals in cooperation with respected independent
scientific researchers, with particular attention to new findings since
the previous review. The staff then drafts proposed findings and
policy recommendations based on their judgment of the overall
“weight of the evidence” of the pollutant’s health effects, and of the
effectiveness of the standard in protecting against them. These staff
recommendations then are reviewed in detail by the agency’s Clean
Air Science Advisory Committee (CASAC)—a chartered committee
of respected environmental science experts from outside the agency
—and particularly by its Particulate Matter Review Panel (PMRP), a
panel of 20 experts most knowledgeable about the relevant science.
CASAC and the PM panel include both academic and industrial
scientists, with explicit requirements for disclosure of any conflicts of
interest and recusal if any exist. Due to this rigorous, independent
scientific review process, EPA’s proposed standards usually have
been upheld when challenged in the courts.

The Trump administration, however, made several major changes to

this process. First, Trump’s EPA administrator announced that
anyone who held EPA-funded research grants had an automatic
conflict of interest and was therefore banned from serving on EPA
review panels. Accordingly, he removed or did not reappoint many of
the academic members of the CASAC, the PMRP, and other
scientific review panels, and replaced them primarily with state air
quality officials from Republican-governed states and with industry
scientists and consultants, with no similar concern about their
potential conflicts of interest. As chair of CASAC he appointed an
industrial consultant whose publicly stated view was that standards
could only be justified by statistical evidence of “manipulative
causality”: that is, proof of a direct relationship between the standard
and an improvement in health outcomes, and not merely an
“association” (as is often the case in epidemiological studies) rather
than considering the full “weight of the evidence” across all relevant
fields of research.20 Several courts subsequently upheld these
appointments on the grounds that the EPA administrator has wide
discretion in appointing members of advisory panels.

Second, the administrator issued a new rule prohibiting the use of

“secret science” as a basis for EPA’s regulatory decisions: that is,
excluding any studies that did not fully disclose their raw data and
analytical methods to the public. This proposal appeared to exclude
many of the long-term epidemiological studies that have documented
the human health effects of pollutants, since they relied on
confidential medical records that could not be disclosed (and would
be too expensive and probably impossible to anonymize).21 This
proposal was widely condemned by the scientific community, but
was nonetheless pushed forward by the EPA administrator.

Third, he abolished the PMRP, leaving the external review of the PM

standards solely to the seven-member CASAC which did not include
expertise even in such critical fields as air pollution epidemiology and
health effects. Several members of the CASAC, acknowledging the
limits of their own expertise, requested that the panel be
reestablished, but the EPA administrator responded only by naming
a pool of a dozen handpicked consultants—itself lacking expertise in
air pollution epidemiology—with whom the CASAC could
communicate only through the CASAC chair and in writing.

With these changes as background, in October 2018 the EPA staff

issued a draft update of its Integrated Science Assessment for
Particulate Matter, a comprehensive evaluation and synthesis of the
policy-relevant science with input from many scientific experts both
within and outside the agency.22 The chair and a majority of the
CASAC responded with a harshly critical review, asserting that the
staff draft was based on “unverifiable opinion”; that it used
inadequate evidence, and did not adequately review the available
science; that it should have paid more attention to “discordant”
evidence (for instance, articles by the chair of the panel himself); that
it showed only “associations” rather than causal connections
between exposures to fine particulates and health effects; and
therefore that it had not shown any justification for tightening the
standard beyond the 2012 level.23

In September 2019 the staff released its draft Policy Assessment for
the Review of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for
Particulate Matter, which concluded that “the current PM2.5
standards do not adequately protect public health” and that “at the
levels of the current fine particulate standards, the risk of premature
mortality is unacceptably high.”24 However, the majority of a divided
CASAC responded that since the assessment depended on the
Integrated Science Assessment which they had previously criticized,
“most CASAC members conclude that the Draft PM PA does not
establish that new scientific evidence and data reasonably call into
question the public health protection afforded by the current 2012
PM2.5 annual standard,” and that the current 24-hour standard for
PM2.5 as well as the PM10 standards should also be retained.25

In response to these CASAC assertions, the twenty members of the

disbanded PMRP—all recognized as distinguished experts on the
health effects of airborne particulates—reconvened as an
“Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel,” and issued a
consensus statement to the administrator that the 2012 standards
did not adequately protect public health, and that the annual
standard should be tightened from 12 to 8–10 µg/m3, and the 24-
hour standard from 35 to 25–30 µg/m3.26

The ultimate outcome of this process remains to be seen, but what is

clear is that the Trump administration is trying to radically change the
EPA’s use of science and of independent scientific review processes
to justify its standards and regulations. It dramatically reduced the
presence of subject matter research experts on its independent
scientific review boards and substituted the judgments of a far
smaller CASAC composed primarily of industrial consultants and
state officials from conservative states. And the new chair of the
CASAC proposed rejecting the EPA’s well-established “weight of the
evidence” basis for standard setting with a burden of proof so
stringent that it would be far more difficult to use science to justify
regulation. This new approach deeply divided the CASAC and the
larger community of subject matter experts, and at least for the
immediate future, seriously damaged trust in the CASAC to reach
consensus conclusions about the relevant science. If it is upheld and
continued, it may seriously diminish the EPA’s ability to prevent
exposure to environmental health hazards.
Authority to Address New Problems:
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Another case raises the question, how can the EPA deal with a
newly identified environmental problem that was not fully anticipated
when its regulatory statutes were enacted?

Climate change has been an important public policy issue since the
late 1970s, when scientists proposed that global warming was
increasing beyond its historic range due to carbon dioxide emissions
from human activities: in particular, fossil fuel combustion by power
plants, other industries, and motor vehicles. In 1987 Congress
directed the EPA to develop a coordinated national policy on climate
change, but most early policymaking focused on crafting an
international agreement—the 1992 Framework Convention on
Climate Change, which the United States adopted, and the 1997
Kyoto Protocol, which it did not—rather than on policies to control
domestic emissions.

The Kyoto Protocol included binding targets for GHG emission

reductions, which President Clinton agreed to but the US Senate in
1997 voted overwhelmingly to reject unless industrializing countries
such as China were also held to them. With Clinton’s support,
therefore, the EPA began to assert a more active policy role. In
1998, its legal office issued an opinion that EPA had the authority to
regulate GHG emissions under the Clean Air Act even though it had
not previously done so. In 1999 a group of environmental
organizations and renewable energy businesses, citing this opinion,
petitioned the EPA to regulate GHG emissions from new motor
vehicles under the Clean Air Act; and in January 2001, just as the
Clinton administration left office, the EPA invited public comments on
this petition, which produced nearly fifty thousand responses during
the first five months of the incoming Bush administration.
While Bush was campaigning for the presidency against Al Gore in
September 2000, he pledged that “[w]e will require all power plants
to meet clean-air standards in order to reduce emissions of carbon
dioxide within a reasonable period of time.”27 Once elected,
however, he renounced this pledge and ended US participation in
the Kyoto Protocol negotiations; and his new appointee as the EPA’s
legal counsel issued a reinterpretation which asserted that contrary
to the agency’s previously issued opinion, the EPA did not have
authority to regulate GHGs as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
Bush’s EPA officials also rejected the petition that had called on the
EPA to regulate GHG emissions from motor vehicles. Unlike other
regulated air pollutants, they argued, GHGs were only significant at a
global scale and therefore were not amenable to the national- and
state-level regulations provided by the Clean Air Act. Moreover, they
argued that such a far-reaching new regulatory initiative should only
be undertaken with explicit direction by Congress and after more
extensive research, and that in the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments,
Congress itself had only directed the EPA to pursue research and
nonregulatory solutions for GHG emissions.28

However, a group of states, cities, and environmental groups led by

the state of Massachusetts challenged this reinterpretation, and
asked the courts to require the EPA to regulate GHG emissions from
motor vehicles. In 2005 an initial court upheld the Bush EPA’s
interpretation, but in 2007 the Supreme Court ruled that GHGs did
fall within the Clean Air Act’s definition of air pollutants, and that the
EPA therefore did have authority to regulate them. Given that
authority, the court said, the EPA also had a legal responsibility to
determine whether they “cause, or contribute to, air pollution which
may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare”
(an “endangerment finding”).29 An affirmative endangerment finding,
in turn, would automatically trigger an EPA obligation to set GHG
emission standards.

In 2009, following the election of President Barack Obama, a

bipartisan group of congressional leaders tried but ultimately failed to
enact new legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade
regime to reduce GHG emissions. Given the Supreme Court’s
Massachusetts decision as a mandate and President Obama’s
commitment to address the problem, the EPA thus became the lead
agency to try to reduce GHG emissions. The new administrator
issued an endangerment finding in 2009, concluding that GHGs did
indeed contribute to risks to public health and welfare and that
emissions from new cars and trucks contributed to these effects.
President Obama then announced a joint initiative by the EPA and
the Department of Transportation to coordinate the regulation of
GHG emissions and of motor vehicle fuel efficiency, and several of
the major car manufacturers and other major corporations
announced their support. The motor vehicle standards (the “Tailpipe
Rule”) were finalized in 2010 and tightened further in 2012 (the
continuing story of the motor vehicle standards, and the federalism
issues related to the battle over them between the Trump
administration and the state of California, would require a whole
additional case study, but see Chapter 2 for more detail).30

An additional implication of the endangerment finding, however, was

that once an emission is regulated as an air pollutant under any part
of the Clean Air Act (motor vehicle emissions, in this case), all major
stationary sources automatically became subject to regulation as
well.31 This principle empowered EPA to regulate GHGs from
stationary as well as mobile sources, but it also had unintended
consequences: “major” stationary sources had been defined as
those emitting more than one hundred tons per year of traditional air
pollutants, which meant only large industrial facilities and power
plants; but far more facilities might emit that amount of carbon
dioxide, including many hospitals, schools, restaurants, office
buildings, farm buildings, and other establishments. The number of
sources required to have permits thus could potentially increase from
fewer than fifteen thousand to over six million, even though most of
them were relatively small contributors to total GHG emissions.
Annual administrative costs would increase from $62 million to $21
billion, and the newly regulated sources would face permitting costs
estimated at $147 billion.32 In 2010, the EPA therefore issued a rule
requiring permits for new or modified GHG sources but “tailoring”
these regulations to focus only on the largest sources—the power
plants and other industrial facilities that emitted more than one
hundred thousand tons of GHGs per year—while excluding the many
smaller and nonindustrial facilities.33 In 2012, the EPA also proposed
performance standards requiring that all new or modified power
plants use the “best system of emission reduction” for GHGs, and in
2013, it issued a revised version of this standard.34

These standards relied on a crucial assumption: that carbon capture

and storage (CCS) technologies had been “adequately
demonstrated” as a “best system of emission reduction,” even
though only a handful of CCS facilities were actually operating so far,
or that other options such as energy efficiency improvements could
be used to achieve the reductions. The EPA’s rationale was that few
new coal-fired power plants were planned before 2020 and that new
plants after that were already being designed to include CCS
technology. Businesses and states opposed to the rule argued,
however, that these technologies had not yet been adequately
demonstrated at a commercial scale.

Two further complications also followed. First, issuing a performance

standard for new power plants also triggered a requirement for the
EPA to develop guidelines that states must use to reduce emissions
from existing facilities, as part of their required “state implementation
plans” for complying with the Clean Air Act. In June 2014, the EPA
issued the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP), a
proposed rule that set state-specific goals based on each state’s
power plant GHG emission rates.35 The goal of the rule was to
reduce overall power plant GHG emissions by 30 percent from 2005
levels, while allowing each state to adopt flexible strategies for doing
so that best suited its circumstances. If a state did not submit a plan
that satisfied the EPA’s guidelines, EPA could write a plan for the
state itself. The final CPP rule was issued in October 2015; initial
state plans were to be completed by September 2016, and final ones
by September 2018.
Second, because only some of the necessary emission reductions
would likely be achieved by the existing power plants, the states
would have to use additional measures to achieve the goals, such as
increasing the substitution of natural gas and renewable energy for
coal, avoiding the retirement of existing nuclear plants, increasing
energy efficiency, adopting market-based incentives, and perhaps
joining multistate cap-and-trade programs. Critics immediately
argued that the CPP stretched the EPA’s use of planning guidelines
under environmental federalism beyond previous precedents and
without legal authority.

In 2013 a group of utilities, other carbon-intensive industries, and

some states and public officials (the “Utility Air Regulatory Group,” or
UARG) petitioned the Supreme Court to overrule the EPA’s
regulation of GHG emissions from stationary sources, arguing that
CCS technology had not yet been adequately demonstrated and that
trying to regulate GHG emissions from stationary sources would thus
expand EPA regulation far beyond what Congress had intended in
the Clean Air Act (the Massachusetts decision had only addressed
motor vehicle emissions, not the effects of this decision in triggering
the regulation of other sources as well). In its decision in this case in
June 2014, the Supreme Court confirmed that the EPA had the
authority to regulate GHG emissions from stationary sources that
also emitted other pollutants specifically covered by the Clean Air
Act. It also ruled, however, that the EPA could not regulate other
sources solely for GHGs without congressional approval, nor did it
have administrative discretion to change the specific tonnage
triggers in the law (from one hundred to one hundred thousand tons
per year) to solve the awkwardness of trying to “tailor” these
provisions to “major” GHG sources. In effect, under this ruling the
Supreme Court confirmed the EPA’s authority to regulate sources of
83 percent of GHG emissions but protected many other smaller
sources from becoming newly subject to EPA regulation without
congressional action.36

In the same month as the court’s UARG decision, the EPA

announced its proposed CPP rule, and the coal industry, along with
twenty-six state governments and hundreds of other businesses and
business organizations, immediately sued the EPA again to try to
block it. The EPA, they argued, was trying to force the states to
reduce GHGs by taking actions far beyond the actual performance of
the regulated power plants themselves, using the Clean Air Act not
just to reduce the power plants’ own emissions but to try to create a
whole new low-carbon energy economy. The EPA responded—
supported by eighteen other states, many local governments,
businesses, and environmental groups—by arguing that the flexibility
it was offering to the states was in fact a classic case of cooperative
environmental federalism: consistent with the original Clean Air Act
and similar to previous environmental regulations, it set a national
goal to reduce emissions endangering public health and welfare and
allowed states broad flexibility to develop plans to achieve it.

The rule was finalized in August 2015, but in February 2016, a 5–4
majority of the Supreme Court put the rule on hold until the court
case was decided, and in September 2016, the US Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments on the
case.37 In November 2016, meanwhile, Donald Trump was elected
president, and on taking office he immediately issued an executive
order directing the EPA to review and rescind the CPP rule. In
October 2017 his new EPA administrator issued a proposed rule
repealing it, and in June 2019 the EPA issued its proposed substitute
—the “Affordable Clean Energy” (ACE) rule—which would be far
weaker, leaving it to each of the states to decide not only the
methods by which they would reduce GHG emissions but even how
much they would choose to do so, and requiring only improvements
in efficiency at existing plants (a change that might even increase
GHG emissions by making older plants more efficient so that they
could run more frequently). In August 2019 ten environmental groups
filed suits to overturn the new rule and reinstate the CPP; a month
later their suit to reinstate the CPP was dismissed as moot on the
grounds that the CPP had already been repealed, but the suit
challenging the ACE remained active and was scheduled for oral
arguments in October 2020.
This case thus offers several further lessons. First, as in both the
previous cases, the EPA’s decisions are driven by both internal and
external forces, including its own staff, environmental and business
advocacy groups, presidential policy preferences, and court
decisions. Key decision points in this case included a memo from the
EPA’s legal staff under a supportive Clinton administration; a petition
by environmental groups, based on this memo, asking the EPA to
regulate carbon emissions from motor vehicles; a contrary memo by
President Bush’s EPA officials, disavowing that interpretation and
rejecting the petition; a Supreme Court decision reaffirming the
previous interpretation; a series of subsequent EPA rules under the
Obama administration implementing that interpretation; a further
Supreme Court decision affirming the EPA’s authority to regulate but
specifying more clearly the rationale and limits of that authority; an
EPA rule implementing that authority but delayed by the Supreme
Court pending final judicial review; and, following the 2016 election,
a presidential executive order directing the EPA to review and
rescind the rule.

Second, as in the previous two cases, the EPA’s policies clearly are
influenced by presidential politics. Its first administrator, William
Ruckelshaus, sought vigorously to establish its independence as a
regulatory agency responsible first and foremost to faithfully execute
the laws, based on the best science and economics available, even
when that mission conflicted with President Nixon’s business
supporters. Beginning with the Reagan administration in the 1980s,
however, the agency’s policies became much more subject to
change based on presidential politics, though those changes
remained constrained by judicial oversight. The EPA’s position on
regulating GHG emissions changed significantly from the Clinton to
the Bush administration and again under Obama, and yet again
under President Trump; a critical question still unanswered is the
extent to which President Trump’s appointees will be upheld by the
courts in their initiatives to change regulations put in place by their
predecessors.
Third, what may appear to be relatively straightforward choices, such
as whether the EPA should protect the environment by regulating
GHG emissions from cars and trucks, can trigger far more complex
consequences. In this case, it triggered regulatory consequences for
thousands of stationary sources as well as for state governments.
Many observers believe that a broad-based carbon tax or cap-and-
trade system would be more effective and more workable, whether
or not they support that goal; but either of those tools would require
new legislation, which Congress so far has been unable to pass.
State cap-and-trade programs may be another option, but a more
effective national solution would require congressional action (see
also Chapter 2 on state environmental policymaking).
Economic Benefits and Costs of
Regulations: Manipulating the Analysis
A final illustration of how the EPA normally makes decisions, and
how the Trump administration is attempting to change it, is a sequel
to the previous case: the Trump administration’s attempt to use
changes in economic criteria to justify the “Affordable Clean Energy”
rule, an attempt that has potential implications far beyond the climate
change rule itself and would affect the agency’s economic-analysis
protocols for all future regulations. In addition to the CPP, Trump’s
EPA administrators also used these criteria changes to try to justify
rescinding rules regulating methane emissions, defining EPA’s
jurisdiction over the “Waters of the United States,” and the long-
established standards for mercury and air toxics emissions, among
others.38

Since at least the 1980s, the White House’s Office of Management

and Budget has directed the EPA to document the economic costs
and benefits of proposed regulations that would significantly impact
the US economy, and to show that their benefits to society are
greater than their costs. In practice this requirement poses difficult
and sometimes contentious technical questions. The costs of an
environmental regulation, for instance, include the costs of
compliance to the businesses that are regulated, but historical
examples suggest that the compliance costs that are predicted in
advance—as they must be, for a proposed regulation—sometimes
turn out to be far lower in reality, since once a regulation goes into
effect, regulated businesses tend to find cheaper ways to comply.39
The benefits to society of regulating an environmental health hazard,
in turn, often are far greater but also are harder to measure than the
private costs of compliance that are claimed. These benefits include
the economic benefits of lower mortality and morbidity, and of people
living longer and healthier and thus more productive lives: that is,
reducing the “social cost of pollution.” They also include “cobenefits,”
such as the benefits of cleaning up one pollutant that also
contributes to cleaning up others. They include improvements in the
overall efficiency of the economy, as they create incentives to
substitute cleaner and more efficient production methods for the
dirtier ones that become more expensive. In the case of a hazard
such as climate change, they also include benefits to the entire
population of the world, not just to people in the United States.

Finally, the economic analysis must calculate an appropriate

relationship between present costs and benefits and those in the
future, by using an appropriate discount rate: a high discount rate
places greater value on costs and benefits in the immediate future,
whereas a low discount rate places a higher value on long-term
considerations.

Up until the Trump administration, the EPA has used well-

established and widely accepted economic procedures and
assumptions for calculating benefits and costs, including cobenefits,
benefits to all who in fact are expected to benefit, and discount rates
appropriate to the full period over which the standard’s benefits and
costs are expected to occur. In rescinding the CPP and other
regulations, however, the Trump administration introduced several
significant changes. First, Trump signed an executive order directing
all agencies to eliminate two regulations for every one new one they
proposed, and to base their analysis solely on reducing compliance
costs: that is, to ignore the benefits of the regulations involved, such
as reduction of the social costs and health damage caused by the
pollution that was regulated.40

Second, Trump’s EPA administrator proposed that calculation of the

benefits of the CPP include only benefits to residents of the United
States, ignoring the fact that its purpose was to reduce a global
environmental hazard to which the United States was one of the
largest contributors. This change of definition by itself significantly
lowered the rule’s calculated economic benefits. In addition,
however, he proposed that only direct economic benefits to climate
mitigation should be included, excluding “cobenefits” such as the fact
that cleaning up GHG emissions from power plants would also
greatly reduce emissions of other pollutants and thus improve health
and other outcomes. This proposal violated not only common sense
but also a provision of the Office of Management and Budget’s
guidance on benefit–cost analysis, which specifically called for
inclusion of cobenefits. Finally, he called for using a high discount
rate—focusing only on short-term costs and benefits—despite the
fact that climate change and its consequences were inherently a
long-term process.41

These proposals were contested and their outcome remained

uncertain, but what was clear was that they represented an attempt
to manipulate the EPA’s procedures for economic analysis in ways
that would lower the calculated benefits of EPA regulations, by
substituting assumptions that were inconsistent both with established
EPA practice and with the principles accepted by most economists.
ACHIEVEMENTS AND LIMITATIONS
Over the 50 years of the EPA’s existence to date, the EPA has
accomplished a great deal in making the environment cleaner using
the regulatory tools it has been given (see Chapter 1). Air pollution
has been dramatically reduced, and regulations for cars and trucks
have produced major improvements in motor vehicle design to
reduce air pollution and increase fuel efficiency. The EPA’s permit
requirements also have greatly reduced water pollution from
wastewater treatment plants and industrial discharges, although
runoff from farms, construction sites, and other nonpoint sources
continues to cause serious problems. Solid and hazardous wastes
are now managed far more safely: the EPA’s regulations closed
more than five thousand open-burning dumps in the 1970s, and
municipal and commercial landfills are now far better managed by
professionals under permit standards set by the EPA.42 The EPA
itself has pioneered some of the most important innovations in
environmental policy, such as emissions trading and information
disclosure requirements.

The EPA’s risk-based, substance-by-substance regulations of

hazardous chemicals have had far more limited success. They have
banned or restricted a few highly visible and controversial toxic
chemicals, but due to scientific uncertainties, limited staff and
resources, political and legal resistance, and the heavy burden of
proof it must sustain, the EPA has actually studied and regulated
very few. One hope for the future was a rare bipartisan vote by
Congress in 2016 to pass the Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act,
which reformed the EPA’s least effective mandate—the Toxic
Substances Control Act—by making all commercial chemicals
subject to EPA review, prioritizing those that posed the greatest
risks, and giving the EPA broader options to manage these risks and
to require more safety testing. However, the Trump administration
assigned implementation of this law to a chemical industry scientist
who rewrote its implementation rules to apply only to the risks of the
manufacturer’s intended uses (rather than all potential uses), and
made other changes sought by industry to limit its effect.43

Both business advocates and policy scholars have sometimes

criticized the EPA’s regulations. Businesses often criticize them
because of the additional costs of compliance, sometimes
disregarding the “external” or “social” costs of the health effects and
other economic damage that their own pollution imposes on others.
Policy scholars often criticize the regulations as economically
inefficient and discouraging of innovation: technology-based permit
requirements, they argue, sometimes impose extra costs on firms
that could reduce pollution more cheaply in other ways, and “best
available technology” requirements tend to “lock in” the best existing
technology rather than encouraging the discovery of more innovative
solutions. Policy scholars have repeatedly recommended the use of
markets, environmental taxes, information disclosure, and other
innovative policy tools to achieve environmental protection more
efficiently and effectively (see Chapter 10).44

In reality, however, the EPA can use only the tools that Congress has
authorized, which often do not yet include many innovative solutions
that have been proposed.45 It therefore has tried to use the
regulatory powers it does have to address new problems, such as
allowing trading of emission allowances, redefining animal feedlots
as point sources, regulating genetically modified organisms as
pesticides, and regulating GHGs as dangers to public health and
welfare. These are sometimes awkward substitutes, however, for
designing more effective policies by statute; yet the Congress has
become too polarized and gridlocked to pass most new
environmental statutes that have been proposed.
THE EPA’S FUTURE
What then is the likely future of the EPA? One outcome could indeed
be the radical diminution of the agency that Trump proposed. Its staff
was demoralized and diminished by retirements and buyouts,46 and
its scientific advisory boards no longer included many of the most
respected academic research scientists. Some of its most visible
regulations were weakened or rescinded, and recommendations to
strengthen them to better protect public health were ignored: these
included particularly its initiatives to diminish the risks of global
climate change, such as the CPP; the automotive standards for fuel
efficiency and GHG emissions; and proposals to eliminate
particularly hazardous pesticides. And its commitment to
enforcement declined precipitously: between 2017 and 2018, EPA
investigations under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts dropped by
one-third to half, and under its hazardous waste programs by 17–23
percent. Its civil enforcement actions declined by 20–50 percent, to
the lowest levels in 10 years; referrals for criminal prosecution
dropped to a 30-year low, just 166 cases in 2018; criminal
convictions fell from more than one hundred cases in each year
since 1997 to just sixty-two cases in 2018;47 and the amounts of
financial penalties collected were the lowest since 2006.48

President Reagan tried once before to “deregulate, defund, and

delegate” the EPA’s responsibilities, but it did not end well for him:
the public and many members of Congress mobilized to “save EPA,”
he was forced to retreat and replace most of the agency’s
leadership, and in the next elections, the public voted in
congressional majorities supportive of the agency. The second
President Bush also tried to weaken environmental regulations by
reinterpreting them, but he too was then confronted with a more
environmentally supportive Congress during his second term and
with rejection of his proposals by the courts.
Trump could perhaps be more successful. First, his appointees to
the EPA were more politically experienced, and the Republican
majority of senators was both more ideologically conservative and
more fearful of crossing him than those in the 1980s. Second, he
and the Senate’s Republican leadership focused single-mindedly on
replacing retiring judges with lifetime appointments of young
conservatives vetted by the Federalist Society for their ideological
commitment to limited government; their philosophies might reshape
the courts’ receptiveness to the agency’s initiatives for a generation.

However, the extent to which Trump would ultimately succeed in

weakening the EPA was by no means certain. He was easily able to
cancel rules that had not yet been finalized, but once rules have
been adopted, they cannot be rescinded simply by the stroke of the
president’s or administrator’s pen. They can only be replaced
through the full process that was required to approve them in the first
place, and proposed changes can be overturned by the courts,
which happened to a large number of his proposals. Rewriting the
EPA rules requires convincing new evidence to justify changing rules
that were previously justified. It also is a time-consuming process,
not only for the EPA and its staff but also for the courts.

In addition, a serious attempt to gut the agency could well rekindle a

backlash of public and even business opposition. Environmental
protection often is not a major issue in elections, but frequently
becomes one in the face of any serious threat to it. The EPA’s
mission and many of its programs are still popular with the public,
with some influential businesses, and with many members of
Congress, including even some Republicans; note that even the
Senate Republican majority refused to seriously consider Trump’s
proposed budget cuts to the agency. Even with unanimous
Republican support, moreover, the Republican majority in the Senate
was less than would be needed to override a filibuster, and by 2019
the House was controlled by Democrats. Some business interests
supported radically weakening the EPA’s regulations, but others
benefited from them: they provided a single set of national standards
rather than different ones in each state, they protected companies’
reputations and compliance investments against less principled
competitors, and they provided predictable requirements consistent
with global as well as domestic expectations. In 2019, for instance,
even the US Chamber of Commerce began to moderate its hostility
to climate change policy and to recognize it as an issue that needed
to be addressed.49

The most likely outcome, therefore, was that at least during the
remainder of Trump’s first term of office, his EPA appointees would
continue to issue few if any new regulations but would work
energetically to weaken or rescind current ones, hoping to push
them through court review before his term ended.

If Trump were to be reelected, however, the future of the EPA could

be very different than its past 50 years. One of the most serious
long-term dangers was the Trump administration’s attempt to
radically defund the scientific research activities that are needed to
understand the problems the agency is charged with addressing. A
particular danger, for instance, is the attempt to eliminate the federal
capacity to address climate change, including not simply the EPA’s
regulations but also climate science research, mitigation, and
adaptation capacities throughout the federal agencies. In October
2020, for instance, he appointed two outspoken climate change
critics to senior science and policy positions in the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, which is the lead agency for the
nation’s periodic official assessments of climate change; these
changes could do serious damage to both America’s and the world’s
understanding of important environmental forces and trends and
significantly hinder our ability to respond to them.
RAYS OF HOPE
Despite attacks by some businesses and other critics, however, as of
2020 the basic statutory frameworks and scientific foundations of the
EPA’s decisions remained largely intact. Even during unsupportive
presidencies, the courts have frequently upheld the EPA’s statutory
responsibilities to protect the environment and have overruled
attempts to reinterpret them in less protective ways. Both
environmental advocacy groups and some state governments—and
even some supportive businesses—have played key roles in
bringing such lawsuits.

There is additional hope in the proliferation of state-level policy

innovations (see Chapter 2). California and New Jersey led in
developing hazardous chemical “right-to-know” laws in the 1980s,
which led to the EPA’s nationwide Toxics Release Inventory. More
than half the states passed renewable energy mandates, and
twenty-four passed tax credits for renewable energy. North Carolina
passed a Clean Smokestacks Act in 2001, a state-level cap-and-
trade requirement that forced its electric utilities to clean up or close
down old coal-fired power plants that had been “grandfathered”
under federal law: this act reduced the state’s sulfur emissions by
more than 80 percent.50 California and a coalition of northeastern
states (the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI) became
leading voices in climate change policy, both within the United States
and in cooperation with other countries, with California in particular
passing strong policies to reduce GHG emissions and to promote
energy efficiency and renewable energy (see Chapters 2 and 12).
Other states also moved to promote renewable energy, including
even “deep red” states such as Texas and Iowa. At the same time,
however, polluting industries and wealthy individuals opposed to
regulation began pouring money into state election campaigns as
well as national ones, and proposing “model” state legislation to try
to block strong environmental policy initiatives at the state level as
well.51
There was also hope in coalitions between environmental advocacy
groups and businesses that would prosper in a greener economy.
Many leading businesses identified ways in which good
environmental management could be good business, and in
cooperation with some environmental organizations, positioned
themselves to prosper in a more environmentally sustainable
economy (see Chapter 14). Market forces favoring greener
outcomes, such as the rapidly decreasing prices of solar and wind
energy and rising global expectations demanding mitigation of
climate change, also became important drivers of business
decisions, and these influences would continue whether or not
Trump’s deregulation agenda succeeded. But the EPA’s regulations
remained an important motivator for other businesses, many of
which were still polluting either because they lacked the will to
modernize old facilities or because it was more expensive for them
to control pollution than to pay for lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians
to resist regulation.

The EPA thus remains an essential institution and—so far, at least—

an important force within the limits of its authority, resources, and
politically unstable leadership. The limits and imperfections of its
policy tools are real, but more often than not, they result not from any
unwillingness by the EPA to use more effective ones but from the
inability of Congress—hamstrung by partisan and ideological
gridlock and by the power of entrenched interests—to authorize
better alternatives. Any hope of truly fundamental policy
improvement must lie in broader political reforms and in broader
coalitions of environmental and public health advocates with those
businesses and state governments that are supportive of
environmental protection.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

US Environmental Protection Agency (www.epa.gov) There

are numerous links on this site that provide access to all major
activities and issues of concern at the EPA, including
environmental laws and regulations.

US Environmental Protection Agency—EPA History

(www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/epa-history) This section of the EPA
site explores the agency’s history and the significant changes
over time in environmental laws and regulations.

US Environmental Protection Agency Clean Power Plan and

Affordable Clean Energy Rule, see
https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/cleanpowerplan_.html
for developments under the Clean Power Plan and other EPA
actions to address carbon pollution under the Obama
administration. For the Trump administration’s proposed
substitute for it (the Affordable Clean Energy Rule), see
https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/affordable-
clean-energy-rule. For recent developments, see
https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2017/09/clean-power-plan-carbon-
pollution-emission-guidelines/

US Environmental Protection Agency New Source Review

(www.epa.gov/nsr) This part of the EPA site is dedicated to
explaining the New Source Review provisions under the Clean
Air Act. For recent developments, see
https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2018/12/new-source-review/

US Environmental Protection Agency Particulate Matter

(PM) Pollution (https://www.epa.gov/pm-pollution) This part of
the EPA website provides links to all aspects of its regulation of
particulate matter pollution. For recent developments, see
https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2020/07/national-ambient-air-
quality-standards-for-pm-and-ozone/
NOTES
1. For a more detailed history of the EPA, see Richard Andrews,
Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of
American Environmental Policy, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2020),
https://yosemite.epa.gov/sab/sabproduct.nsf/0/FE50D8FD06EA9B17
852583B6006B7499/$File/03-07-
19+Draft+CASAC+PM+ISA+Report.pdf, Chapters 12 and 17.

2. Russell Train, “The Environmental Record of the Nixon

Administration,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26 (1996): 185–96.

3. For more detail on EPA budgets and staffing, see Chapter 1 and
Appendixes 2 and 3.

4. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Fiscal Year 2018 Agency

Financial Report (Washington, DC: EPA, 2018),
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2018-11/documents/epa-
fy-2018-afr.pdf.; Sarah Gibbens, “This Is How the EPA Uses Its
Budget,” National Geographic, March 2017,
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/03/environmental-
protection-agency-budget-cuts/.

5. Philip Shabecoff, “E.P.A. Aims to Curb Tall Smokestacks,” New

York Times, June 28, 1985.

6. See, for instance, Trip Gabriel, “Utility Cited for Violating Pollution
Law in North Carolina,” New York Times, March 3, 2014.

7. Brian Clark Howard and Robert Kunzig, “5 Reasons to Like the

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” National Geographic,
December 9, 2016,
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/12/environmental-
protection-agency-epa-history-pruitt/.
8. Coral Davenport, “E.P.A. Faces Bigger Tasks, Smaller Budgets
and Louder Critics,” New York Times, March 18, 2016.

9. U.S. Office of Management and Budget, America First: A Budget

Blueprint to Make American Great Again, March 2017.

10. Nadja Popovich, Livia Albeck-Ripka, and Kendra Pierre-Louis,

“95 Environmental Rules Being Rolled Back Under Trump,” New
York Times, December 21, 2019.

11. “Existing U.S. Coal Plants, Age Comparison,” SourceWatch,

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Existing_U.S._Coal_Plants#ci
te_note-14.; U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Most Coal
Plants in the United States Were Built Before 1990,” Today in
Energy, April 17, 2017,
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30812.; U.S.
Energy Information Administration, “More U.S. Coal-fired Power
Plants are Decommissioning as Retirements Continue,” Today in
Energy, July 26, 2019,
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40212.

12. Clean Air Act of 1970, Public Law 91-604, Section 111; U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, New Source Review,
www.epa.gov/nsr.

13. Larry Parker, Clean Air: New Source Review Policies and
Proposals, CRS Report No. RL31757 (Washington, DC:
Congressional Research Service, 2003); Clean Air and New Source
Review: Defining Routine Maintenance, CRS Report No. RS21608
(Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2005).

14. James E. McCarthy, “Clean Air Act: A Summary of the Act and
Its Major Requirements,” in Clean Air Act: Interpretation and
Analysis, ed. James P. Lipton (New York, NY: Nova Science, 2006),
Chapter 1. See pages 41–43 on New Source Review.

15. Christopher Drew and Richard Oppel, Jr., “Air War—Remaking

Energy Policy: How Power Lobby Won Battle of Pollution Control at
E.P.A.,” New York Times Magazine, March 6, 2004.

16. John Shiffman and John Sullivan, “EPA’s Court Follies Sow
Doubt, Delay,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 2008; New York v.
EPA, 413 F. 3d 3 (D.C. Cir. 2005); New York v. EPA, 443 F. 3d 880
(D.C. Cir. 2006).

17. Thomas McGarity, “When Strong Enforcement Works Better

Than Weak Regulation,” Maryland Law Review 72 (2013): 1204–94.

18. Joseph Goffman, Janet McCabe, and William Niebling, “EPA’s

Attack on New Source Review and Other Air Quality Protection
Tools,” Environmental & Energy Law Program, Harvard Law School,
November 1, 2019, http://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-
content/uploads/NSR-paper-EELP.pdf.

19. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Particulate Matter

Pollution,” https://www.epa.gov/pm-pollution/particulate-matter-pm-
basics.; “Table of Historical PM NAAQS,”
https://www3.epa.gov/ttn/naaqs/standards/pm/s_pm_history.html,
both accessed January 29, 2020.

20. Louis Anthony Cox, Jr., “Should Health Risks of Air Pollution be
Studied Scientifically?” Global Epidemiology 1 (2019): 100015;
Gretchen Goldman and Francesca Dominici, “Don’t Abandon
Evidence and Process in Air Pollution Policy,” Science 363 (2019):
1398–1400.

21. Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “Pruitt Unveils Controversial

‘Transparency’ Rule Limiting What Research EPA Can Use,”
Washington Post, April 24, 2018.

22. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Integrated Science

Assessment for Particulate Matter (External Review Draft), Report
No. EPA/600/R-18/179, October 2018.

23. Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) Draft Report,

Letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, March 7, 2019,
https://yosemite.epa.gov/sab/sabproduct.nsf/0/FE50D8FD06EA9B17
852583B6006B7499/$File/03-07-
19+Draft+CASAC+PM+ISA+Report.pdf, accessed February 7, 2020.

24. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Policy Assessment for

Review of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Particulate
Matter, External Review Draft,” Federal Register 84 (September 11,
2019): 47944.

25. Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) Draft Report,

Letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, November 13, 2019,
https://yosemite.epa.gov/sab/sabproduct.nsf/WebCASAC/0A46BDB
E59C86531852584B10077B0F6/$File/11-13-
19+Draft+CASAC+PM+PA+Report.pdf, accessed February 4, 2020.

26. Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel, Letter to EPA

Administrator Andrew Wheeler, October 22, 2019, https://ucs-
documents.s3.amazonaws.com/science-and-democracy/IPMRP-
FINAL-LETTER-ON-DRAFT-PA-191022.pdf, accessed February 4,
2020.

27. Seth Borenstein, “Bush Changes Pledge on Emissions,”

Philadelphia Inquirer, March 14, 2001.

28. Robert Fabricant (EPA General Counsel), “EPA’s Authority to

Impose Mandatory Controls to Address Global Climate Change
under the Clean Air Act” (August 29, 2003), cited in Federal Register
68 (173): 52922–32 at page 52925.

29. Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007).

30. James McCarthy, Cars, Trucks, and Climate: EPA Regulation of

Greenhouse Gases from Mobile Sources, CRS Report No. R40506
(Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2014).

31. The “timing rule” (also known as the “PSD Triggering Rule”) was
issued in 1980; it made any source emitting more than one hundred
tons of any regulated air pollutant subject to requirements for an EPA
permit for “prevention of significant deterioration” of air quality (PSD).
The Supreme Court unanimously reconfirmed the EPA’s authority to
regulate GHGs from power plants in American Electric Power Co. v.
Connecticut, 564 U.S. 410 (2011).

32. Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, 134 S. Ct. 2427 (June 23,
2014).

33. Federal Register 75: 31514, June 3, 2010; Robin Bravender,

“EPA Issues Final ‘Tailoring’ Rule for Greenhouse Gas Emissions,”
New York Times, May 13, 2010.

34. Federal Register 77 (2012): 22392; James McCarthy, EPA

Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Power Plants: Many
Questions, Some Answers, CRS Report No. R43127 (Washington,
DC: Congressional Research Service, 2013).

35. Environmental Protection Agency, Carbon Pollution Emission

Guidelines for Existing Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating
Units, 40 CFR Part 60, Fed. Reg. 79: 34830 (2014).

36. Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, 134 S. Ct. 2427 (June 23,
2014).

37. Linda Tsang and Alexandra Wyatt, Clean Power Plan: Legal
Background and Pending Litigation in West Virginia v. EPA. CRS
Report No. R44480 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research
Service, March 8, 2017).

38. Niina Heikkinen, “Crunching New Numbers for a Potent

Greenhouse Gas,” Climatewire, November 20, 2017.

39. Elizabeth Kopits, Al McGartland, Cynthia Morgan, Carl Pasurka,

Ron Shadbegian, Nathalie B. Simon, David Simpson, and Ann
Wolverton, “Retrospective Cost Analyses of EPA Regulations: A
Case Study Approach,” Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis 5 (2014):
173–93.
40. Alan Krupnick, “Trump’s Regulatory Reform Process: Analytical
Hurdles and Missing Benefits.” Resources for the Future, Resources
194 (Spring 2017).

41. Chris Mooney, “New EPA Document Reveals Sharply Lower

Estimate of the Cost of Climate Change,” Washington Post, October
11, 2017.

42. Richard Andrews, Managing the Environment, Managing

Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 245–49.

43. Eric Lipton, “Why Has the E.P.A. Shifted on Toxic Chemicals?”
New York Times, October 21, 2017.

44. At least one scholar, however, has argued that this conventional
wisdom is overstated and often wrong and that “there are solid
reasons to suspect that an emissions trading program does a poorer
job of stimulating innovation than a comparably designed traditional
regulation.” See David Driesen, “Does Emissions Trading Encourage
Innovation?” Environmental Law Reporter 33 (2003): 10094–108.

45. Richard Andrews, “The EPA at 40: An Historical Perspective,”

Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum 21 (2011): 223–58 at
229–34.

46. Brady Dennis, “EPA Plans to Buy Out More Than 1,200
Employees This Summer,” Washington Post, June 20, 2017,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-
environment/wp/2017/06/20/epa-plans-to-buy-out-more-than-1200-
employees-by-the-end-of-summer/?utm_term=.a7a9c9ba72ef.

47. Ellen Knickmeyer, “EPA Criminal Action Against Polluters Hits

30-Year Low,” Associated Press, January 15, 2019.

48. Leif Frederickson, Marianne Sullivan, Christopher Sellers,

Jennifer Ohayon, Ellen Kohl, Sarah Lamdan, Alissa Cordner, Alice
Hu, Katarzyna Kaczowka, Natalia Navas, Linda Wicks, A Sheep in
the Closet: The Erosion of Enforcement at the EPA, Environmental
Data and Governance Initiative, November 2018,
https://www.eenews.net/assets/2018/11/16/document_gw_01.pdf,
accessed November 19, 2018.

49. Jennifer Dlouhy, “U.S. Chamber to Re-Examine Climate Policy

That Cost It Members,” Bloomberg News, September 24, 2019.

50. Richard Andrews, “State Environmental Policy Innovations: North

Carolina’s Clean Smokestacks Act,” Environmental Law 43 (2013):
881–940.

51. Suzanne Goldenberg, “Conservative Lobby Group Alec Plans

Anti-Environmental Onslaught,” The Guardian, December 2, 2014,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/02/alec-
environmental-protection-agency-climate-change.
PART III PUBLIC POLICY
DILEMMAS
8 ENERGY POLICY
—Sanya Carley
Energy, as both a commodity and service, fundamentally affects the day-to-day lives of all individuals.
Energy is also essential to the functionality of modern economies and a critical source of economic
growth in both the United States and elsewhere around the world. Primary energy resources (e.g., coal,
natural gas, oil, nuclear, wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass) are used to generate—or
reduce in the case of energy efficiency—different secondary energy services (e.g., electricity,
transportation, heating, and cooling) that support both human well-being and economic prosperity. Each
of these energy resources, and the policies that encourage them, however, is also accompanied by a
set of benefits and drawbacks, institutional challenges, vested interests, and difficult trade-offs.

Energy policy refers to policy, legal, and political decisions about the production and consumption of
these energy resources. Energy policy thus also requires making decisions under complex conditions
that necessitate difficult trade-offs. The direction of energy policy, at any given point in time, is shaped
by those who make policy decisions—and the concerns, values, personal and professional interests,
and partisanship that they uphold—as well as the conditions of the time. In the 1970s, when faced with
oil shortages and a drastic increase in the price of oil, US policymakers pursued energy policy—in the
form of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975—aimed at improving the efficiency of vehicles
and building strategic petroleum reserves. During the George W. Bush presidency, the country’s energy
policies tended to focus on enhancing energy security and domestic production of energy through
nuclear, ethanol, and so-called clean coal incentives. In 2009, a year into the Great Recession, the
Obama administration urged Congress to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which
allocated approximately $90 billion toward energy innovation, research and development, and energy
projects.1

Most recently, the Trump administration has sought to shift the energy policy paradigm once again, in
favor of fossil fuels and away from renewable energy, energy conservation, and efficiency. Among many
regulatory changes, the administration has prioritized removing barriers to fossil fuel extraction;
lessening or abdicating any responsibilities to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; changing the
way in which analyses that support regulatory decisions are conducted; and propping up the coal
industry (see Chapters 4 and 7). All of these efforts are accompanied by a growing political divide on
energy issues within the United States. The administration’s policy efforts mark a sharp contrast with
policies pursued during the Obama administration and highlight just how deeply political energy policy
decisions are.

A major condition facing energy markets in the modern era is the generation of GHG emissions. The
production and consumption of energy, primarily through fossil fuel combustion to satisfy transportation
and electricity needs, is the single largest contributor to US GHG emissions.2 It is widely recognized,
based on scientific evidence from a large contingent of prominent scientists, that the accumulation of
GHG emissions in the atmosphere has the potential to affect the stability of ecosystems through climate
change and compromise human health and well-being.3 The majority of Americans also believe that
climate change is happening, specifically perpetuated by anthropogenic sources,4 and that policymakers
should address climate change through public policy (see Chapters 3 and 12).5

Another primary condition facing energy markets is the rapidly changing price of different energy
resources, due in part to past energy policies, but also to various market conditions and political factors.
Between 2009 and 2018, for example, the cost per kilowatt-hour of onshore wind declined on average
by 69 percent and the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels declined on average by 88 percent.6 The
decrease in the price of renewable energy sources has, in many cases and in many locations across the
United States and the world, led to cost parity with more conventional fossil fuel resources. Whereas the
most common energy resource consumed just a decade ago was coal, which is highly carbon-intensive
and also the source of significant air and water pollution,7 low- to no-carbon, efficient, and advanced
energy resources are penetrating energy markets across the world.

In some jurisdictions, these penetration levels are significant, such as in California, which produced
more renewable energy in 2017 than any other energy source, with 16 percent of its electricity
generation coming from solar PV or solar thermal.8 Iowa also produced 29 percent of its electricity from
renewable sources.9 Consider also Germany, which operated on 85 percent renewable energy for a full
day in May 2017.10 Several US cities, such as Aspen, Colorado, and Burlington, Vermont, are also able
to claim 100 percent renewable electricity consumption based on their energy mix, energy efficiency
measures, and purchases of tradable credits.11 These market changes, as well as others discussed
below, reveal that an energy transition is underway.12

In light of these conditions, US energy policies—led by a combination of federal, state, and municipal
governments as well as regional partnerships, but especially state and municipal governments during
the Trump administration—are driven increasingly by three objectives: (1) reduce GHG emissions; (2)
deploy more low-carbon and efficient technologies; and (3) either prepare for or fight against the energy
transition. Some jurisdictions are pursuing all three at once, while others focus predominantly on one
objective. Some seemingly seesaw between clean energy technology diffusion and protecting vested
interests against the energy transition. Several red states such as Ohio and Indiana, for example, have
repealed policies put in place to incentivize renewable energy industry expansion and instead promoted
fossil fuel interests, despite a general interest in expanding industries with a growing number of jobs and
general support from their constituents for clean energy.

In this chapter, I first provide more context about the energy transition. I then provide a detailed account
of several energy policies that uphold the three aforementioned objectives and set each in context.
While it is impossible to cover all US energy policies, the examples included represent a range of policy
instruments, case studies, and levels of government. Throughout the narrative, in addition to presenting
the intricacies of various energy policies, I highlight political tensions, trade-offs, and transitioning norms
and institutions, and subsequently return to a discussion of these themes in the conclusion.
SETTING THE CONTEXT: A US ENERGY TRANSITION
The term “energy transition” is increasingly used to describe the state of energy markets across the
world. An energy transition, by loose definition, is a switch from dependence on one energy resource or
a set of energy resources, to another.13 By one account, and as a much stricter definition, it is an
increase in the prevalence of a specific energy resource from 5 to 80 percent.14 There are several
examples of previous energy transitions, at least by the loose definition of the term, such as the
transition from whale oil to kerosene and wood to coal, both during the nineteenth century. The present
energy transition is marked by a movement away from carbon-intensive fossil fuels toward lower-
carbon, more efficient, and advanced energy resources, albeit not without a great deal of resistance by
the fossil fuel industry and conservative supporters. Figure 8.1 displays these trends in the United
States between 1990 and 2017 as the electricity mix has shifted from the left-most bar of 3 million
megawatt-hours (MWh) to the right-most bar of 4 million MWh, with resource changes tabulated in
between.

Description

Figure 8.1 Change in Electricity Production by Source (in MWh), 1990–2017

Although experiential evidence is limited due to the low number of historical examples, such transitions
are rarely rapid. The current energy paradigm is solidified and continually reinforced by almost a century
of technological path dependency (i.e., where history tends to determine the decisions that are made
about the future) and so-called “carbon lock-in,” which refers to the continual reinforcement of a fossil
fuel–based economy through technological and institutional norms.15 For example, energy systems also
tend to operate on long-term planning horizons, in which new power plants or other infrastructure tend
to last decades before replacement. Thus, any changes in energy systems tend to be slow and gradual;
and it is difficult for new, advanced, efficient, or low-carbon technologies to penetrate the market and
gain consumer and producer acceptance.16 Arguably, policy and other institutional norms tend to evolve
even slower than the technologies.

Scholars continue to debate the pace of the current energy transition.17 Those who claim it to be slow
tend to abide by the strict definition. They observe the percentage of low-carbon technologies out of
total demand over time and note that the percentage is small but growing gradually. Those who claim it
to be rapid tend to consider the annual change in energy resources, and point out that low-carbon
energy resources have provided the majority of new capacity in energy markets over the past decade,
as well as most new capacity that is projected into the future.18 Assumptions about uncertain future
political circumstances also influence perceptions of the pace of the energy transition. Those who
anticipate significant policy backlash against renewables as such technologies mature and penetrate
previously well-established markets, for example, are more likely to assume a slower energy transition.
As new energy technology penetration tends to increase, so too does political resistance;19 and such
political turmoil can slow the pace of the transition.

What is not debated is that the energy transition is occurring—this appears undeniable.20 Projections
from 13 different long-range energy modeling scenario studies published between 2017 and 2018—
including those published by ExxonMobil, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),
and the United States Energy Information Administration—all predict a decline in coal of, on average, 28
percent of the global 2015 mix to between 12 and 17 percent in 2040, and an increase in renewables
from 14 percent to between 16 and 31 percent over the same time period.21 These studies do not agree
about the future of nuclear: some predict a decline from the 5 percent globally in 2015, while others
predict a modest increase. These estimates also predict a growth of energy consumption of between 20
and 30 percent between 2015 and 2040, which means that the percentage of any resource is out of a
much larger total. Another source predicts that fossil fuel demand will peak by 2020 and 2027.22 These
various findings all suggest that the energy transition will continue to unfold, and at an accelerating
pace.

Energy experts also do not debate the fact that the energy transition is accompanied by changes that
extend beyond the resource mix, including new institutional actors, markets for exchanging energy
commodities, and arrangements between consumers and producers. These changes are forcing
traditional energy actors, such as utilities and car manufactures, to reevaluate their business models
and, in the case of energy consumers, to modify the ways in which they interact with energy goods and
services. For example, not only are centralized energy operations transitioning toward lower-emitting
sources, but the prevalence of smaller-scale, low-carbon energy resources is also increasing. In many
cases, the owners of such systems are not the traditional utility: for larger-scale wind turbines and solar
panels, the owners are often independent power producers; for small-scale distributed generation, the
owners are often consumers turned “prosumers” (when a consumer also serves as a producer of
energy).

These new actors and market arrangements require a reevaluation of institutional rules and regulations
and present a host of technical, economic, equity, and policy challenges. Such changes inevitably inflict
growing pains on the entire energy system as well as on individual entities and subsectors and markets
within the system. For example, energy producers that work in legacy industries such as coal—and
possibly in the future natural gas and nuclear—face declining economic opportunities, a loss of
employment, and, in some cases, stranded assets. As another example of such challenges, wholesale
power markets are working to better integrate higher penetration levels of renewable energy, including
energy storage and powerline construction. In addition, US energy policy decision-makers operate
within a federal system, and new market operations require some degree of coordination across all
levels within the system or decisions can become bottlenecked or caught in lengthy court processes.

While these various changes and challenges are welcomed by some, they are opposed—sometimes
fiercely—by others. Incumbent and heavily invested interests, for example, may be reluctant to strand
assets—such as in an already built and fully functional coal power plant—or diversify business
operations in new directions. Resistance to change can be observed through lobbying efforts, where
companies pay significant sums of money to influence legislation—such as to resist a carbon policy23 or
to support the continuation or removal of energy subsidies—that would require the company to
drastically change its investment strategy or render the company’s product outdated or noncompliant.
Between 2000 and 2016, the fossil fuel industries spent approximately $370 million on climate lobbying
(compared to $48 million spent by renewable energy industries).24 These expenditures reached a
climax in 2009 and 2010, right before onshore wind energy, the lowest cost and most commonly
deployed form of renewable energy, reached cost parity with traditional forms of fossil fuels.25 The
timing of this climax also coincided with Congressional consideration of the Waxman-Markey Bill, which
proposed an emissions trading plan, as well as the drafting of the Obama administration’s American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The public is observing these various developments with mixed reactions. As of 2019, 67 percent of
those polled believe that the government is not doing enough to reduce the effects of climate change,26
up from 46 percent in 2010 who agreed with the statement that global warming is a problem requiring
immediate government action.27 While these numbers have shifted in recent years toward a greater
share of those who hold this belief, strong political divides still remain. Of those who self-identified as
Democrat in 2019, 90 percent believe that the government is not doing enough, compared to 39 percent
who self-identified as Republican. In recent years, the public strongly supports renewable energy. In
2016, 89 percent of polled citizens said that they favor expanding solar panels and 83 percent favor
wind turbine expansion, compared to 41 percent who favor coal mining expansion.28 (See Chapter 3 for
a more in-depth discussion of public opinion.)

This unfolding energy transition is at least partly attributable to energy policies aimed at technology
deployment and GHG emission abatement that have been enacted and implemented over the past
several decades, as well as due to market dynamics, mechanization, and other trends.29 Most of the
policies have been adopted and implemented at the state level, where economic and social interests
tend to be more consistently aligned, but the federal and municipal levels have contributed substantively
as well (see Chapter 2). The energy transition also instigates new energy policies, so as to either
accommodate evolving energy markets or address difficult challenges that the energy transition poses,
or to entirely resist the energy transition and its effects on vested interests. In the next section, I discuss
some of the policies that have contributed to the energy transition, as well as recent modifications of
these policies as the energy transition has evolved.
POLICY PRIORITIES: GHG EMISSIONS AND TECHNOLOGY
DEPLOYMENT

State Renewable Portfolio Standards

One of the most popular US energy policies is the state-level renewable portfolio standard (RPS), first
adopted by a small subset of states in the late 1990s as an outgrowth of electricity deregulation and in
response to a lack of leadership at the national level on energy and climate policy. An RPS is a mandate
that a specific percentage of total state electricity sales, or generation, is sourced from renewable
energy (e.g., wind or solar), often including hydroelectricity. A more recent form of an RPS discussed in
greater detail below, often called a clean energy standard, is a mandate that a percentage of total
electricity comes from clean energy (e.g., a form of energy that produces limited or no GHG emissions).
(See Chapter 2 for further discussion.)

As an example, Illinois has an RPS mandate that requires that 25 percent of all electricity sales be
sourced by renewable energy by 2025. Eligible resources that count toward this requirement include
solar PV, solar thermal, wind, biomass, hydroelectricity, landfill gas, other anerobic digestion gas, and
biodiesel.30 RPS policies, as a strict command-and-control type instrument, are almost always
accompanied by renewable energy certificate (REC) markets. Those utilities required to comply with
RPSs may buy (or sell) credits to satisfy their mandates, each of which counts as 1 MWh of renewable
electricity. Typically, RECs only account for the environmental attributes of the renewable energy, not the
actual electricity as well (one can pay separately for the electricity that comes from the renewable
energy). The electricity is then sold through a separate energy market.

As of early 2020, 29 states and the District of Columbia have an RPS policy, as displayed in Figure 8.2.
These states account for approximately 55 percent of total US retail electricity sales.31 An additional 8
have voluntary policies. Democratically leaning states more commonly adopt these policies, but both red
and blue states have done so.32 In fact, one of the biggest RPS success stories with a significant
penetration of wind energy—with an annual increase in wind consumption of 37 percent between 2000
and 2017—and fairly consistent support across key stakeholders is the state of Texas, which voted for a
Republican presidential candidate every election between 1980 and 2016.32 The majority of
Southeastern states, however, where the cost of electricity is low and the endowment of renewable
sources such as wind are low, do not have an RPS policy. As of 2018, 32 other countries also have RPS
policies, or what is more commonly referred to as quota policies.33 The RPS policy is politically more
feasible than other energy policies because the gradual nature of the requirement allows policymakers
to set their goals into the distant future, with a minimal immediate commitment, but with a signal today
that they are prioritizing clean energy. Voluntary policies send the signal that the state is interested in
developing renewable energy, even if the policy has no “teeth.”
Description

Figure 8.2 States With Binding Renewable Portfolio Standards in 2020

In the early years of RPS implementation, states tinkered frequently with their RPS policy designs, with
some states revising their policies up to five times. Common amendments included increasing policy
stringency, adding new requirements for specific resources (e.g., solar PV or distributed generation),
expanding the list of eligible resources (e.g., adding energy efficiency or fossil fuel technologies),
adjusting geographic restrictions on RECs, and adding cost recovery and planning mechanisms.34

The vast majority of studies on RPS policies confirm that they have facilitated renewable energy growth
successfully across the United States. Utility reporting documentation reveals that utilities that face RPS
standards tend to achieve compliance with their state’s interim benchmarks, with only some
exceptions.35 RPS policies were accountable for about 34 percent of all new renewable energy capacity
in 2017, with a much larger share on the coasts.36 This percentage has declined in recent years—for
reference, over 75 percent of all new renewable energy capacity was attributed to RPS policies in
200737—as renewable energy markets have become more robust due to factors other than RPS
policies, including other policies, voluntary credit trading markets, long-term contracts, and other market
dynamics. Research also confirms that the design of a state RPS policy is essential to its success; for
example, more stringent standards lead to more renewable energy development and placing geographic
restrictions on the exchange of RECs leads to more in-state renewable growth.38

Studies also confirm that state RPS policies could collectively reduce GHG emissions. A modeling study
that accounted for all RPS standards in place by 2016—well before the recent explosion of 100 percent
clean energy commitments—found that the cumulative 2015–2050 GHG savings from the collection of
RPS policies could amount to about 6 percent. With a stronger set of standards that match the former
Clean Power Plan obligations, states could reduce GHG by 23 percent over this time frame.39
Accounting for all new 100 percent clean energy pledges across all states, cities, and businesses would
increase this estimate quite considerably.

RPS policies, however, can also produce complications. Some states have grappled with how to
integrate large quantities of renewable generation into the grid,40 especially during times of the day
when the sun goes down concurrent to when demand increases. This phenomenon, when graphed over
a single day, is referred to in the energy policy literature as the “duck curve,” suggestive of the shape of
the demand curve after one accounts for available solar generation and the steep ramp-up after the sun
goes down that needs to be satisfied by other energy resources that quickly penetrate the grid.41
Another challenge is how to account for spillovers, such as when one state changes its energy mix as a
result of a surrounding state’s RPS policy.42 A third challenge that electricity market actors are
increasingly confronting is how to integrate individual states’ RPS mandates into regional electricity
markets, or what are titled Independent System Operations (ISO) or Regional Transmission Operators
(RTO).43 A fourth challenge is overcoming political and personal opposition to energy infrastructure
siting.

In recent years, leading energy policy states began to modify their policies again, this time with more
ambition. Hawaii adopted a 100 percent clean energy mandate in 2016. Following this precedent,
several other states began to seriously pitch the idea of 100 percent clean energy. Many increased their
targets in 2018 (e.g., California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey), followed by several
more in 2019 (e.g., Maryland and Nevada), including those with 100 percent commitments (e.g.,
California, the District of Columbia, New Mexico, Washington, and the territory of Puerto Rico). These
new, highly ambitious mandates not only double or triple the amount of low-carbon energy that states
must achieve, but they also: (1) introduce greater complexity into the definition of clean energy and (2)
are accompanied by other policy features aimed at efficiency and equity.

While all of these jurisdictions previously had aggressive RPS policies, or were at least early movers in
the RPS policy diffusion process, these new, bolder mandates were, arguably, less of an effort to one-up
their standards than an effort to increase their targets to a maximum in response to the Trump
administration’s efforts to derail the US’s commitments to climate mitigation. In this sense, these
mandates are both symbolic—sending a signal to the federal government and the rest of the world that
climate change is still a leading priority—and potentially significant for climate change mitigation, since
these jurisdictions contain a significant proportion of the US population.

A case for consideration is the state of Washington and its Clean Energy Transformation Act, passed in
2019. This policy sets several benchmarks for the state:

1. by 2025, the state can no longer produce electricity from coal;

2. by 2030, the electricity mix must be 100 percent carbon neutral, at least 80 percent of which comes
from state-generated carbon-free sources (e.g., renewables, nuclear, or natural gas with carbon
capture and storage) and 20 percent can come from RECs, carbon taxes, or allowable energy
project expenditures (e.g., electric vehicle infrastructure or weatherization); and
3. by 2045, 100 percent carbon-free and in-state generation.44

This policy also requires that the state switch from a traditional rate design to a performance-based
design in order to encourage utilities in the state to be more innovative and supportive of energy
efficiency and similar investments. Finally, the policy calls for equitable distribution of the benefits and
burdens of policy outcomes, financial support for low-income energy assistance, grants for clean energy
projects, and a requirement that utilities consider the social cost of carbon when making investment
decisions.45
Federal Fuel Economy Standards
In contrast to the exclusively state-led RPS policy, fuel economy standards in the United States have
been led by the national government, but with influence from the states. Fuel economy standards are
arguably the most ambitious and long-lasting energy policies that the federal government has enacted
over the past several decades. Corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards were first introduced
in response to the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act, during the term of President Gerald Ford,
which authorized the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to set mileage standards
for new cars and light-duty vehicles. The original standard was 27.5 miles per gallon (MPG) by 1985.
After two decades of only slight modifications to the standards, but significant advancements in the state
of California, the George W. Bush administration increased standards more substantially beginning in
2005, and then again in 2007, working with a Democratically controlled Congress, through the Energy
Independence and Security Act (EISA). The Obama administration followed suit with executive authority
granted through the EISA: in 2011, it increased standards from 2011 to 2016; in 2012, it issued a
rulemaking that established a new goal of 54.5 MPG by 2025.

Just a few months after President Trump was sworn into office, his administration announced a plan to
revisit the standards and reopen the midterm review of the program. The administration first released a
draft plan, led by the NHTSA, that was riddled with calculation errors and in which many of the modeling
scenarios did not even pass a basic benefit–cost test.46 In March 2020, more than three years after
Trump first announced his intent to change the standards, the administration released its final Safer
Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule. Instead of an approximately 5 percent increase in
efficiency each year, as the Obama administration rules were designed, the new regulation requires an
annual increase of approximately 1.5 percent. Several scholars have raised similar questions about the
underlying assumptions and conclusions within the regulatory impact assessment as they did about the
proposed rule (for additional coverage of this topic, see Chapters 4 and 15).

There are three particularly noteworthy aspects of the history of fuel economy standards. First, US fuel
economy standards are a case of dynamic federalism, in which the states, led by California, have
influenced the federal government to continually increase the stringency of the standards. Under a
provision offered to the state of California in the 1970 Clean Air Act, the state is able to seek a waiver of
federal preemption over emissions regulations for motor vehicles. Since it is not practical to have two
separate sets of vehicle standards—one for California and those states that adopt California’s standards
wholesale, and the rest of the country—the federal government has tended to match California’s
standards. That is, until recently. The Trump administration, as part of the rollout of the SAFE rule,
revoked California’s tailpipe emissions waiver, a decision that immediately resulted in judicial action
when the state of California and more than 20 other states sued the administration. (For more extensive
coverage of this topic, see Chapters 2 and 7.)

Second, fuel economy standards have received overwhelming bipartisan support through the years—
after all, improving efficiency should presumably result in cost savings, unless the cost of efficiency
measures outweigh the savings—and have proven durable across changes in administration and have
been regularly amended by Congress since 1990. That is, again, until recently, when the Trump
administration released its SAFE rule. They did so despite overwhelming support among the American
public for advancements in vehicle efficiency, and even some pushback from the automobile industry in
response to the Trump administration’s declaration that it would revise standards. Automobile
companies initially asked for greater flexibility in fuel economy and GHG emissions compliance, but not
a substantial reduction to the standards themselves, variation in emissions standards across United
States due to the California waiver, nor an increase in regulatory uncertainty. The oil and gas industry,
however, one of the biggest sources of federal lobbying expenditures, stands to benefit significantly from
the new rule due to consumer purchases of gasoline.

Third, fuel economy standards are part of what is referred to as the Joint National Program, which is the
first major federal policy initiative that directly combines energy and climate goals.47 This marriage grew
out of the 2007 United States Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts versus EPA (see Chapter 6), that
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the authority to regulate GHG emissions, and the
subsequent 2009 endangerment finding issued by the EPA that GHG emissions from mobile and
stationary sources threaten human health and the environment. In 2012, the EPA established GHG
limits for cars and light trucks for model years 2017–2025 that correspond to the NHTSA MPG
standards; and now both agencies, jointly, regulate vehicle efficiency.48 This combined Joint National
Program, with a set of dual objectives, may help garner greater or more diverse political support; of
course, it could also divide political support for the program, given the extreme polarization on the topic
of climate change.49

Modern fuel economy and GHG emissions standards have been marked by mixed success. The
standards have achieved full manufacturer compliance,50 although different companies comply in
different ways. For example, some manufacturers bank or borrow credits toward compliance; some build
new vehicle fleets, such as electric vehicles; and some change the vehicle materials, such as using
aluminum instead of steel in the Ford F-150. Many manufacturers have even complied early.51 As a
result, the program has increased steadily the average MPG of new vehicles. The program also,
however, has several drawbacks. As a result of focusing on improving the efficiency of the vehicle,
manufacturers have neglected to improve other vehicle attributes that consumers value, such as
horsepower and torque.52 Fuel economy standards are also likely not the most efficient policy if one’s
objective is GHG abatement.53 Scholars have also raised concerns about the rebound effect (i.e., when
one drives more because the cost of owning a vehicle decreases) diminishing the benefits of the
policy,54 and the likelihood that the increased price of a new vehicle will cause people to hold onto their
used cars longer.55
Zero-Emissions Vehicle Policy
Another joint GHG abatement and technology diffusion policy is the zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV)
program. The objective of the ZEV program is to increase the percentage of vehicles on the road that
produce low to no tailpipe emissions during operation. Over the long term, this has the potential to both
reduce GHG emissions56 and help advanced vehicles reach economies of scale and thus decline in
price. The policy operates as a mandated percentage of ZEVs that must be purchased by a specified
date, as tracked by the number of ZEV credits earned by each regulated manufacturer. Battery electric
vehicles and fuel cell vehicles count for full credit. Vehicles that produce low levels of emissions, such as
hybrid battery electric, hydrogen, natural gas, and hybrid vehicles, can receive partial credit. Similar to
REC markets for renewable electricity, vehicle manufacturers can bank and borrow ZEV credits over
time and exchange the credits with each other.

The ZEV program first originated in California in 1990 when the California Air Resources Board (CARB)
introduced it as a way to combat smog and soot in Los Angeles. The original mandate was 2 percent
ZEV vehicles on the road by 1998; it was subsequently raised to 10 percent by 2003. In 2012, CARB
folded the ZEV program into its Advanced Clean Cars program and extended the ZEV program to focus
on GHG abatement. It also increased the mandate of required ZEV credits earned by each
manufacturer to amount to a projected 15.4 percent of ZEV sales by 2025.57 This estimate has since
declined to about a 7.5 percent penetration of ZEV vehicles due to consumers buying a higher than
originally anticipated number of long-range battery electric vehicles as well as automakers’ use of
banked credits.58

Other states are allowed to adopt California’s vehicle emissions standards wholesale without seeking
EPA approval, as granted in section 177 of the Clean Air Act. Since 2004, ten states and the District of
Columbia have adopted California’s ZEV program, most recently Colorado in 2019: Colorado,
Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and
Vermont. These 11 states and Washington, DC account for a sizeable portion of total US automobile
demand. These states do not, however, produce the majority of vehicles; it is the manufacturing states,
such as Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, that will bear the majority of costs and benefits from these
manufacturing adjustments.

Since 2010, when the first modern electric vehicles were released to US markets, the number of
purchased electric vehicles has grown steadily, and crested over one million in 2018, or roughly 2
percent of the total automobile market.59 These sales are not, however, exclusively in ZEV states and
some ZEV states are doing better than others at working toward their ZEV mandates, as displayed in
Figure 8.3, which plots cumulative electric vehicle sales between 2011 and 2019 relative to the final
2025 ZEV goal for each state. Over this same time period, the cost of electric vehicles has also declined
significantly. All major manufacturers now offer at least one electric vehicle model, if not several, with
variations in driving distance on a single battery charge and amenities. The ZEV is, arguably, the most
important factor in these developments, since auto manufacturers develop cars for the entire US market,
and not, for example, one set of cars for California and other ZEV states, and another set of cars for the
non-ZEV states.
Description

Figure 8.3 State 2025 Zero-Emission Vehicle Goals Relative to Cumulative Sales
Between 2011 and 2019 (in Thousands)

A brief history of automobile industry reactions to the ZEV program reveals mixed political reactions
within the industry. In 1990, when California first introduced the ZEV, automobile manufacturers resisted
it through focused lobbying efforts.60 Their resistance was to protect their investments in the incumbent
technology, the internal combustion engine. Over time and with each subsequent revision to the ZEV
mandate, however, the industry became less resistant, tempered their lobbying efforts, and even
engaged in more proactive lobbying. Examples of such lobbying efforts include those to reduce
compliance costs through more flexible credit rules and other policy design modifications,61 to increase
regulatory certainty, and to assure compatibility between the ZEV and other vehicle regulations such as
fuel economy standards.62

ZEV mandates have the potential to reduce significantly GHG emissions and US demand for oil.63 Like
RPS policies and fuel economy standards, however, ZEV mandates also have their challenges. There is
no guarantee that consumers will demand enough electric or fuel cell vehicles by 2025 for
manufacturers in ZEV states to comply with their mandates.64 There is also extensive evidence that
consumers are concerned about some of the functional and financial drawbacks to electric vehicles—
such as concerns about the range of the vehicle and the upfront cost to purchase it—and are still
hesitant to adopt this new technology.65 These conditions suggest the need to couple the ZEV policy
with other electric vehicle programs that build demand and reduce consumer concerns, such as
providing tax credits, charging station infrastructure, and making use of creative ways to get people to
experience electric vehicles (e.g., fleet purchases, test-drive opportunities, or leasing structures).66
States are, to varying degrees, pursuing all of these activities.

Boston, Massachusetts, is an example city that has offered a variety of electric vehicle incentives and,
as a result, experienced significant electric vehicle growth rates. Massachusetts offers a tax credit of up
to $2,500 for battery electric or fuel cell vehicles and $1,500 for hybrid electric vehicles and helps
coordinate an electric vehicle advocacy network. These incentives are on top of the federal tax credit for
electric vehicles, which can provide up to $7,500 depending on the type of electric vehicle. Boston
residents have benefited from these incentives, as well as the activities facilitated specifically by the city:
personal charging station incentives, public charging stations throughout the city, requirements that new
developments are electric-vehicle ready, electrician training for charger installers, and a streamlined
charger inspection process, among others.
POLICY PRIORITIES: PREPARING FOR OR PROTECTING
AGAINST THE ENERGY TRANSITION

State Pushback in the Form of New Policies and Retrenchment From Old Ones

State RPS and ZEV policies, and federal CAFE standards, are all examples of policies designed to
advance new, low-carbon energy technologies. Through technology deployment, these policies also
reduce GHG emissions in energy sectors. As discussed above, such policies are also contributing to the
energy transition, as these clean technologies mature, their costs decline, and they capture a larger
share of energy markets.

Yet, while some jurisdictions are planning for the energy transition and using public policy to promote it,
others are pushing back and seeking ways to slow the transition. Technological and business changes
facilitated by the energy transition have the potential to threaten incumbent industries and local or
regional economies that rely heavily on fossil fuel–based resources or manufacturing. Shareholders,
politicians, and other entities that rely on these industries and economies are more likely to respond with
resistance. Such protection of economic or political interests has led to political battles in some places,
clean energy policy retrenchment in others, and fossil fuel–propping policies in yet others.

Several states have recently repealed or frozen their RPS policies. In 2009, Kansas adopted a standard
of 20 percent renewable energy by 2020 but, in 2015, changed the policy from mandatory to voluntary
through Senate Bill 91.67 In 2008, Ohio adopted one of the earliest and most aggressive portfolio
standards of 25 percent by 2025.68 Ohio then froze its standard for two years in 2014 and extended the
terminal year from 2024 to 2026. Although House Bill (HB) 554 threatened to freeze the standard even
longer, the governor vetoed it and the standard became binding again. Then, in 2019, HB 6 eliminated
the RPS through a gradual phase out (i.e., 8.5 percent renewable energy by 2026 and then no standard
thereafter) as well as the state’s energy efficiency resource standard. The efficiency standard was
originally set as a 22 percent reduction in consumer energy by 2027. By one estimate, this efficiency
standard saved Ohio consumers an estimated $5.1 billion in energy savings between 2009 and 2017.69
HB 6 also removed surcharges on customer electric bills to support renewable energy and energy
efficiency, and introduced new surcharges to instead cover $1 billion of subsidies to bail out two coal
and two nuclear plants.

These changes were accompanied by significant lobbying investments by electric utilities across the
country,70 as well as by political pressure within the specific states. Utilities in Ohio, for example, pushed
the state legislators to repeal the RPS because the policy threatened the viability of long-term power
purchase agreements for their coal generation. Over a year after HB 6 passage, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation arrested Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, as well as four others, for the exchange
of $60 million in a bribery scheme involving FirstEnergy Solutions, an Ohio utility that owns power plants
poised to benefit from the policy.71 Across the country, companies representing coal, utility, and nuclear
interests have also contributed over $3 million to political campaigns in each election year since 2010,
and up to $4.3 million in the 2010 election.72 These various efforts were accompanied by local
resistance to wind turbine siting, and new wind turbine setback rules that challenged the financial
viability of wind entirely.73

Another example of policy retrenchment is Nevada’s changes to its net energy metering (NEM) policy in
2015. NEM policies allow a consumer to connect small-scale residential energy systems, such as solar
PV panels, to the electric grid and to give and take electricity from the grid as needed. This policy allows
a residential electricity customer to act as a prosumer. Under a traditional NEM design, consumers are
compensated for the solar electricity that they give to the grid at the same rate that they pay for
electricity, that is, the retail rate. State NEM policies typically set limits on the size of the residential
energy system—to ensure that the system is sufficiently small—and the total capacity that a state can
accept as NEM systems.

Nevada first adopted its NEM policy in 1997 and amended it several times between 2001 and 2014. A
benefit–cost analysis provided by an independent consulting firm in 2014 found that the state NEM
program provided millions of benefits in net present value.74 Despite this, in December 2015, the state’s
largest utility, NV Energy, made the case through its own market study that consumers without
residential solar were subsidizing those with solar. In response to this case, the state’s utility
commissioners sided with the utility and voted unanimously to abolish the state’s NEM program and
replace it with a program that compensates residential energy owners at the wholesale rate of electricity
and adds fixed charges for these customers.75 No residential consumers were grandfathered in from the
old system. In other words, everyone who made the decision to invest in solar panels under the former
policy were then forced to accept completely different rules, and rules that would make the payback
period for their panels much longer, if a positive payback at all.

This case was particularly noteworthy due to the activists involved. Leonard DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo
appeared on the scene to protest the utility commission decision and advocate for the solar industry.
Ruffalo declared publicly the utility commission as “anti-Robin Hood,”76 while 2016 presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton criticized the decision over social media77 and candidate Bernie Sanders
declared in a speech that the utility commission decision was “just about the dumbest thing I have ever
heard.”78

After significant public protests and solar job losses as solar companies fled the state, the NEM was
reinstated in 2017 to allow systems up to 25 kW to recover 95 percent of the retail price of electricity for
all excess generation, with declining recovery rates for all total state NEM generation beyond 80 MW.79
Arguably, however, the damage was already done, as solar investors observed the political uncertainty
of energy policies and those in the energy industry observed how different assumptions within a benefit–
cost analysis can yield wildly different outcomes, outcomes by which policymakers may make key
decisions such as whether to backtrack policies after initial adoption and implementation.
Grid Modernization Efforts and Energy Sector Planning
As the energy transition evolves, states are increasingly pursuing efforts to facilitate grid modernization,
a term used to capture a number of investment, planning, analysis, and regulatory activities to prepare
the electricity grid for technological advancements and resilience. Such efforts are a direct response to
the evolving economic, technical, social, and policy challenges—and opportunities—precipitated by the
energy transition, as discussed above. Grid modernization involves, among other activities:

1. Studying and planning for how to integrate renewable energy, including storage, into electricity
grids;
2. Extending smart metering and advanced metering infrastructure to customers;
3. Setting rules and regulations for the use of data on customer electricity consumption, after
gathering such data with smart infrastructure;
4. Including the social cost of carbon—a price on each unit of carbon that accounts for all unpriced
impacts of carbon emissions—in integrated resource planning and other planning activities;
5. Using rate design and other incentives to encourage utilities to innovate and pursue energy
efficiency, or to encourage customers to be more mindful of their energy use with prices that vary by
time and actual production costs;
6. Performing value of solar studies to determine both the private and the social net benefits of small-
scale solar PVs;
7. Identifying who will be harmed by the energy transition, understanding the source and implications
of possible inequities, and devising approaches to compensate or otherwise help those
disadvantaged;
8. Coordinating regional transmission operations and state electricity efforts; and
9. Planning and preparing for large shifts in the revenue base for local economies (for example, from
coal power plant closures, where the coal plant formerly accounted for a large share of the local tax
base).

In 2019, the majority of states, 46 in total, as well as Washington, DC, took some form of action related
to grid modernization, with the most cases focusing on energy storage.80 As such, grid modernization
efforts are clearly appealing to state governments that exhibit a range of political, socioeconomic, and
energy resource mix characteristics. A set of state energy policy leaders, however, including New York
and California and a handful of other blue states, tend to pursue the more progressive grid
modernization efforts, such as offering incentives for advanced infrastructure and addressing some of
the deeper social justice issues associated with energy developments.

New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV), as an example of a grid modernization effort, was a
direct response to Hurricane Sandy and the damage that it inflicted on the state’s energy
infrastructure.81 The REV program was introduced by Governor Andrew Cuomo and other stakeholders
in 2014 with an objective to make the electric grid more resilient, to guide the way that energy is
produced and consumed in the state, and to facilitate the integration of renewable energy and energy
efficiency into both electricity and transportation sectors.82 The program includes over 40 initiatives that
run the gamut from a Clean Energy Community competition for cities to a series of low-carbon building
initiatives. Energy infrastructure modernization initiatives under the REV include the establishment of an
Integrated Smart Operations Center, which uses analytical software to forecast equipment failures in
power plants and transmission lines across the state83 and Energy Manager, a product that is used to
build energy management strategies for individual buildings.84 The REV program has been lauded in
the literature as having the potential to change the way that consumers interact with both their utilities
and more generally with new services (e.g., smart energy technologies) and new prosumer
opportunities.85

Another example is the state of Arizona and its policy efforts to distribute “smart meters” and roll out
dynamic electricity pricing, which is when the price charged for electricity changes over time, depending
on the cost of energy generation, as well as over space. One of the state’s largest utilities, Salt River
Project, for example, received approximately $57 million in federal American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act of 2009 funds to defray the costs of smart meter—meters that have two-way
information sharing from utility to customer and from customer to utility—installations to approximately
one million customers by 2013.86 Along with the smart meters, the utility allows customers to opt into
different pricing plans, one of which offers different rates per season, another offers different prices at
any given moment, depending on the cost of electricity at that moment (i.e., dynamic pricing).87 Reports
on this program find that it has saved significant labor and gasoline costs due to the reduced need for
the utility to drive around and check consumer meters,88 and saved consumers money on their
electricity bills.89
CONCLUSION
As discussed in the introduction, modern US energy policy is driven by three primary objectives: reduce
GHG emissions; advance the deployment of innovative, low-carbon, and efficient energy technologies;
and help perpetuate or resist the evolving energy transition, and the effects of the transition on
institutions, organizations, and people. While some jurisdictions are motivated by one of these
objectives, others are motivated by all three at once, with little discernment among the three. For
instance, with increasing prevalence of extreme weather patterns and forest fires that span multiple
states if not entire countries, among other impacts, policymakers are confronting the modern challenge
of global climate change. In the absence of policy tools that directly price or commodify GHG emissions
—which may not work for certain levels of government or be a political nonstarter for others—
policymakers’ primary policy levers are to influence energy technology deployment and build resilient
and smart energy infrastructure.

This chapter covers a range of energy policies that share these objectives. These policies represent
variation in technological focus (e.g., electric vehicles, solar PVs, and smart meters), the level of
government responsible for the adoption and implementation, degree of political influence or
confrontation, and economic sectors. All policies discussed here share several common traits. First,
each policy presents its own set of benefits and drawbacks. The new RPS variant of 100 percent clean
energy standards, for example, sends a clear and ambitious signal to electricity market participants, but
with the potential downside of overpromising before the technological, economic, and even social
factors are in place to support 100 percent clean energy on the grid (perhaps similar to the ZEV
program, as Figure 8.3 suggests may be the case). As another example, the ZEV program mandates
the deployment of electric vehicles, which has the potential to reduce total GHG emissions, but with the
potential downside of manufacturers focusing exclusively on building out electrification plans and not
advancing efficiency in the rest of their vehicle fleets.

Second, and closely related, each policy presents its own set of trade-offs in design and implementation.
Policymakers must make difficult trade-offs between specific technological advancement versus picking
promising favorites, maximizing efficiency versus equity, keeping prices low versus aggressive
innovation, and ensuring policy flexibility versus adaptability over time. Although, of course, decisions
are not always as cut and dried as this list suggests. States also have very different strategies, priorities,
and technical agencies to design, help implement, and oversee all of these policies.

Third, each policy is accompanied by vested interests and, thus, politics. Such politics tend to increase
most significantly when new technologies or business models mature enough that they begin to threaten
vested interests. Whereas, in early stages of technological advancement, incumbent industries tend to
underestimate the potential for long-term market maturity and thus do not apply as much political
opposition.90 As an example, electric utilities did not oppose NEM policies when they were first
introduced. It was only after the costs of residential solar PVs declined significantly, and a fraction of
each utility’s customers turned prosumer, that utilities began to oppose NEM policies. Vested interests
also have perpetuated low-carbon energy technologies as well, such as through support of and
pressure for policies like the production tax credit and the investment tax credit for wind. These policies,
once in place, are hard to remove and, through political force, have been extended incrementally over
time.91 One may assert that a similar trend exists for RPSs, fuel economy standards, and ZEV
standards, all of which policymakers have incrementally ratcheted up over time—with substantial
support from political interests—for most jurisdictions, although repealed through acts of retrenchment
for a few.

Finally, these policies, and the energy transition that is evolving concurrent to them, all introduce new
institutional challenges, at least some of which need to be confronted with revised rules and regulations,
market operations, human behavior, and institutional norms. To list just a few examples, as the
deployment of smart meters increases, consumers may need to modify their energy consumption
behavior, and utilities and others will need to consider how to analyze and protect consumer electricity
data. As battery storage technologies mature and decrease in price, electricity markets will need to
adapt to include options for market participation. As the energy transition continues to evolve, it will be
necessary to also evaluate these new challenges continually, and devise new or amend existing policy
solutions to address them.

I began this chapter by explaining that energy policies require decision-making under complex and
evolving conditions and are shaped fundamentally by those who make these decisions and their values
and interests. Policy priorities, the types of policy instruments deemed favorable, and even the
approaches and methodologies used to evaluate a policy set often change with an administration and
with shifting markets. As such, energy policies do not always progress in a linear fashion and can zigzag
or proceed forward at times and retreat at others. The modern energy era is marked by an evolving
energy transition away from dependence on carbon-intensive fossil fuels and toward low-carbon and
efficient alternatives, as well as by intense partisanship over energy sources and policy. Policymakers
must choose whether to continue to reinforce these trends through policy prescriptions or to stall the
transition and prop up the declining industries. The Trump administration, through a series of executive
orders and other regulatory processes, has focused on the latter. As we proceed through the 2020s, we
will observe the implications of such policy setbacks, as well as policy responses made by other levels
of government and future administrations.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency (www.dsireusa.org) The North
Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center maintains an up-to-date database of all state renewable
energy and energy efficiency policies, including information on how the policies are designed, and
when and how they have been amended over time.

Resources for the Future (https://www.rff.org/) Resources for the Future is a nonprofit think-tank
based in Washington, DC, that produces rigorous, objective research on environmental, energy,
and economic policy.

U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) (https://www.eia.gov/ and

https://www.eia.gov/tools/) The EIA collects a range of different energy statistics such as utility-level
data on generating units, state-level production and consumption, and oil prices. The EIA also
produces regular reports such as the Annual Energy Outlook, which contains energy modeling
forecasts.
NOTES
1. Sanya Carley, “Energy Programs of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” Review
of Policy Research 33, no. 2 (2016): 201–23.

2. “Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2019,

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions.

3. V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, H. O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P. R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W.

Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J. B. R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M. I. Gomis, E.
Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, T. Waterfield, eds., “An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global
Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission
Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change,
Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty,” IPCC 2018: Global Warming of 1.5°C, in
press.

4. Anthony Leiserowitz, Edward Maibach, Connie Roser-Renouf, Seth Rosenthal, Matthew Cutler, and
John Kotcher, “Climate Change in the American Mind: March 2018,” April 2018,
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-change-american-mind-march-2018/.

5. J. De Pinto, F. Backus, and A. Salvanto, “Most Americans Say Climate Change Should Be Addressed
Now – CBS News Poll,” CBS News, September 15, 2019.

6. “Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis-Version 12.0,” Lazard, 2018,

https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf.

7. Ralph L. Langenheim, Jr., “Coal (Mineral Resource),” Salem Press Encyclopedia of Science, 2019,
https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=88806479&site=eds-live&scope=site.

8. “California: State Profile and Energy Estimates,” U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2019,
https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=CA#tabs-3.

9. “State Energy Data System (SEDS): 1960–2017,” United States Energy Information Administration,
2019, https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/seds-data-complete.php?sid=US#StatisticsIndicators.

10. Steve Hanley, “Germany Breaks a Solar Record – Gets 85% of Electricity from Renewables,”
CleanTechnica, May 8, 2017, https://cleantechnica.com/2017/05/08/germany-breaks-solar-record-gets-
85-electricity-renewables/.

11. “Cities Are Ready for 100% Clean Energy: 10 Case Studies,” Sierra Club,
https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/www.sierraclub.org/files/blog/RF100-Case-Studies-Cities-Report.pdf.

12. Robert C. Allen, “Backward Into the Future: The Shift to Coal and Implications for the Next Energy
Transition,” Energy Policy 50 (November 2012): 17–23.

13. S. Carley and M. Graff, “A Just U.S. Energy Transition,” in Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy,
ed. D. Konisky (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020) (forthcoming).

14. Roger Fouquet, “Historical Energy Transitions: Speed, Prices and System Transformation,” Energy
Research & Social Science 22 (December 2016): 7–12.

15. Gregory Unruh, “Understanding Carbon Lock-In,” Energy Policy 28, no 12 (October 2000): 817–30.

16. Arnulf Grubler, “Energy Transitions Research: Insights and Cautionary Tales,” Energy Policy 50
(2012): 8–16, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2012.02.070.
17. See, e.g., Roger Fouquet, “Historical Energy Transitions: Speed, Prices and System
Transformation,” Energy Research & Social Science 22 (2016): 7–12; or Arnulf Grubler, “Energy
Transitions Research: Insights and Cautionary Tales,” Energy Policy 50 (2012): 8–16.

18. C. Lampe-Onnerud and J. Kortenhorst, “The Speed of the Energy Transition: Gradual or Rapid
Change?” World Economic Forum White Paper, September 2019.

19. Hanna Breetz, Matto Mildenberger, and Leah Stokes, “The Political Logics of Clean Energy
Transitions,” Business and Politics 20 (2018): 492–522.

20. Robert C. Allen, “Backward Into the Future: The Shift to Coal and Implications for the Next Energy
Transition,” Energy Policy 50 (November 2012): 17–23.

21. Richard Newell, Daniel Raimi, and Gloria Aldana, “Global Energy Outlook 2019: The Next
Generation of Energy,” Resources for the Future Report 19-06, July 2019.

22. “2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming,” Carbon Tracker, 2018,
https://www.carbontracker.org/reports/2020-vision-why-you-should-see-the-fossil-fuel-peak-coming/.

23. Matto Mildenberger, Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate (MIT Press, 2020).

24. Robert J. Brulle, “The Climate Lobby: A Sectoral Analysis of Lobbying Spending on Climate Change
in the USA, 2000 to 2016,” Climatic Change 149 (2018): 289, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2241-
z.

25. “Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis-Version 13.0,” Lazard, 2019,

https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-130-vf.pdf.

26. Cary Funk and Meg Hefferon, “U.S. Public Views on Climate and Energy,” Pew Research Center,
2019. [PDF file], https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-views-on-climate-and-
energy/.

27. “Little Change in Opinions about Global Warming,” Pew Research Center U.S. Politics & Policy, Pew
Research Center, 2010, https://www.people-press.org/2010/10/27/little-change-in-opinions-about-global-
warming/.

28. “Americans’ Opinion on Renewables and Other Energy Sources,” Pew Research Center Science &
Society, Pew Research Center, 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2016/10/04/public-opinion-
on-renewables-and-other-energy-sources/.

29. Susan F. Tierney, “The U.S. Coal Industry: Challenging Transitions in the 21st Century,” 2016.

30. “State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency,” North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center,
2019, accessed October 18, 2019.

31. Galen Barbose, “U.S. Renewables Portfolio Standards: Preliminary 2018 Annual Status Report,”
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, April 26, 2018.

32 “State Energy Data System (SEDS): 1960–2017,” United States Energy Information Administration,
2019, https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/seds-data-complete.php?sid=US#StatisticsIndicators.

33 “Renewables 2019 Global Status Report,” REN21, ISBN 978-3-9818911-7-1, 2019,

https://www.ren21.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/gsr_2019_full_report_en.pdf.

34. Sanya Carley, Lincoln Davies, David Spence, and Nikolaos Zirogiannis, “Empirical Evaluation of the
Stringency and Design of Renewable Portfolio Standards,” Nature Energy 3 (July 2018): 754–63.
35. Galen Barbose, “U.S. Renewables Portfolio Standards: 2018 Annual Status Report,” Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, November 2018.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Sanya Carley, Lincoln L. Davies, David B. Spence, and Nikolaos Zirogiannis, “Empirical Evaluation
of the Stringency and Design of Renewable Portfolio Standards,” Nature Energy 3 (July 2018): 754–63.

39. Ryan Wiser, Trieu Mai, Dev Millstein, Galen Barbose, Lori Bird, Jenny Heeter, David Keyser, Venkat
Krishnan, and Jordan Macknick, “Assessing the Costs and Benefits of US Renewable Portfolio
Standards,” IOP Publishing, September 2017, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-
9326/aa87bd/.

40. Eric Martinot, “Grid Integration of Renewable Energy: Flexibility, Innovation, and Experience,”
Annual Review of Environment and Resources 41 (November 2016): 223–51.

41. Paul Denholm, Matthew O’Connell, George Brinkman, and Jennie Jorgenson, “Overgeneration from
Solar Energy in California: A Field Guide to the Duck Chart,” National Renewable Energy Laboratory,
NREL/TP-6A20-65023, November 2015, https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/65023.pdf.

42. Alex Hollingsworth and Ivan Rudik, “External Impacts of Local Energy Policy: The Case of
Renewable Portfolio Standards,” Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists
6, no. 1 (January 2019), https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/700419.

43. Sara K. Adair and F. T. Litz, “Understanding the Interaction Between Regional Electricity Markets
and State Policies,” Nicholas Institute Primer, November 2017.

44. S.B. 5116, 66th Legislature for the State of Washington, 2019, https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?
BillNumber=5116&Year=2019&initiative=#documentSection

45. Ibid.

46. Antonio M. Bento, Kenneth Gillingham, Mark R. Jacobsen, Christopher R. Knittel, Benjamin Leard,
Joshua Linn, Virginia McConnell, David Rapson, James M. Sallee, Arthur A. van Benthem, and Kare S.
Whitefoot. “Flawed Analyses of U.S. Auto Fuel Economy Standards,” Science 352 (2018): 1119–21.

47. Sanya Carley, Nikolaos Zirogiannis, Denvil Duncan, Saba Siddiki, and John D. Graham,
“Overcoming the Shortcomings of U.S. Plug-in Electric Vehicle Policies,” Renewable and Sustainable
Energy Reviews 113 (2019): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2019.109291

48. Ibid.

49. Cale Jaffe, “Melting the Polarization Around Climate Change Politics,” Georgetown Environmental
Law Review 30, no. 3 (2018): 455–98.

50. Joshua Linn and Virginia McConnell, “The Role of State Policies under Federal Light-Duty Vehicle
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards,” Resources for the Future Report, June 2017.

51. Ibid.

52. Thomas Klier and Joshua Linn, “The Effect of Vehicle Fuel Economy Standards on Technology
Adoption,” Journal of Public Economics 133 (January 2016): 41–63.

53. See note 50.

54. Kenneth Gillingham, David Rapson, and Gernot Wagner, “The Rebound Effect and Energy
Efficiency Policy,” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 10, no. 1 (2016): 68–88.

55. Mark R. Jacobsen and Arthur A. van Benthem, “Vehicle Scrappage and Gasoline Policy,” American
Economic Review 105, no. 3 (March 2015): 1312–38.

56. Jay Apt, Scott B. Peterson, and J. F. Whitacre, “Battery Vehicles Reduce CO2 Emissions,” Science
333, no. 6044 (August 2011): 823.

57. Sanya Carley, Nikolaos Zirogiannis, Denvil Duncan, Saba Siddiki, and John D. Graham,
“Overcoming the Shortcomings of U.S. Plug-in Electric Vehicle Policies,” Renewable and Sustainable
Energy Reviews 113 (2019): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2019.109291.

58. “Summary Report for the Technical Analysis of the Light Duty Standards,” California Air Resources
Board [CARB] California’s Advanced Clean Cars Midterm Review, 2017.

59. “Advanced Technology Vehicle Sales Dashboard,” Auto Alliance, Data compiled by the Alliance of
Automobile Manufacturers using information provided by HIS Markit, August 20, 2019,
https://autoalliance.org/energy-environment/advanced-technology-vehicle-sale=dashboard/, accessed
December 13, 2019.

60. J. H. Wesseling, J. C. M. Farla, D. Sperling, M. P. Hekkert, “Car Manufacturers’ Changing Political

Strategies on the ZEV Mandate,” Transportation and Environment 33 (2014): 196–209.

61. Ibid.

62. Saba Siddiki, Sanya Carley, Nikolaos Zirogiannis, Denvil Duncan, and John D. Graham, “Does
Dynamic Federalism Yield Compatible Policies? A Study of Federal and State Vehicle Standards,”
Policy Design and Practice 1, no. 3 (2018): 215–32.

63. David L. Greene, Sangsoo Park, and Changzheng Liu, “Public Policy and the Transition to Electric
Drive Vehicles in the U.S.: The Role of the Zero Emission Vehicles Mandates,” Energy Strategy Reviews
5 (2014): 66–77.

64. Sanya Carley, Nikolaos Zirogiannis, Denvil Duncan, Saba Siddiki, and John D. Graham,
“Overcoming the Shortcomings of U.S. Plug-in Electric Vehicle Policies,” Renewable and Sustainable
Energy Reviews 113 (2019): 1–10.

65. Ibid.

66. David L. Greene, Sangsoo Park, and Changzheng Liu, “Public Policy and the Transition to Electric
Drive Vehicles in the U.S.: The Role of the Zero Emission Vehicles Mandates,” Energy Strategy Reviews
5 (2014): 66–77; and Julio C. Zambrano-Gutierrez, Sean Nicholson-Crotty, Sanya Carley, and Saba
Siddiki, “The Role of Public Policy in Technology Diffusion: The case of Plug-in Electric Vehicles,”
Environmental Science & Technology 52, no. 19 (September 2018): 10914–22.

67. “Database for State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency,” North Carolina Clean Energy
Technology Center, Renewable and Clean Energy Standards (2020), accessed July 1, 2020.

68. Ibid.

69. “Energy Efficiency: A Good Investment for Ohio,” Midwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, n.d.,
http://www.mwalliance.org/sites/default/files/media/Ohio-State-Fact-Sheet.pdf?
current=/taxonomy/term/11.

70. “Industry Profile: Electric Utilities,” Center for Responsive Politics, 2019,
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=E08&year=2018&filter=P.
71. National Public Radio, “Ohio House Speaker Arrested in Connection with $60 Million Bribery
Scheme,” 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/07/21/893493224/ohio-house-speaker-arrested-in-
connection-to-60-million-bribery-scheme.

72. Kathiann M. Kowalski, “Campaign Contributions Pay Off for Ohio Utilities and Coal Interests,”
Energy News Network, March 5, 2020.

73. Hana Breetz, Matto Mildenberger, and Leah Stokes, “The Political Logics of Clean Energy
Transition,” Business and Politics 20, no. 4 (2018): 492–522, https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2018.14.

74. “Nevada Net Energy Metering Impacts Evaluation,” Energy and Environmental Economics, July
2014,
http://puc.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/pucnvgov/Content/About/Media_Outreach/Announcements/Announcem
ents/E3%20PUCN%20NEM%20Report%202014.pdf?pdf=Net-Metering-Study.

75. Sanya Carley and Lincoln L. Davies, “Nevada’s Net Energy Metering Experience: The Making of a
Policy Eclipse?” Brookings Mountain West Report, 2016.

76. Noah Buhayar, “Who Owns the Sun?” Bloomberg Business Week, January 28, 2016.

77. Katie Fehrenbacher, “Why Nevada Brought Back Favorable Rates for Existing Solar Customers,”
September 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/09/16/nevada-solar-grandfathering/, accessed October 5,
2016.

78. Scott Lucas, “In NLV Speech, Sanders Calls PUC Solar Decision ‘Just about the Dumbest Thing I
Ever Heard,’” Las Vegas Sun, December 28, 2015, http://lasvegassun.com/news/2015/dec/28/in-nlv-
speech-bernie-sanders-calls-puc-solar-decis/, accessed October 5, 2016.

79. “Database for State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency,” North Carolina Clean Energy
Technology Center, Renewable and Clean Energy Standards, 2020, accessed July 1, 2020.

80. “North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center,” The 50 States of Grid Modernization: 2019
Review and Q4 2019 Quarterly Report, February 2020.

81. “About REV,” Reforming the Energy Vision (REV),

https://www.ny.gov/sites/ny.gov/files/atoms/files/WhitePaperREVMarch2016.pdf.

82. “REV Initiatives,” Reforming the Energy Vision (REV),

https://www.ny.gov/sites/ny.gov/files/atoms/files/WhitePaperREVMarch2016.pdf.

83. “ISOC: Integrated Smart Operations Center,” NY Power Authority, www.nypa.gov/services/digital-

energy-services/isoc.

84. “NY Energy Manager,” NY Power Authority, www.nypa.gov/services/digital-energy-services/ny-

energy-manager.

85. Joseph Nyangon and John Byrne, “Diversifying Electric Customer Choice: REVing Up the New York
Energy Vision for Polycentric Innovation,” Energy Systems and Environment (2018): 4–19,
http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.76023.

86. Elizabeth Doris and Kim Peterson, “Government Program Briefing: Smart Metering,” National
Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL/TP-7A30-52788, September 2011,
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/52788.pdf.

87. Matthew S. Stern and Kevin B. Jones, “Salt River Project: Delivering Leadership on Smarter
Technology & Rates,” Institute for Energy and the Environment, June 2012,
https://www.vermontlaw.edu/sites/default/files/Assets/iee/SRP-Report-Final-120618.pdf.
88. “The Smart Grid Done Right: Phoenix’s Salt River Project,” Elster, 2011,
https://www.elstersolutions.com/assets/downloads/WP42-6003A_SaltRiverProject_DoneRight.pdf.

89. Judith Schwartz, “Case Study: Salt River Project—The Persistence of Customer Choice,” Presented
at the National Forum of the National Action Plan on Demand Response, June 2012,
https://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/demand-response/dr-potential/napdr-srp.pdf.

90. Leah Stokes and Hanna L. Breetz, “Politics in the U.S. Energy Transition: Case Studies of Solar,
Wind, Biofuels and Electric Vehicles Policy,” Energy Policy 113 (February 2018): 76–86.

91. Ibid.
Descriptions of Images and Figures
Back to Figure

The graph depicts the change in electricity production for ten sources. The period of estimation is from
1990 to 2017. The change is measured in megawatt-hours. The year 1990 saw a total of 3,037.7, while
2017 saw a total of 4,008.3. The various sources and their percentage of change is as follows: coal
(-386.1), petroleum (-105.4), geothermal (+0.5), other (+3.8), hydro (+7.2), biomass (+18.2), solar
(+52.6), nuclear (+228.1), wind (+221.5), and natural gas (+900.1).

Back to Figure

The map of the United States depicts the states with binding renewable portfolio standards in 2020.
They are as follows: Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado,
Montana, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont,
Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland,
North Carolina, and Hawaii.

Back to Figure

The bar diagram is a detailed depiction of the cumulative sales for the period 2011–2019 versus the
sales needed by 2025 of zero-emission vehicle goals. The states taken into account and their
cumulative sales and sales needed by 2025, respectively, are detailed as follows: California (590,
1,500), New York (5, 1000), Colorado (2, 905), New Jersey (2, 305), Massachusetts (4, 300), Maryland
(3, 290), Connecticut (1, 150), Oregon (3, 145), Maine (0, 50), Rhode Island (0, 40), and Vermont (0,
30).
9 NATURAL RESOURCE POLICIES IN AN ERA OF
POLARIZED POLITICS
—William R. Lowry and John Freemuth
Sage-grouse, a bird a bit larger than a crow but with a larger, roundish body, smallish head, and long
tail, have been affected since the beginning of settlement of the West and, by 1995, were in a serious
decline. Conservation efforts began that year and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the
Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the US Forest Service (USFS) have worked together to
develop a conservation strategy over the range of the species. However, resolution of the issue has
been subject to increased polarization, politics, and policy reversals (Figure 9.1).

Description

Figure 9.1 Sage-Grouse Habitat

In 2002, the George W. Bush administration’s USFWS received the first of three petitions to list the
greater sage-grouse as threatened over its 11-state range. In 2004, some of its actions leaked to the
press, including a key document containing inappropriate edits made by a higher-level political
appointee in the Department of the Interior (DOI). The Inspector General for DOI found that the
appointee had inappropriately changed the assessment document. Although she resigned, the Bush
administration issued a “not warranted” decision on listing. Federal district Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled
that the determination not to list the sage-grouse was “arbitrary and capricious.” The agency, in a
settlement agreement, agreed to issue a new finding by May 2009. In 2010, USFWS ruled that the
sage-grouse was at risk of extinction, but declined to list it, asserting that the listing was “warranted but
precluded” because the agency had dedicated its resources to actions with a higher priority. However,
the agency and others pledged to take steps to restore sagebrush habitat and in a court settlement,
agreed to issue a listing decision by 2015.

In 2011, the Obama administration launched a concerted effort with federal and state agencies,
nongovernmental organizations, and private landowners to develop plans to avoid an Endangered
Species Act (ESA) listing. Policymakers in California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming
all developed plans for conserving sage-grouse habitat, while the USFS and BLM revised 98 land use
plans in 10 states. The US Department of Agriculture provided funding for voluntary conservation
actions on private lands.

In 2015, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, joined by a bipartisan group of Western governors, announced
that these actions had reduced threats to sage-grouse habitat so effectively that a listing was no longer
necessary. Despite the good feelings, some conflicts remained unresolved. The plan belatedly created
zones called Sagebrush Focal Areas—zones deemed essential for the sage-grouse to survive—and
proposed to bar mineral development on 10 million acres within those areas. Some Western governors
viewed these as surprises and developers objected.

In March 2017, the United States District Court for Nevada ruled that the Obama administration violated
the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by not preparing a supplemental Environmental Impact
Statement (EIS) about the designation of the Focal Areas, that EIS would have allowed for public
comment on the focal area additions.

Subsequently, the Trump Interior Department decided not to create Focal Areas and allowed
development in these zones to expand. Agency records show that as officials reevaluated the sage-
grouse plan in 2017, they worked closely with oil, gas, and mining industry representatives, but not with
environmental advocates. The administration then revised the plans developed by the previous
administration. However, in October 2019, US District Judge Winmill granted a preliminary injunction
that stopped the implementation of the Trump administration’s sage-grouse plan revisions, asserting
that environmental groups that sued to stop the plans would likely prevail in court. This court action puts
the Obama-era plans back in place. Winmill’s decision will be appealed, but it stands for now.
INTRODUCTION
Our thesis regarding natural resource policies is straightforward. As the sage-grouse case illustrates,
politics matters. More specifically, natural resource policies are often based on short-term electoral or
partisan decisions more than science, economics, the resource, or any long-term goals based on
information or facts. This has always been true for natural resource policies to some extent, but it is
even more apparent in recent years. The divergence between the Democratic and Republican parties in
this policy area has grown to a chasm, and differences on policies, such as those on the sage-grouse,
are often rigid and intense. We will cite some counterexamples, but in most cases, these days the two
parties pursue very different policies regarding natural resources. And while the COVID-19 pandemic
affected natural resources, partisan differences over governing policies on these issues neither changed
nor diminished. Thus, policies are usually short term and inconsistent, and their impact problematic for
natural resources that depend on long-term, sustainable management.

The chapter is organized as follows. We first provide some broader context with discussion of key
statutes and then the factors that make political resolution of natural resource conflicts contentious. The
result is often gridlock in Congress and unilateral actions by presidents. Thus, the second section
examines the impact of politics on the public agencies that carry out agendas of presidents when
implementing natural resource policies. The third section discusses some underlying trends in natural
resource policies that continue across presidential administrations and shape policies currently and in
the future.
EVOLUTION OF NATURAL RESOURCE POLICIES
North America was blessed with an abundance of natural resources. However, as those resources
became scarcer over time, controversies and conflicts increased. This led to the development of key
institutions and policies to govern them.
Historical Development
For centuries, humans used natural resources with little concern of exhausting them, but that changed
in the nineteenth century when Americans intensified development of natural areas. People would move
into an area, use up available resources, and move on. In the late nineteenth century, user groups as
well as conservationists requested the creation of federal agencies to provide some oversight and
balance between short-term usage and long-term needs.1 Achieving this balance in natural resource
policies has always been a challenge and policies almost inevitably favor one priority over another.
Through the late 1960s, the two major parties did not automatically line up on different sides of an issue
and important policies such as the Wilderness Act of 1964 passed by strong, bipartisan majorities.

By the early 1970s, most of the major formal institutions governing natural resource policies were in
place. Four federal agencies administer most American federal lands. The exact amounts are always
changing, but in 2017, the federal government owned nearly 650 million acres (about 28 percent of the
total land mass). While these agencies have their own priorities, as discussed later, certain key statutes
affect them all. Rulemaking on federal lands and species is supposed to take place according to the
notice-and-comment rulemaking procedures established by the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946. If
actions potentially affect the environment, they are subject to review under the NEPA of 1970.
Wilderness areas established according to the process specified in the Wilderness Act of 1964 are to be
set aside and maintained in pristine, roadless condition. The ESA of 1973 governs the protection of
threatened and endangered species. Provisions in the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts affect all federal
lands.

While collaboration between the two major political parties shaped the formation of many of these
governing institutions, events in the middle and latter half of the 1970s reduced the chances of future
consensus. As discussed in Chapter 8 on energy policy, oil shortages and higher gasoline prices shook
American assumptions of continuing abundance of oil at cheap prices and were replaced by debates
about conservation, production, and development of domestic supplies.2 Much of the readily accessible
crude oil and natural gas (this is before fracking opened other possible pools) in the country existed on
public lands. The Republican Party began to demand more access and usage of these lands for fossil
fuels, whereas the Democrats increasingly preferred the development of alternative sources of energy
rather than accelerated tapping of public lands. This fissure in the relations between parties in natural
resource grew.
Increasingly Contentious
Natural resource policies have become increasingly contentious since the 1970s. The divergence
between the two parties in American politics in recent decades has been well documented and is
discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. In short, the two parties have established different priorities, aligned with
different interest groups, and mobilized different bases to get elected. Polarization is seen in nearly
every issue area, including environmental, energy, and natural resource policies. Several factors make
natural resource issues even more subject to partisan tensions.

One factor is that natural resource issues are not decided just at the federal level. Natural resources are
also subject to policy impacts from state and local governments. Compared to the 650 million acres
owned by the federal government, state governments own about 200 million. Every state has its own
state park system, varying widely in terms of degree of development and protection.3 The vast majority
of states also have their own version of ESAs. Finally, much of the mineral and oil and gas development
occurring today is potentially subject to state and local oversight as well as federal subsurface
management by BLM. Politics at the state level add another level of potential partisan conflict.

A second factor is that many natural resource issues have a regional hue. Hostility towards the federal
presence in the form of public lands is occasionally quite high in the western states, as evidenced by the
recent takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon that we discuss in more detail later. At the
federal level, this regional hostility takes on a partisan dimension. For instance, lawmakers introduced
over 100 bills in Congress between 2011 and 2016 that called for the privatization or diminution of
federal lands, nearly all involving Republican legislators from western states. The dominance of the
Republican Party in many western states, in contrast to Democratic dominance on the coasts, only
intensifies party differences on natural resource issues.

A third factor making natural resource policies contentious is that people have strong feelings about
these issues. Most Americans value their public lands quite highly, expressing their support through
public opinion polls regarding national parks and ballot measures for funding at state and local levels.4
Broadly stated support does not always translate, however, to consensus on what to do with those lands
and species. People have widely different views as to what purposes those lands should serve. Thus, a
multitude of interest groups advocate for different policies. Organizations on both sides of natural
resource issues have been intense and willing to use both legal and extralegal tactics to achieve their
goals. Since the 1970s, the Republican Party aligned with development organizations while the
Democratic Party aligned with traditional environmental groups.

Events during these decades also pushed the parties and their supportive groups even further apart.
Controversies over endangered species motivated Republican efforts to alter the ESA that continue to
this day. The Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989 strengthened the resolve of
environmental groups and Democrats in Congress to stop some oil exploration in Alaska. Perhaps the
ultimate issue driving the parties apart, at least since 1988, has been climate change. The impacts on
natural resources, from glaciers to species, inspire debates that typically form along party lines. In all
three of those cases, partisan divisions have prevented legislative resolution. Indeed, in general,
Congress has rarely been able to pass significant natural resource policies in recent decades.

Two pieces of legislation ten years apart seem to provide exceptions to that rule. First, in 2009,
Congress passed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act that provided protection for more than 2
million acres of wilderness and over 1,000 miles of wild and scenic rivers. The bill provided considerable
benefits for many states and districts, including wilderness areas in nine different states and ten national
heritage areas. Supporters of the bill used those distributional effects to overcome ideological gridlock
and get overwhelming majorities for passage. Similarly, in 2019, Congress passed the John Dingell
Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. The legislation combined over 100 other pieces of
legislation into one bill, the most important provision being to reinvigorate the Land and Water
Conservation Fund (LWCF). Since 1964, the LWCF has used royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling
to fund numerous projects such as matching grants for state and local parks. The LWCF has been
inconsistently utilized but the 2019 legislation attempted a permanent reauthorization. The legislation
also provided protection for millions of acres of land and hundreds of miles of rivers.

Closer examination of both these pieces of legislation, however, reveals numerous compromises such
as allowing hunting in natural areas. These provisions facilitated support from constituencies, such as
hunters, as part of a broader coalition. Broad coalitions do not, however, translate to support for
controversial measures and neither act took meaningful action on issues such as regulation of
greenhouse gas emissions on public lands or the protection of endangered species.5 Instead, as one
analysis summarized the 2019 act, “the hodgepodge bill offered something for nearly everyone,
stretching across the country.”6 Congress finalized the legislation as the Great American Outdoors Act
and President Trump signed it into law in August 2020.

Congress is much more capable of building support across party lines if it focuses on distributional
policies such as spending money for individual projects even while it remains gridlocked when
attempting to provide significant legislation on controversial issues.
NATURAL RESOURCE AGENCIES AND POLICIES
While Congress and the president set broad goals and priorities, putting policies into effect on the
ground (literally in the case of natural resources) is the responsibility of public agencies. With Congress
usually stuck in partisan gridlock, presidents have shown an increasing tendency to act unilaterally,
typically through public agencies, rather than pursuing broad-based legislation. We describe the actions
of key natural resource agencies below.

Before discussing specific agencies, several differences between the two most recent administrations
affect all natural resource agencies. First, the administrations have pursued different priorities. The
Obama administration emphasized science in appointments and actions, including politically
controversial natural resource topics such as the permitting of coal mines and signing on to the Paris
Climate Accord. President Trump and his administration, to the contrary, substantially deemphasized
science by appointing lobbyists rather than scientists to head agencies, suppressing scientific studies
that undermined political goals, politicizing the grant-making process and restricting scientific
communication on numerous issues, particularly climate change.7 Second, as Chapter 4 makes clear
and Appendix 1 shows, budgets for recent administrations differ between Democratic and Republican
presidents. The Trump administration cut budgets for all natural resource programs other than those
involving recreation. Third, perhaps in no area are the administrations more different than in the use of
regulations. The Democratic Party under President Obama supported the use of regulations on the
protection of public lands, oil and gas drilling in federal areas, and rules for offshore oil drilling, among
others that are discussed elsewhere in this volume. The offshore oil reforms followed the Deepwater
Horizon oil spill of 2010, a disaster magnified by the failures of several federal agencies. The Trump
administration reversed Obama-era regulations in these areas as well as more long-term rules such as
protections for endangered species. The administration’s deregulatory efforts have prompted numerous
legal challenges as discussed in Chapter 6.

Table 9.1 lists the five agencies most responsible for natural resource policies. Other agencies that
affect these policies are discussed fully elsewhere in this volume, notably the EPA in Chapter 7 and the
Department of Energy in Chapter 8.
Table 9.1 Natural Resource Agencies

Agency Mission Controversies

Department of Overall management of public Conflicting mandates and missions;
the Interior lands and resources inconsistent priorities
Bureau of Land Manage uses of rangelands Politics determines grazing and mining fees;
Management sustainably extensive oil + gas development
National Park Protect the nation’s parklands for Politics affects balance between preservation
Service the future but allow for use and use; creation of monuments
Fish and Manage refuges and protect Low funding; political pressures on listing
Wildlife Service endangered species species and allowing uses on refuges
Forest Service Multiple-use doctrine to manage Politics determines priorities of usage;
national forests for perpetuity species protection and roadless areas
Department of the Interior
The DOI plays a major role in shaping natural resource policies. Created by a reorganization of several
federal agencies in 1849, the DOI is a collection of different agencies that have some relation to
American lands. Indeed, even people at the DOI refer to the agency as the “Department of Everything
Else” because it has so many diverse responsibilities. Specific to natural resources, the DOI oversees
about 75 percent of federal public land as well as nearly 2 billion acres offshore. Three of the agencies
discussed below are located in DOI. Over its history, the DOI has seen controversy as a result of the
conflicting mandates of the agencies within as well as inconsistent priorities from different
administrations.

In recent years, the influence of partisan politics has been notably evident in terms of White House
appointments. The secretaries of the DOI under President Obama were a moderate Senator from
Colorado, Ken Salazar, whose appointment received a mixed reception among conservation groups,
and Sally Jewell, a former oil engineer. The first head of DOI under President Trump, Ryan Zinke, was a
former representative from Montana who resigned under pressure in 2019, while under investigation for
expenditures of federal money for private purposes. Zinke’s replacement, David Bernhardt, had been a
key lobbyist for the oil and gas industry before becoming Zinke’s assistant.
Bureau of Land Management
The nation’s largest landlord, the BLM, administers over 200 million acres of range and grassland,
largely available for grazing and mining and energy development. The BLM was created through a
reorganization of existing land agencies in 1946 at the behest of cattle ranchers who could not control
their own tendencies to overgraze the low-vegetation lands of the American West. The agency did not
receive a clear mission statement and, over time, it came to serve its one primary client, livestock
interests.8 As the agency’s responsibilities grew to include governance of mining claims on many federal
lands, critics often derisively referred to BLM as the “bureau of livestock and mining.”

The title derives largely from the fact that both grazing and mining on federal lands are governed by
systems that charge low user fees. Grazing fees for animals on federal land are many times lower than
fees on state or private lands. Mining fees are still determined by the 1872 Mining Law wherein people
or companies finding hard-rock minerals on federal land patent their claims at minimal prices and then
pay no royalties. As a result, the lands under BLM control can be overgrazed or damaged by large
mining operations.9 To a significant extent, the BLM is not to blame for this situation but rather operates
under mandates from Congress. Grazing fees are set each year by Congress, and members,
particularly from western states, traditionally refuse to substantially increase those fees. Members from
western states, including Democrats such as Harry Reid of Nevada, have also refused to significantly
revise the 1872 Mining Law.

Being somewhat powerless then, the BLM is subject to the demands and preferences of whatever
President is in power. Thus, under the Trump administration, the BLM has offered lease sales on
millions of acres of land for oil and gas development. The acting head of BLM in 2020, William Perry
Pendley, was a Deputy Secretary under James Watt in the 1980s; Watt was removed from office under
allegations of offering coal leases at below-market prices. The case study at the outset of this chapter
on the sage-grouse is illustrative of the conflicts facing the BLM.
National Park Service
The National Park Service (NPS) manages about 85 million acres in 419 units, including 61 national
parks as well as national monuments, battlefields, and recreation areas. The agency was established in
1916 with a mandate to provide for short-term use as well as long-term protection, a perpetual source of
tension.10 Partisan fights over agency operations have intensified in recent years.

At the level of the entire system, partisan fights over budgets have severely affected needed resources.
The operating budget for the NPS has actually declined in terms of constant dollars. Total funding in
nominal dollars between 2005 and 2014 increased from $2.27 billion to $3.1 billion (15 percent) but,
when adjusted for inflation, this was an actual decline of 3 percent.11 Since 2011, the number of full-time
NPS employees has declined by 16 percent.12 These cuts occurred at the same time that the agency
was dealing with increased visitation and a backlog of needed repairs to infrastructure. Visitation
increased by over 20 percent, from 274 million in 2005 to a record 331 million in 2017.13 The NPS
currently has an estimated $12 billion maintenance backlog of needed repairs.14

Within individual units, including the most famous sites, polarized politics and the swings that come with
different partisan priorities preclude significant progress on long-term plans. For example, partisan
disagreements over priorities and budgets have resulted in only incremental progress on long-standing
plans to reduce automobile usage in Yosemite.15 Buffeted by polarized interests and parties,
Yellowstone park managers have struggled to formulate and implement a plan for snowmobiles in the
winter that makes ecological sense.16 At the Everglades, an ambitious restoration plan for increasing
freshwater flows signed into law by President Clinton has suffered from inconsistent funding and broken
promises.17 These and other cases affecting every park unit from Shenandoah to the Grand Canyon
warrant much further discussion, but suffice it to say that even the nation’s most precious lands are not
immune to impacts from partisan politics.

Politicization of the NPS has increased during the Trump years. Personnel have been shuffled or
replaced, based on their policy positions, the most visible being Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk,
a 43-year veteran, who was pressured to retire after taking positions protecting park bison that were
contrary to the views of nearby ranchers.18 In early 2018, nine of the twelve members of the NPS
Advisory Board resigned in protest of administration policies. In 2019, the NPS was put in the center of
one of the most visible controversies of recent years. Unable to get congressional funding for a wall on
the Mexican border, President Trump ordered NPS rangers from as far away as the Great Smoky
Mountains (NC) and Wrangell-St. Elias (AK) to relocate to Arizona to work with the US Border Patrol.19
During the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration displayed confusion over
whether to close popular units of the park system, at first promoting visitation and then allowing them to
be closed as criticism increased over the health of park employees and visitors.20

Perhaps the most visible partisan conflict involving the NPS during the Trump administration has
centered on national monuments created under the Antiquities Act (Box 9.1).

Box 9.1

Case Study of the Antiquities Act

Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 to conserve the stunning archaeological treasures
of the American Southwest. Sites include dwellings such as the Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree
House in what is now Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. Spurred on by vandalism and
looting in such places, Congress passed the “Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities” on
June 8, 1906. Almost every president except Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W.
 Bush has used the Antiquities Act. Many well-known national parks were first designated as
national monuments, including the Grand Canyon, Zion, Death Valley, Acadia, and Olympic. The
law’s key provision states:

That the President of the United States is hereby authorized, in his discretion, to declare
by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other
objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or
controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments…

The two monuments of relevance here are Grand Staircase Escalante, proclaimed by President
Clinton in 1996, and Bears Ears proclaimed by President Obama in 2016. They are shown in
Figures 9.2 and 9.3. President Trump reduced Bears Ears National Monument, from 1.3 million
acres to 228,000 acres. The administration cut Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
nearly in half, from 1.9 million acres to about one million acres. As one recent study shows,
Trump took this and other actions despite the fact that of 2.8 million comments submitted to the
DOI in 2017 on his administration’s review of the status of National Monuments, 99 percent
opposed the review and 80 percent of respondents polled in western states supported keeping
monument designations intact.21 As expected, a number of lawsuits followed that challenge the
power of a president to reduce the size of a monument proclaimed by a prior president.

Description

Figure 9.2 Grand Staircase Escalante

Description

Figure 9.3 Bears Ears National Monuments

Fish and Wildlife Service
The USFWS is responsible for roughly 89 million acres in 568 wildlife refuges, many in Alaska. The
product of several congressional resolutions and some predecessor agencies, the modern FWS dates
to a 1970 reorganization. One summary describes the FWS as having “the most chaotic organizational
history” of all public lands agencies that leads to a “weak position in the federal bureaucracy.”22 The
agency lacks a strong, specific mandate, but is expected to manage the nation’s fish and wildlife
species. Having fish and animals as constituents does not help the agency’s status with other federal
entities such as Congress. As the saying goes, bears don’t vote. Thus, the FWS is notoriously
underfunded and understaffed. That situation has become even more dire in recent years. Specifically,
the overall Refuge System budget, never large to begin with, dropped by 18 percent between 2010 and
2019. The number of refuge officers dropped by 65 percent between 1990 and 2015 to only 318.23
Wildlife refuges are thus vulnerable to criticism and even hostile takeovers from antigovernment groups
such as what happened in 2014 when a property rights militia occupied the Malheur Refuge in eastern
Oregon.24 Illustrative of the political manipulation of the agency, in 2018 President Trump pardoned the
ranchers whose prosecution inspired the takeover.

At the heart of the mission for the FWS is enforcement of the ESA. In large part, the legislation is
controversial because it calls for the listing and protection of species based on “biological grounds
alone.” Thus, the ESA has been the target of critics who claim it impedes economic development and
infringes on property rights. Controversies over endangered species have intensified in recent years
because listed species warrant protection and for some, such as polar bears, that would require
addressing climate change. Not surprisingly then, Republicans in Congress have attempted to revise or
even repeal this legislation numerous times in the last five decades. Consistent with the gridlock
argument discussed earlier, Democrats have stopped Republican efforts and continued to fund the
program, albeit at varying levels depending on the party of the presidential administration. In addition,
the number of species listed for protection varies dramatically by the party of the president. The Clinton
administration listed 522 species; the subsequent Bush administration listed only 62, while 268 were
listed under Obama.25

Very few species have been listed under the ESA during the Trump years. Instead, in 2019, despite a
just-released United Nations report claiming a million species at risk worldwide including many in the
United States, the Trump administration announced a plan to revise implementation of the law.
Specifically, for the first time ever, economic impacts of listing species would be considered in
determining protections. Further, listings would not factor in climate change. While the lineup of political
parties on opposite sides of the proposal was predictable, so too were the reactions of environmental
groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity as well as seventeen states who sued to stop the rule
change.26

While the FWS has often been characterized as struggling to protect species, they have had some
success stories. Indeed, some 39 species, from bald eagles to American alligators, have been delisted
due to recovery rates. Critics cite this low number as evidence of failure, but in fact over 1,600 species
have been protected under the ESA and only 11 have gone extinct.27 For many Americans, the ultimate
success story of public agencies, specifically the NPS and FWS, fulfilling their conservation mandate is
that of the Yellowstone wolves (Box 9.2).

Box 9.2

Case Study of the Yellowstone Wolves

Seeing or even hearing wolves in the wild is a truly remarkable experience. Yet, for decades, it
was nearly impossible to do so in the continental United States. In the western United States,
livestock interests despised gray wolves as the enemies of cattle and sheep and encouraged the
federal government as well as ranchers and trappers to virtually eliminate gray wolves from their
natural habitat in the northern Rocky Mountains. The loss of this predator caused significant
changes in the ecosystem. In particular, elk and coyote populations increased dramatically. This
in turn resulted in devastation of vegetation, erosion of stream beds, and declines in the
populations of other animals such as beavers.

Thus, in the 1960s and 1970s, biologists from the FWS and NPS, as well as some environmental
groups, began advocating for the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park and
central Idaho. Those calls inspired intense opposition from livestock interests in Wyoming and
Montana and their allies in Congress. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, those supporting
restoration expanded the sphere of conflict over the issue to involve the American public who, by
overwhelming majorities, supported reintroduction.28

In 1994 and 1995, wildlife managers released 31 wolves into the park. They thrived and
reproduced at rapid rates, the wolf population in the park growing to over 100 in just a few years.
The wolves also reduced the elk and coyote populations and thus increased the vegetation and
helped other species.29 Economically, the wolves brought substantially increased tourism and
tourist dollars to the park and nearby areas. While the entire costs of managing the reintroduction
into Yellowstone (and neighboring Idaho) ran about $1.5 million annually, economic studies
estimated total benefits to the area of over $20 million per year.30 The wolves also, again
predictably, did occasionally wander outside the park and kill cattle and sheep. Estimated kills
were roughly about 100 animals per year, a fraction of fatalities from other causes, but still costs
for ranchers. One environmental group, Defenders of Wildlife, attempted to defray the costs by
reimbursing ranchers from a trust fund, but opposition to the wolves remained deep-seated
among some local residents.

Not surprisingly then, the wolf program has been and continues to be subject to political
decisions. In the late 1990s, a lawsuit based on the difficulty of differentiating reintroduced
wolves (experimental status under the ESA) from wolves who migrate to the park on their own
(and are thus fully protected) had the potential to abort the entire program until rejected by a
federal judge. In 2007 and 2008, the George W. Bush administration used higher population
numbers to attempt to delist the wolves from federal protection in neighboring states, only to be
rejected by the courts after environmental groups sued. In 2011, Congress delisted gray wolves
in the Northern Rockies in spite of objections from some scientists and environmental groups. In
2019, the Trump FWS proposed to strip all wolves from federal protection in the lower 48 states.
Defenders of Wildlife and others moved immediately to try to stop the proposal.
The Forest Service
The USFS governs nearly 190 million acres of national forests under a multiple-use mandate. Prior to
creation of the agency, many forests were cut down to build houses and roads with no plan for
sustainable, long-term use. Thus, in response to demands from economic as well as environmental
interests, some policymakers began setting aside large forest reserves in 1891. Defending the program
in economic terms, President Theodore Roosevelt said, “The preservation of our forests is an imperative
business necessity.”31 The FS was created in 1905 to manage national forests for perpetuity. The
agency’s mission is to balance multiple uses: sustainable timber production, watershed management,
mineral extraction, grazing, and recreation. The agency also became the center of firefighting, largely as
a result of heroic efforts to battle massive fires in the early twentieth century.32

As one of the most visible products of the Progressive movement’s emphasis on scientific management,
the FS was traditionally portrayed as a model of administrative efficiency.33 From its beginning, however,
the FS has been affected by politics. Early on, the agency developed a reputation for prioritizing timber
production, in no small measure due to organizational placement in the Department of Agriculture.34

More recently, timber production from the national forests has varied, often corresponding again to the
party of the president. In recent decades, high yields during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush years
were followed by dramatic reductions under Clinton only to be revived again under George W. Bush,
and then reduced again under Obama.35 At the level of individual forests, each supervisor has to
promulgate a plan for the amount of timber to be produced and those plans have always been subject to
political pressures. The most controversial of these plans involved management of old-growth forests in
the Pacific Northwest and the impacts of logging on species such as the northern spotted owl.36 In
addition, the FS has been frequently criticized by environmentalists as well as economists for
subsidizing logging companies by building roads into forests, encouraging clear-cutting, and selling
public timber at low prices.37

One recent manifestation of the impact of politics on forest management has been the inconsistent effort
to set aside certain areas in national forests for purposes other than timber production. One controversy
involved roadless areas in national forests, when in 1999, President Clinton proposed a ban on roads in
58 million acres. Of over 2 million comments on the proposal, 95 percent supported it, but lawsuits from
the timber industry put the rule on hold. The subsequent George W. Bush administration then allowed
revisions to the roadless rule, including for the 9-million acre Tongass National Forest in Alaska and in
some cases allowing states to develop collaboratively, state-specific rules.38 Later, a federal district
judge reinstated the roadless rule but the controversy has not ended. Recently, Senator Lisa Murkowski
(R-AK) introduced legislation to end roadless protections in the state of Alaska, including the Tongass.
In response, Democratic Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell of Washington state introduced the
Roadless Conservation Act of 2018. The fate of these lands is not yet clear, although the Trump
administration called for increased logging in the Tongass in 2020.
Summary of Policy Impacts Through Public Agencies
Presidents can significantly impact natural resource policies through bureaucratic actions but those
impacts are limited by other institutions, as discussed in Chapter 4. Interest groups challenge
presidential actions in the courts. State and local governments shape implementation of presidential
directives at the subnational level. Finally, unilateral actions lack permanence. Subsequent presidents,
especially if they are from the other party, can reverse or at least minimize the impacts from their
predecessors. One needs, therefore, to consider the broad trends that affect these policies across
administrations.
TRENDS IN NATURAL RESOURCE POLICIES
Some trends in natural resource policies transcend administrations or even crises. Indeed, while the
coronavirus pandemic of 2019–2020 impacted all aspects of American life, including for example the
closing of national parks, controversies in the issues discussed below continued. We discuss three
broad topics that will be part of any deliberations on natural resource policies in the future.
Devolution and Privatization
The federally managed public lands of the United States have been the focus of historically long
arguments about whether they are best managed by federal government, the states, or the private
sector. If states were to manage these lands, they would have to be “transferred” by Congress to the
states to manage per the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to manage federal property.
Discussion usually centers on the BLM or USFS lands, not national parks or wildlife refuges. Transfer
discussions began in 1912 and have continued off and on until the present day.39 Indeed, as Chapter 2
describes, these arguments involve numerous policy areas in addition to public lands. The premise
behind most of the arguments of those who favor transfer of national public lands is that the states can
do a “better job” managing them. The term “better job” is ill defined. What is most likely is that the term is
a code word for producing more revenue for the states by accelerating the production of timber, oil and
gas, and other minerals, and less regulation of other activities such as grazing. Opponents argue that
resource production and deregulation would increase harm to biological and other qualities of the public
lands. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted intense discussions and protests over the responsibilities and
relative roles of state and federal governments in all policy areas, as discussed in the Rabe chapter on
federalism. Those debates in future years will certainly involve the management of public lands.

Arguments about the virtues of privatizing public lands have even deeper roots. Indeed, in response to
such proposals in 1776 Adam Smith wrote, “Lands for the purpose of pleasure and magnificence—
parks, gardens, public walks, etc…seem to be the only lands which, in a great and civilized monarchy,
ought to belong to the crown.”40 Politicians and property rights advocates have frequently renewed a
push to privatize public lands, whether that is selling federal land to corporations and others or
maximizing possessory interests of concessioners. Proponents argue, “Markets offer a more effective,
economical, and egalitarian alternative to the political management of federal lands.”41 Many
conservationists and environmental groups have resisted these efforts with numerous
counterarguments.42 Markets need prices, they note, but putting a price on preservation is difficult.
Establishing private ownership of public lands violates the principle of public goods that they be
nonexcludable in that they belong to all people. Finally, public lands like parks are protected for future
generations but how will their interests be accounted for in markets focused on bottom lines?
Collaboration and Compromise
One recent trend in natural resource policies is increased reliance on collaborative processes. In large
part, this results from the polarization of parties and different interests who are involved in these issues.
However, with collaboration comes compromise and that raises other questions, ones that date to the
origins of the environmental movement.

Collaborative ecosystem management involves efforts to find cooperative solutions to potentially

conflictual resource issues. Participants utilize science-based findings and communication between
diverse stakeholders to seek win-win outcomes that satisfy all parties, or at least reduce the likelihood of
litigation.43 One version of this that is often used for large ecosystems is called adaptive management
wherein resource planners work with stakeholders to take experimental actions, scientifically monitor the
results, and then adjust plans for future actions. Policymakers have pursued long-term adaptive
management programs on such large and complex ecosystems as the Everglades and the Colorado
River in the Grand Canyon.

While the overall trend is one of increasing usage of collaborative management, as with all natural
resource policies there is some variance depending on which party is in power. The Obama
administration supported such efforts, notably in large-scale projects such as the Everglades
Restoration Program and the sage-grouse initiative described at the outset of the chapter.44 The Trump
administration, as the sage-grouse situation reflects, often abandoned or underfunded such programs.

One obvious requirement for collaboration is the willingness of all interested parties to compromise to
find some common ground. While this may sound logical, compromise has been a controversial topic in
environmental politics. Indeed, many date the modern American environmental movement to the refusal
of the Sierra Club and other groups to compromise on possible dam-building in the Grand Canyon in the
late 1960s.45 The perceived costs of compromise fostered the writing of Edward Abbey, the creation of
groups such as Earth First!, and the regrets of some prominent environmentalists such as David Brower
who said, “Every time I’ve compromised, I’ve lost.”46 Over the last several decades, environmental
groups have taken a less confrontational tone and attempted to work with those pursuing economic
development of natural resources. In just the last few years, some critics have argued that this trend has
gone too far. One author, for instance, describes eco-pragmatism as “a gentle negotiation over how
much of nature to cede to industry.”47
Climate Change and Energy
Conflicts over energy development and natural resources have occurred for decades. For example, the
two parties have battled over possible development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in
Alaska since passage of the Alaska Lands Act in late 1979. More broadly, about half of the undeveloped
fossil fuels in the country are located in federal lands or offshore waters.48 By 2017, oil or gas drilling
occurred on 77 units (about 14 percent) of the National Wildlife Refuge system.49 A dozen units of the
National Park System had oil or gas production operations and over two dozen more were at risk of
future development.50 As of 2011, oil production on federal lands contributed about one-tenth of total US
oil production while production from federal offshore facilities provided about one-third.51

The frequency and intensity of conflicts over these developments have increased markedly due to the
impact of energy policies on climate change. Congressional Republicans who deny the threat of climate
change have been supportive of these developments, such as legislation to prevent national park
designations be used to block power plants.52 In response to concerns that Congress would repeal Rule
9B (the 9B rules refer to nonfederal oil and gas rights) standards for energy development in national
parks, the Obama NPS updated those rules in late 2016 to strengthen the guidelines even while
processing oil and gas leases on other federal lands.53 Many of these operations inspire controversy
and protests and contribute momentum to the Keep it in the Ground movement.54 This movement, in
short, involves hundreds of groups demanding an end to fossil fuel usage by literally keeping those fuels
in the ground. In addition to fossil fuel development, proposals for renewable projects have inspired
battles in the Mojave Desert, near Death Valley, and in Joshua Tree National Parks, as well as with wind
farms and transmission lines on Western lands.55

Prompted by these controversies, some policymakers have sought compromise solutions. For instance,
a bipartisan group introduced the Public Lands and Renewable Energy Development Act in 2019 to
facilitate leasing for solar and wind projects on public lands with royalties going into conservation funds.
As another example, several federal agencies along with numerous stakeholders developed the Desert
Renewable Energy Conservation Plan to guide energy development in the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts
while ensuring that important wildlife areas are protected.56 Finally, federal officials, states, and
stakeholders continued to seek resolution of conflicts such as energy development on lands with
endangered species (such as the sage-grouse) through collaborative ecosystem management.

Any momentum toward seeking compromise solutions for energy vs. natural resource conflicts ended
abruptly with the Trump administration. Immediately after taking office, the administration commenced
efforts to increase fossil fuel development on federal lands. These moves included the aforementioned
reduction of the size of national monuments and opening sage-grouse habitat.57 Abandoning even
pretense to collaborative ecosystem management or compromise legislation, the administration pursued
these goals with unilateral actions.

Notably, in March 2017, Trump issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to end policies,
such as the Park Service’s Rule 9B, that protected park units from harmful oil and gas development. In
just the first year in office, the administration proposed leasing just outside the borders of more than 18
western parks, including one within a mile of Zion, helping restart the “external threats to national parks”
debate.58 The administration also reversed Obama-era restrictions on offshore oil development and
promised to open up most coastal waters to exploration even while damages from the 2010 Deepwater
Horizon spill continue to affect the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.

Reactions to the administration’s actions were predictable. For the most part, congressional
Republicans supported the administration’s moves while Democrats opposed them. One publicized
exception involved offshore drilling. The administration’s plan to open most US coastlines prompted
more than a dozen governors from coastal states, several of them Republicans, to object. Those
objections intensified after Secretary of Interior Zinke exempted the state of Florida after its Republican
governor complained, an interesting dilemma for an administration rhetorically supportive of states’
rights. In late 2020, shortly before the election, the administration reversed itself on offshore oil policies,
at least in some states.

Other specific parts of the administration’s agenda prompted objections from many groups. Native
American groups, for example, vigorously protested expanded fracking operations near Chaco Culture
National Historic Park, prompting cancellation of expanded leasing in 2018.59 A proposed oil refinery
just three miles from the border of Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota inspired protests
from local groups as well as national conservation organizations such as the National Parks and
Conservation Association.60

At present, Trump administration efforts to expand energy development on public lands continue despite
opposition. The administration proposed conducting future ANWR lease sales, but, consistent with the
themes in this chapter, without explicit congressional authorization. On many lands, the Trump efforts
are further complicated by the fact that some states have proposed their own regulations and tax
systems governing fracking operations on private or state-held lands.61 Indeed, while many states
opposed the Obama administration’s proposed regulations, many others have resisted Trump’s efforts
to reverse them. Native American and conservation groups continue to battle Trump efforts to develop
pipelines in court. Democrats, having retaken the House of Representatives in 2018, have also
attempted to block some administration actions. Collaborative resolutions are rarely even discussed at
the federal level, whereas some states, notably Colorado, have valiantly attempted to find common
ground among different interests in their energy development oversight.

The coronavirus pandemic has impacted climate and energy issues in important ways. One involves oil
prices and development. Stay-at-home orders and the reluctance of people to travel reduced oil
consumption throughout the world to the point where oil was in such heavy supply in early 2020 that the
price of a barrel dropped below $20, a level not seen in decades. While this has slowed oil development
in some places, including plans for drilling in ANWR, long-term trends are unclear. Another impact
involves concern over climate change. Although shelter-in-place behavior precluded the mass
demonstrations planned for the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, scientists and activists did use
the occasion to point out parallels between the necessary responses to both the pandemic and to
climate change, notably the need to pay attention to scientific assessments and warnings.62 In addition,
the improvement in environmental indicators such as air pollution could give impetus to those seeking
action on climate. If people do take those comparisons and indicators seriously, the long-term impacts
on energy use and development could be profound.
CONCLUSIONS
Politics impacts natural resource policies in the United States. First, the two major political parties have
very different priorities and goals. The two parties thus push different actions and those differences
typically lead to gridlock in Congress. Second, presidents frequently use unilateral actions, typically
through natural resource agencies, to pursue their party’s agendas. Those actions motivate pushback
from interest groups and some state governments through litigation and other actions. This pushback
has, to some extent, limited what the Trump administration has been able to accomplish in their agenda
regarding natural resources. Nevertheless, the Trump administration has had significant impacts on
nearly all natural resource policies.

Third, these conflicting political directives force public agencies to respond to short-term pressures when
their mandates call for long-term management of natural resources. Criticisms of those public agencies
foster ongoing calls for alternative institutional arrangements, specifically privatizing public lands, using
market-based mechanisms, or transferring control of federal properties to the states. Fourth, advocates
and policymakers continue to pursue collaborative resolutions to conflicts over natural resources.
Finally, tensions over natural resources are heightened by disagreements over energy and climate
change.

Political conflicts over natural resources driven by short-term partisan goals are only likely to continue
and even intensify in coming years. Indeed, even the immense crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic did not
eliminate partisan divisiveness in the United States. These divisions will continue to impact natural
resource policies in the future even though protections of natural resources such as lands and species
depend upon long-term strategies and consistent implementation. Without those things, the United
States continues to put at risk its most precious resources.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Center for Biological Diversity (www.biologicaldiversity.org) This environmental group is often at

the forefront of conflicts over endangered species issues.

Competitive Enterprise Institute (www.cei.org) The CEI is a nonprofit organization that

emphasizes free enterprise and individual liberty in making policy decisions.

Defenders of Wildlife (www.defenders.org) This environmental group publishes a monthly

magazine and maintains a webpage that has much information about endangered species.

Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org) The Heritage Foundation is a think tank in Washington

DC, that promotes policies based on free enterprise and limited government.

High Country News (www.hcn.org) This is a weekly online newspaper that provides thorough
analyses of natural resources, public lands, and species in the American West.

Mountain States Legal Foundation (www.mslegal.org) MSLF is a non-profit law firm that focuses
on protecting property rights and economic liberty.

National Parks Conservation Association (www.npca.org) This environmental group uses

information and advocacy for the further protection of America’s national parks.

National Parks Traveler (www.nationalparkstraveler.org) This weekly online newsletter contains

timely, informative stories about America’s national parks.

Property and Environment Research Center (www.perc.org) PERC is a research institute located
in Bozeman, Montana, dedicated to free-market environmentalism.
NOTES
1. Paul J. Culhane, Public Lands Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

2. Michael J. Graetz, The End of Energy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 21.

3. William R. Lowry, “State Parks Found to be Source of Innovation,” Public Administration Times 19
(1996): 1–13.

4. See, for example, William R. Lowry, “The Exceptionalism of the Open Space Issue in American
Politics,” Social Science Quarterly 99, no. 4 (2018): 1363–76.

5. Carl Segerstrom, “New Bill Leaves Lands Protected, Lawmaking Neglected,” High Country News,
February 20, 2019.

6. Matthew Daly, “Senate Passes Conservation Bill that Boosts Parks, Trails,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
February 13, 2019, A9.

7. Jacob Carter, Emily Berman, Anita Desikan, Charise Johnson, and Gretchen Goldman, “The State of
Science in the Trump Era,” Union of Concerned Scientists, 2019, www.ucsusa.org/ScienceUnderTrump.

8. Jeanne Nienaber Clarke and Daniel C. McCool, Staking Out the Terrain, 2nd ed. (Albany, NY: SUNY,
1996), 162; and Philip Foss, Politics and Grass (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1960).

9. For a recent scathing expose, see Christopher Ketcham, This Land (New York, NY: Viking Press,
2019).

10. John Freemuth, Islands under Siege (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1991); William R.
Lowry, The Capacity for Wonder (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1994); and Alfred Runte,
National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).

11. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Revenues from Fees and Donations Increased, but Some
Enhancements are Needed to Continue this Trend” (Washington, DC: U.S. GAO, 2015).

12. Karen Chavez and Trevor Hughes, “Ordered to the Border,” USA Today, December 2, 2019, 1A.

13. Statistics for visitation are found at www.nps.gov/aboutus/visitation-numbers.htm.

14. Julie Turkewitz, “National Parks Struggle with a Mounting Crisis: Too Many Visitors,” The New York
Times, September 27, 2017.

15. William Lowry, Repairing Paradise (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2009), Chapter 3.

16. Michael J. Yochim, Yellowstone and the Snowmobile (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas,
2009).

17. Michael Grunwald, The Swamp (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

18. Nate Hegyi, “Yellowstone National Park Superintendent: ‘I’m No Longer Wanted.’”
www.npr.org/2018/06/07/617936487.

19. Karen Chavez and Trevor Hughes, “Ordered to the Border,” USA Today, December 2, 2019, 1A.

20. John Freemuth, “In The Pandemic’s Wake, Let’s Create More Park Spaces,” National Parks
Traveler, https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2020/04/op-ed-pandemics-wake-lets-create-more-park-
spaces, accessed April 21, 2020.
21. Christopher Ketcham, This Land (New York, NY: Viking Press, 2019), 152.

22. Clarke and McCool, 1996, 107.

23. Helen Santoro, “Wildlife Refuges Suffer under Budget Cuts and Staff Shortages,” High Country
News, November 20, 2019.

24. James Pogue, Chosen Country (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2018).

25. Center for Biological Diversity, “Study: Endangered Species Protection Taking Six Times Longer
than Law Allows,” press release dated August 8, 2016.

26. Timothy Puko, “Trump Administration Eases Endangered Species Act Protections,” The Wall Street
Journal, August 12, 2019.

27. Seth Borenstein, “Butterfly on a Bomb Range,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 8, 2019, A17.

28. Douglas W. Smith and Gary Ferguson, Decade of the Wolf (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2005); and
Lowry, 2009: Ch. 2.

29. For a recent review of these changes, see Peter Dockrill, “It Started with Just 14 Wolves,” 2018,
www.sciencealert.com/how-31-wolvestransformed-yellowstone-in-ways-nobody-could-ever-have-
predicted-national-park-wolf-reintroduction-trophic-cascade.

30. J. W. Duffield, C. J. Neher, and D. A. Patterson, “Wolf Recovery in Yellowstone,” Yellowstone

Science 16, no. 1 (2008): 22.

31. Roosevelt quoted in H. W. Brands, Dreams of El Dorado (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2019), 473.

32. Timothy Egan, The Big Burn (New York, NY: Mariner Books, 2010).

33. Herbert Kaufman, The Forest Ranger (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960); and Clarke and
McCool, 1996: 50–3.

34. Pinchot quoted in Steve Olson, Eruption (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016).

35. Congressional Research Service, “Timber Harvesting on Federal Lands,” report R45688, dated April
12, 2019, p. 8.

36. For a thorough review of the case, see Judith A. Layzer, The Environmental Case, 3rd ed.
(Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2012), Chapter 7.

37. Christopher Ketcham, This Land (New York, NY: Viking Press, 2019); and Randal O’Toole,
Reforming the Forest Service (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1988).

38. https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5053193.pdf, accessed January 8,

2020.

39. John Freemuth and Esther Babcock, “Governance, Science and the Public Lands,” in Environmental
Politics and Policy in the West Third Edition, eds. Zachary Smith and John Freemuth (Boulder, CO:
University of Colorado Press, 2016).

40. Adam Smith, 1776, The Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2, 1960 edition, London: Dent, p. 306.

41. Reed Watson, “A Moral Case for Markets,” 2017, PERC Reports, Vol. 36, No. 1: 4.

42. Steven Davis, In Defense of Public Lands (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2018).
43. Julia M. Wondollek and Steven L. Yaffee, Making Collaboration Work (Washington, DC: Island
Press, 2000); and Mark Lubell, “Collaborative Watershed Management,” Policy Studies Journal 32, no.
3 (2004): 341–61.

44. Lubell and Segee, 2013: 198–200.

45. For example, see Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 235–37; and Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (New York, NY: Penguin
Books, 1987), 295.

46. Quoted in Ketcham, 2019, 324.

47. Ketcham, 2019, 325.

48. Ben Adler, “Fossil Fuel Extraction on Public Lands is the Next Climate Fight,” High Country News,
September 29, 2015, 2.

49. U.S. General Accounting Office, “Wildlife Refuge Oil and Gas Activity,” GAO-02-64R, October 31,
2001.

50. Kurt Repanshek, “Oil and Gas Production and the National Parks,” National Parks Traveler, May 5,
2010.

51. Marc Humphries, “U.S. Crude Oil Production in Federal and Non-Federal Areas,” Congressional
Research Service Report for Congress, R42432, March 20, 2012.

52. Kurt Repanshek, “Republicans, Democrats Differ over Whether National Park Designations Should
Block Energy Projects,” National Parks Traveler, May 11, 2010.

53. Nicholas Lund, “The Facts on Oil and Gas Drilling in National Parks,” NPCA blog post, 2/10/2017,
www.npca.org/articles/1471/the-facts-on-oil-and-gas-drilling-in-national-parks; and Elizabeth Shogren,
“Park Service May Strengthen its Oil and Gas Regulations,” High Country News, October 27, 2015.

54. Kirk Nielsen, “Bad Vibes in Big Cypress,” Sierra, July/August 2016: 50–51; Kate Schimel, “How the
Keep it in the Ground Movement Came to Be,” High Country News, July 19, 2016; and Joshua Zaffros,
“Protests against Drilling on Public Lands are Escalating,” High Country News, May 13, 2016.

55. Amy Harder and Cassandra Sweet, “Solar Push Stirs Concern,” The Wall Street Journal, October
26, 2016, 6; and Elizabeth Shogren, “At the BLM, A Mixed Record for Renewables on Public Lands,”
High Country News, December 4, 2015.

56. Defenders of Wildlife, “Getting it Right,” Defenders, Winter 2015, p. 16.

57. Rebecca Leber, “The Federal Land at Stake in Trump’s Rush for More Drilling,” Mother Jones,
December 7, 2017; Brady McCombs, “Lands Stripped from Monuments Open to Claims,” Arizona
Republic, 2/4/2018: 11E; and Elizabeth Shogren, “Interior Moves Swiftly After Trump’s Climate Order,”
High Country News, March 31, 2017.

58. Kurt Repanshek, “Change in Administrations Puts Zion National Park in Bind over Drilling Proposal,”
National Parks Traveler, February 5, 2017; John Miles, “Mixing Energy Development and National
Parks,” National Parks Traveler, July 15, 2018; and Mike Wirth, “Drilling in National Parks?” National
Parks, Fall 2018: 10–1.

59. Jonathan Thompson, “Resistance to Drilling Grows on the Navajo Nation,” High Country News,
March 2, 2018.

60. Blake Nicholson, “Firm Denies Skirting Law to Build Refinery Near Park,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
December 24, 2017, A23.
61. Charles E. Davis, “Shaping State Fracking Policies in the United States,” State and Local
Government Review 49, no. 2 (2017): 140–50; Barry G. Rabe and Rachel L. Hampton, “Taxing
Fracking,” Review of Policy Research 32, no. 4 (2015): 389–412; and Rachel L. Hampton and Barry G.
Rabe, “Leaving Money on the Table,” Commonwealth 19, no. 1: 5–32.

62. See, for example, Daniel C. Esty, “Covid-19 Lessons for the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day,” The
Hill, April 22, 2020.
Descriptions of Images and Figures
Back to Figure

The map represents the habitations of the Greater Sage-Grouse. The estimation is based on the current
range of the Sage-Grouse population and the historic range of the same. The habitation is mostly
nestled in parts of Washington, Idaho, California, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota,
Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada.

Back to Figure

The figure depicts Trump’s idea of transforming the Grand Staircase Escalante. As shown in the figure,
we can see Trump’s monument boundaries and the original Grand Staircase Escalante boundaries.

Back to Figure

The figure is a depiction of Bears Ears. The national monument

10 APPLYING MARKET PRINCIPLES TO
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
—Sheila M. Olmstead
Each day, you make decisions that require trade-offs. Should you walk to work or drive? Walking takes
more time; driving costs money for gasoline and parking. You might also consider the benefits of
exercise if you walk, or the costs to the environment of the emissions if you drive. In considering this
question, you need to determine how to allocate important scarce resources—your time and money—to
achieve a particular goal.

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, and economists typically apply two simple
concepts, efficiency and cost-effectiveness, for systematically making decisions. Let’s take a concrete
environmental policy example. The Snake River in the Pacific Northwest provides water for drinking,
agricultural irrigation, transportation, industrial production, and hydroelectricity generation. It also
supports rapidly dwindling populations of endangered salmon species. If there is not enough water to
provide each of these services and to satisfy everyone, we must trade off one good thing for another.

Some scientific evidence indicates that removing hydroelectric dams on the upper Snake River may
assist in the recovery of salmon populations. Salmon declines may also be caused by too little water in
the river, which might be addressed by reducing agricultural or urban water withdrawals. Each of these
measures could be implemented at some cost. Benefit–cost analysis would compare the benefits of
each measure (the expected increase in salmon populations) to its costs. An efficient policy choice
would maximize net benefits; we would choose the policy that offered the greatest difference between
benefits and costs.

To continue this example, what if the Endangered Species Act requires that a specific level of salmon
recovery be achieved? In this case, the benefits of salmon recovery may never be monetized. But
economics can still play a role in choosing policies to achieve salmon recovery. Cost-effectiveness
analysis would compare the costs of each potential policy intervention that could achieve the mandated
salmon recovery goal. Decision-makers would then choose the least costly or most cost-effective policy
option.

This discussion is highly simplified. Explaining the causes of Snake River salmon decline and
forecasting the impact of policy changes on salmon populations are complex scientific tasks, and
different experts have different models that produce different results.1 The trade-offs can also be
multidimensional. Removing dams may sound like a great environmental idea, but hydroelectric power
is an important source of clean energy in the Pacific Northwest. Would the dams’ hydroelectricity be
replaced by coal- or gas-fired power plants? What would be the impacts of the increased emissions of
local and global air pollutants? In this chapter, we discuss some simple economic tools for examining
such trade-offs.
ECONOMIC CONCEPTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

Economic Efficiency and Benefit–Cost Analysis of Environmental Policy

Many countries regulate emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2), an air pollutant that can damage human
health and also causes acid rain, which harms forests and aquatic ecosystems. In the United States,
power plants are a major source of SO2 emissions, regulated under the Clean Air Act (CAA). As
evidence accumulated in the 1980s regarding the damages from acid rain in the northeastern United
States, Congress considered updating the CAA so that it would cover many old power plants not
regulated by the original legislation. This process culminated in the 1990 CAA Amendments, which set a
new goal for SO2 emissions reductions from older power plants. Assume that it is 1989, and you have
been asked to tell the US Congress, from an economic perspective, how much SO2 emissions should
be reduced.

First, consider the costs of reducing SO2 emissions. Economic costs are opportunity costs—what we
must give up by abating each ton of emissions rather than spending that money on other important
things. Emissions abatement can be achieved by removing SO2 emissions from power plant
smokestack gases using a “scrubber,” which requires an up-front investment, as well as labor and
materials for routine operation. Power plants can also change the fuels they use to generate electricity,
switching from high-sulfur to more expensive low-sulfur coal or from coal to natural gas. Spending this
money on pollution control leaves less to spend to improve a plant’s operations or increase output.
These costs are passed on by the firm to its employees (in the form of reduced wages), stockholders (in
terms of lower share prices), consumers (in the form of higher prices), and other stakeholders.

If required to reduce emissions, firms will accomplish the cheapest abatement first, and resort to more
and more expensive options as the amount of required abatement increases. The cost of abating each
ton of pollution tends to rise slowly at first, as we abate the first tons of SO2 emissions, and then more
quickly. This typical pattern of costs is represented by the lower, convex curve in Figure 10.1, labeled
total costs, or C(Q).
Description

Figure 10.1 Comparing the Total Benefits and Costs of Pollution Abatement

The value of reducing emissions declines as we abate more and more tons of SO2. At high levels of
SO2 emissions (low abatement), this pollutant causes acid rain as well as respiratory and cardiovascular
ailments in populated areas. But as the air gets cleaner, low SO2 concentrations cause fewer problems.
Thus, while the total benefits of reducing SO2 may always increase as we reduce emissions, the benefit
of each additional ton of abatement will go down. This typical pattern of benefits is represented by the
upper, concave curve in Figure 10.1, labeled total benefits, or B(Q).2

Economic efficiency requires that we find the policy that will give us the greatest net benefits—the
biggest difference between total benefits and total costs. In Figure 10.1, the efficient amount of SO2
emissions abatement is marked as Q*, where the vertical distance between the benefit and cost curves
is biggest. Why would it be inefficient to abate more or less than Q* tons of SO2 emissions? To the right
of Q*, the total benefits of reducing pollution are still positive and still rising. But costs are rising faster
than benefits. So for every dollar in benefit we gain by eliminating a ton of emissions, we incur greater
costs. To the left of Q*, the benefits of each ton of abatement are rising more quickly than costs, so if we
move to the left, we will also reduce the policy’s net benefits.

Note that we have emphasized the costs and benefits of reducing each individual ton of pollution.
Where total benefits are steep, at low levels of abatement, the benefit of an additional ton is very high.
Where the total benefits curve is flat, the benefit of an additional ton is low. This concept of the
decreasing “benefit of an additional ton” defines the economic concept of marginal benefit. On the cost
side, where total costs are almost flat, at low levels of abatement, the cost of adding an additional ton is
very low. As total costs get very steep, the cost of abating an additional ton is high. This concept of the
increasing “cost of an additional ton” defines the concept of marginal cost. The efficient quantity of
pollution abatement is the number of tons at which the marginal benefit of abating an additional ton is
exactly equal to the marginal cost.3

What we have just done is a benefit–cost analysis of a potential SO2 emissions reduction policy. If you
had completed the analysis to advise Congress, the information amassed on benefits, costs, and the
efficient quantity of pollution to abate would illuminate the trade-offs involved in improving air quality.
When Congress passed the CAA Amendments of 1990, it eventually required 10 million tons of SO2
emissions abatement, roughly a 50 percent reduction in power plant emissions of this pollutant. Was this
the efficient level of pollution control? Subsequent analysis (particularly of the human health benefits of
avoided SO2 emissions) suggests that the efficient amount of SO2 abatement would have been higher
than the 10-million-ton goal.4 But economic efficiency is one of many criteria considered in the making of
environmental policy, some others of which are detailed elsewhere in this book. An excellent summary
of how economists see the role of benefit–cost analysis in public decision-making is offered by Nobel
Laureate Kenneth Arrow and coauthors:

Although formal benefit-cost analysis should not be viewed as either necessary or sufficient for
designing sensible public policy, it can provide an exceptionally useful framework for
consistently organizing disparate information, and in this way, it can greatly improve the
process and, hence, the outcome of policy analysis.5

There are many critiques of benefit–cost analysis.6 A common critique is that basing environmental
policy decisions on whether benefits outweigh costs ignores important political and ethical
considerations. As is clear from the preceding quotation, even when citizens and their governments
design policy based on concerns other than efficiency, collecting information about benefits and costs
can be extremely useful. Some critics of benefit–cost analysis object to placing a dollar value on
environmental goods and services, suggesting that these “priceless” resources are devalued when
treated in monetary terms.7 But benefit–cost analysis simply makes explicit the trade-offs represented
by a policy choice—it does not create the trade-offs. When environmental policy is made, we establish
how much we are willing to spend to protect endangered species or avoid the human health impacts of
pollution exposure. Whether we estimate the value of such things in advance and use these numbers to
guide policy or set policy first based on other criteria and then back out our implied values for such
things, we have still made the same trade-off. No economic argument can suggest whether explicit or
implicit consideration of benefits and costs is ethically preferable. But the choice does not affect the
outcome that a trade-off has been made. Used as one of many inputs to the consideration of policy
choices, benefit–cost analysis is a powerful and illuminating tool.
The Measurement of Environmental Benefits and Costs
Thus far, we have discussed benefits and costs abstractly. In an actual economic analysis, benefits and
costs would be estimated, so that the horizontal and vertical axes of Figure 10.1 would take on specific
numerical units. Quantifying the costs of environmental policies can require rough approximations. For
example, one study has estimated the costs of protecting California condors, designated an endangered
species following their near extinction and their later reintroduction into the wild from a captive breeding
program.8 Figure 10.2 describes the costs of each potential step that policymakers might take to protect
the condor population; when the number of condors saved per year is graphed against the cost of each
potential step taken to save them, a marginal cost curve results that is upward sloping like those we
discussed for pollution abatement.

Description

Figure 10.2 Marginal Costs of Protecting the California Condor

Economists measure the benefits of an environmental policy as the sum of individuals’ willingness to
pay for the changes it may induce. This notion is clearly anthropocentric—the changes induced by an
environmental policy are economically beneficial only to the extent that human beings value them. This
does not suggest that improvements in ecosystem function or other “nonhuman” effects of a policy have
no value. Many people value open space, endangered species preservation, and biodiversity and have
shown through their donations to environmental advocacy groups, campaigning for local referenda and
contributions to political candidates that they are willing to sacrifice much for these causes. The
economic value of an environmental amenity (such as clean air or water or open space) comprises the
value that people experience from using it, and the so-called nonuse value. Nonuse value captures the
value people have for simply knowing that an endangered species (like the grizzly bear) or a pristine
area (like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) exists, even if they never plan to see or use such
resources. To carry out a benefit–cost analysis, however, we must know more than that people have
some value for a policy’s goal; we must estimate that value to compare it to the policy’s costs.

An in-depth discussion of environmental benefit estimation methods is beyond the scope of this
chapter.9 But we can sketch out the basic intuition behind the major approaches. Some benefits of
environmental policies can be measured straightforwardly through their impacts on actual markets. For
example, if we are considering a policy to reduce water pollution that may increase commercial fish
populations, estimates of the increased market value of the total catch would be included in an estimate
of the policy’s total benefits.

For most environmental goods and services, however, estimating benefits is much trickier. The values
that people have for using environmental amenities can often be measured indirectly through their
behavior in markets. For example, many people spend money on wilderness vacations. While they are
not purchasing wilderness, per se, when they do this, economists can estimate the recreational value of
wilderness sites from travelers’ expenditures. Travel cost models are a class of statistical methods that
economists use for this purpose.

Another method, the hedonic property model, is based on the idea that what people are willing to pay for
a home reflects, in part, the environmental attributes of its neighborhood. Economists use statistical
techniques to estimate what portion of a home’s price is determined by environmental attributes, such
as the surrounding air quality, controlling for other price determinants, for example, the home’s physical
characteristics, school district quality, and proximity to jobs and transportation. To estimate the value of
human health impacts of an environmental policy, economists primarily use hedonic wage studies.
These models estimate people’s willingness to pay for small decreases in risks to life and health by
examining the differences in wages for jobs with different levels of risk. As in the hedonic property
model, statistical methods must be used to control for the many other determinants of wages (for
example, how skilled or educated a worker must be to take a particular job).

Travel cost and hedonic models are revealed preference models—they estimate how people value a
particular aspect of an environmental amenity from their actual behavior, revealed in markets. But if we
were to stop with values expressed in markets, the benefits we could estimate for things like wilderness
areas and species preservation would be incomplete. Nonuse value leaves no footprint in any market.
Thus a stated preference approach must be used to quantify nonuse values. Economists design
carefully structured surveys to ask people how much they are willing to pay for a specific improvement in
environmental quality or a natural resource amenity, and they sum across individuals to assess
aggregate willingness to pay.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) 1985 benefit–cost analysis of reducing the lead content
of gasoline offers an example of what each side of such an analysis might include. The analysis
quantified the main benefits from phasing out leaded gas: reduced human health damages from lead
exposure (retardation of children’s cognitive and physiological development and exacerbation of high
blood pressure in adult males), reduction in other local air pollutants from vehicle emissions (since
leaded gas destroyed catalytic converters, which reduce emissions), and lower costs of engine
maintenance and related increases in fuel economy. The costs were primarily the installation of new
refinery equipment and the production of alternative fuel additives. The study found that the lead
phasedown policy had projected annual net benefits of $7 billion (in 1983 dollars), even though only a
portion of benefits were actually monetized. The health benefits of the regulation that the EPA estimated
included the avoided costs of medical care and of remedial education for affected children. Americans, if
surveyed, would likely have had significant willingness to pay to avoid the lasting health and cognitive
impacts of childhood lead exposure, but these benefits were never monetized. Even with these gaps,
acknowledged by the study’s authors, this analysis helped to “sell” the regulation; a few years earlier,
the EPA had decided on a much weaker rule, citing potential costs to refineries.10

The fact that the EPA did not monetize some benefits of the US lead phasedown brings us to an
important point. In some cases, existing estimation methods may be sufficient to evaluate the benefits of
an environmental policy but are too complex and expensive to implement. In the lead case, this was
immaterial. The benefits of the policy exceeded the costs by a large margin, even excluding the
unmonetized benefits, so the eventual policy decision was not affected by this choice. In other cases,
when benefits are hard to monetize, doing so may matter for the ultimate policy outcome.

In some cases, economic tools simply prove insufficient to estimate the benefits (or avoided damages)
from environmental policy. For example, climate science suggests that sudden, catastrophic events (like
the reversal of thermohaline circulations or sudden collapse of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice
sheets) are possible outcomes of the current warming trend. The probabilities of such disastrous events
may be very small. When these low probabilities are combined with the fact that important climate
change impacts may occur in the distant future, estimating the benefits of current climate change policy
becomes a challenging and controversial task.11 Some analysts have attempted, incorrectly, to estimate
the benefits of avoiding the elimination of vital ecosystem services, such as pollination and nutrient
cycling, using economic benefit estimation tools.12 Used correctly, these tools measure our collective
willingness to pay for small changes in the status quo. The elimination of Earth’s vital ecosystem
services would cause dramatic shifts in human and market activity of all kinds. While the benefit
estimation techniques we have discussed are well suited to assessing the net effect of specific policies,
like reducing air pollutant concentrations or setting aside land to preserve open space, they are
inadequate to the task of measuring the value of drastic changes in global ecosystems—efforts to use
them for this purpose have resulted in, as one economist quipped, a “serious underestimate of infinity.”13
Estimation of the benefits from environmental policy is the subject of a great deal of economic research,
and much progress has been made. But, in some situations, the limits of these tools remain a significant
challenge to comprehensive benefit–cost analysis.
Cost-Effective Environmental Policy
The economists’ goal of maximizing net benefits is one of many competing goals in the policy process.
Even when an environmental standard is inefficient (too stringent or not stringent enough), economic
analysis can still help to select the particular policy instruments used to achieve that goal. Earlier we
defined the concept of cost-effectiveness as choosing the policy that can achieve a given environmental
standard at least cost. Let’s return to our SO2 example to see how this works in practice.

Imagine that you are a policy analyst at the EPA, given the job of figuring out how US power plants will
meet the 10-million-ton reduction in SO2 emissions required under the 1990 CAA Amendments. One
important issue to consider is how much the policy will cost. All else equal, you would like to attain the
new standard as cheaply as possible. We can reduce this problem to a simple case to demonstrate how
an economist would answer this question. Assume that the entire 10-million-ton reduction will be
achieved by two power plants, firms A and B. Each has a set of SO2 abatement technologies, and the
sequence of technologies for each firm and their associated costs determine the marginal cost curves in
Figure 10.3, labeled MCA and MCB. Notice that abatement increases from left to right for firm A, and
from right to left for firm B. At any point along the horizontal axis, the sum of the two firms’ emissions
reductions will always equal 10 million tons, as the CAA Amendments require.

Description

Figure 10.3 Cost-Effective Pollution Abatement by Two Firms

Let’s begin with one simple solution that seems like a fair approach: divide the total required reduction in
half and ask each firm to abate 5 million tons of SO2. This allocation of pollution control is represented
by the left-most dotted vertical line in Figure 10.3 and is often referred to as a “uniform pollution control
standard” because the abatement requirement is uniform across firms. Is this the cheapest way to
reduce pollution by 10 million tons? Suppose we require firm A to reduce one extra ton and require firm
B to reduce one ton less. We would still achieve a 10-million-ton reduction, but that last ton would cost
less than it did before. Firm B’s cost curve lies above A’s at the uniform standard, so when we shift
responsibility for abating that ton from B to A, we reduce the total cost of achieving the new standard.
How long can we move to the right along the horizontal axis and continue to lower total costs? Until the
marginal costs of abatement for the two firms are exactly equal: where the two curves intersect, when
firm A abates 6 million tons and B abates 4 million tons.

The cost savings from allocating abatement in this way rather than using the uniform standard is
equivalent to the difference in costs between firm A and firm B for the last million tons of abatement. On
Figure 10.3, that is equal to the area between the two firms’ marginal cost curves (the cost to firm B
minus the cost to firm A), bounded by the dotted lines marking the uniform standard and the cost-
effective allocation. In Figure 10.3, we demonstrate how this principle works for two firms. But the rule of
thumb for a cost-effective environmental policy instrument is the same for a large number of firms as it is
in this simple example: a pollution control policy minimizes costs if the marginal abatement costs of all
firms reducing pollution under the policy are equal.

You may have noticed that, in order to identify the cost-effective pollution control allocation in this simple
case, we needed a lot of information about each firm’s abatement costs—we used their marginal cost
curves to accomplish the task. As an EPA policy analyst, you would not likely have this information, and
having it would be even less likely if you were to move from considering two power plants to looking at
the thousands eventually covered by the CAA Amendments of 1990. In a market economy, the structure
of firms’ costs is proprietary information that they will not easily share with regulators. So how can a
cost-effective pollution control policy be designed?

One class of environmental policy instruments, often called “market-based” or “incentive-based”

approaches, does not require regulators to have specific information about individual firms’ marginal
abatement costs in order to attain a particular pollution control standard at least cost. In the case of the
SO2 emissions reduction required by the CAA Amendments of 1990, regulators chose one of these
approaches, a system of tradable pollution permits, to achieve this goal.

A market for tradable pollution permits works quite simply. Return to the world of two firms and assume
that you have advised the EPA administrator to allocate responsibility for 5 million tons of SO2 emissions
abatement to each of the two firms. You add, however, the provision that the firms should be able to
trade their allocations, so long as the aggregate reduction of 10 million tons is achieved. If we begin at
the (5 million, 5 million) allocation in Figure 10.3, we can imagine the incentives for the two firms under
this trading policy.

The last ton abated by firm B costs much more than the last ton abated by A if each sticks to the 5-
million-ton abatement requirement. Firm B would be willing to pay A to increase its own abatement, so
that B could abate fewer tons of SO2. In fact, B would pay any price that lies below its own marginal
abatement cost. Firm A would be willing to make such a deal, so long as B paid more than A’s own
marginal abatement cost. So the vertical distance between the two cost curves at (5 million, 5 million)
represents the potential gain from trading for that ton of abatement. The same is true of the next ton,
and the next, all the way to the point at which B is abating 4 million tons and A is abating 6 million.
Notice that the firms will trade permits until exactly the point at which the total costs of reducing 10
million tons of SO2 are minimized.14 The bigger the difference in abatement costs across regulated
firms, the larger the potential cost savings from trading.

How much of a difference did this make in the SO2 emissions abatement regulation we have been
discussing? While it operated, the US SO2 trading program produced cost savings of about $1.8 billion
annually, compared with the most likely alternative policy considered during deliberations over the 1990
CAA Amendments (which would have required each firm to install the same technology to reduce
emissions).15 In fact, the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental advocacy organization,
agreed to endorse and help write the legislation proposed by the George H. W. Bush administration to
amend the CAA if the administration would increase the required emissions reduction (from 8 million
tons, which it was proposing) to the eventual 10 million tons of SO2, based on the potential cost savings
of the tradable permit approach. In this case, the tradable permit policy was not only cost-effective, but it
allowed political actors to take a step closer to the efficient level of abatement, with significant benefits
for human and ecosystem health.16
PRINCIPLES OF MARKET-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
You may have noticed that the notion that firms A and B are inherently doing something wrong when
they produce SO2 emissions along with electricity has been lacking from our discussion. In economic
terms, pollution is the result of a set of incentives facing firms and consumers that is “stacked against”
environmental protection. The consumption and production decisions that result can be changed if we
alter the relevant incentives. The social problem of pollution results from what economists call market
failure. The three types of market failure most relevant to environmental policy are externalities, public
goods, and the “tragedy of the commons.”17

Let’s consider externalities first. If you have driven a car, checked e-mail, or turned on a light today, you
have contributed to the problem of global climate change. With near unanimity, the scientific community
agrees that the accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other heat-trapping gases in Earth’s upper
atmosphere has increased global mean surface temperatures by about 1 degree Fahrenheit since the
start of the twentieth century, with consequences including sea level rise, regional changes in
precipitation, increased frequency of extreme weather events, species migration and extinction, and
spatial shifts in the prevalence of disease. Ask an economist, however, and he or she will suggest that
the roots of the problem are not only in the complex dynamics of Earth’s atmosphere but also in the
incentives facing individuals and firms when they choose to consume and produce energy. Each such
decision imposes a small cost in terms of its contribution to future atmospheric carbon concentrations.
However, the individuals making these decisions do not bear these costs. Your electricity bill does
include the cost of producing electricity and moving it from the plant to your home, but (in most
locations) it does not include the cost of the carbon emissions from electricity production. Carbon
emissions are an externality—their costs are external to the transaction between the buyer and the
seller of electricity. The market for energy is incomplete, since its price does not reflect the full cost of its
provision.18

You also may have noticed that bringing nations together to negotiate a solution to the problem of global
climate change seems to be difficult. Clean air and a stable global climate are public goods: everyone
benefits from their provision, whether or not they have contributed, and we can all enjoy these goods
without interfering with the ability of others to enjoy them. Other public goods include national defense,
weather forecasting, and public parks. If you have ever listened to public radio or watched public
television without contributing money to these institutions, then you have been a free rider. Free riding is
a rational response to the incentives created by a public good: many beneficiaries will pay nothing for its
provision, and those who do pay will generally pay less than what, in their heart of hearts, they would be
willing to pay. Markets for public goods are incomplete. Left to their own devices, markets will
underprovide these valuable goods and services.

A third category of market failure relevant here is the tragedy of the commons.19 A group of individuals
sharing access to a common resource (a pasture for grazing cattle, a fishery, or a busy highway) will
tend to overexploit it. The “tragedy” is that, if individuals could self-regulate and reduce their collective
use of the resource, the productivity of the resource would increase to everyone’s benefit. But the
actions of single individuals are not enough to make a difference. Individuals restricting their own use
only bear the costs of their restraint, with no benefits. The resulting spiral of overexploitation can destroy
the resource entirely. A prominent example of the tragedy of the commons is the collapse of many deep-
sea fisheries. Climate change is another example. The global upper atmosphere is a resource shared
by everyone and owned by no one. The incentive for individual citizens to reduce carbon emissions
(their exploitation of this resource) is small; thus the resource is overexploited.

When markets fail in these three ways and environmental damages result, government intervention may
be required to fix the situation. Governments can correct externalities, provide public goods, and avert
the tragedy of the commons. From an economic perspective, market principles should be used to
correct these market failures.
Using Market Principles to Solve Environmental Problems
Like the global damages from carbon emissions, the local and regional damages from SO2 emissions
(for example, human health problems and acid rain) are external to power plants’ production decisions
and their consumers’ decisions about how much energy to use. The tradable permit program described
earlier is an example of using market principles to correct market failures. The government distributed
permits to power plants and allowed them to trade. Plants made these trades by deciding how to
minimize the costs of producing power—for each ton of SO2 that they produced before the regulation
was passed, they now faced a choice. Either they could continue to emit that ton, and use one of their
permits, or they could spend money to abate that ton, freeing up a permit to sell to another power plant
(and earning the permit price). The result was an active market for SO2 emissions permits. In June 2008
alone, 250,000 tons of emissions were traded in this market, at an end-of-month price of $325 per ton.
By putting a price on pollution, the government internalized its cost, represented by the price of a permit
to emit one ton of SO2, a cost that firms took into account when they decided how much electricity to
produce. Unfortunately, regulatory and judicial actions in 2008–2010 effectively dismantled the US SO2
allowance market, one of the most significant experiments with a market-based approach to pollution
control.20 When governments create environmental markets, even well-functioning markets that
dramatically reduce the costs of pollution control, they can also dismantle them.

Another way to use market principles to reduce pollution is to impose a tax. Rather than imposing a cap
on the quantity of pollution, and allowing regulated firms to trade emissions permits to establish a market
price for pollution, a tax imposes a specific price on pollution and allows firms to decide how much to
pollute in response. A tax has an effect on firms’ decisions that resembles the effect of the permit price
created by a cap-and-trade policy; polluters decide, for each ton of emissions, whether to abate that ton
(incurring the resulting abatement costs) or to pay the tax and continue to emit that ton.

Some important differences exist between taxes and tradable permits. First, a cap-and-trade system
pins down a total quantity of allowable pollution, and subsequent permit trading establishes the permit
price. Before any trading has taken place, we know exactly how much pollution the policy is going to
allow, but we are uncertain how high the costs will be. In setting a tax, regulators pin down the price of
pollution instead. As under the permit policy, firms make private choices about how much pollution to
emit, comparing their abatement costs to the tax. But the total quantity of pollution that will result is
uncertain. To be certain about how much pollution will result after the tax is imposed, regulators need to
have good information about the cost of reducing pollution in the regulated industry. Both the total
quantity of allowable pollution and the total cost of pollution reduction are important pieces of
information to consider in designing environmental policy. Each of the two primary market-based
approaches to internalizing the cost of pollution, taxes and permits, offers certainty over one, but not
both, of these important variables.21

Taxes and tradable permits can also differ in their costs to regulated firms. Under a pollution tax, a firm
must pay the tax for every ton of pollution it emits. Under a permit system, permits are typically given to
firms for free, at least initially. So a permit system requires a firm to pay only for pollution in excess of its
permit allocation. For this reason, complying with a tax can be more expensive for firms than complying
with a permit system.22 If taxes and tradable permits are fundamentally equivalent pollution regulations
from an economic perspective, what about those extra compliance costs for firms? Taxes create
revenues for the government agency that collects them, exactly equal to the aggregate tax bill for all
firms, whereas tradable permits distributed for free do not. The net impact of this difference between the
two policies depends on how tax revenues are spent. From the standpoint of efficiency, the best thing to
do with environmental tax revenues may be to use them to reduce other taxes in the economy that tend
to distort consumers’ and firms’ decisions—taxes on income, sales, and capital gains, for example.23
The economy may benefit to a smaller degree if governments rebate tax revenues to citizens, or use
revenues to provide additional goods and services.
Pollution taxes may also be imposed indirectly. For example, many countries tax gasoline. In the United
States, the revenues from most state gasoline taxes are used to maintain and expand transportation
infrastructure; US gas taxes are not explicit pollution control policies. However, economists have
estimated the optimal US gasoline tax, taking into account the most significant externalities: emissions
of local pollutants (particulate matter and nitrous oxides), CO2 emissions (which contribute to global
climate change), traffic congestion, and the costs of accidents not borne by drivers.24 In their estimation,
the efficient tax would be $0.83 per gallon. A more recent study suggests potential regional
heterogeneity in the optimal gas tax; California’s efficient tax may be about $1.37 per gallon.25 However,
most of these externalities depend on the number of miles driven, not the amount of gasoline consumed
(only a proxy for miles driven); taxing miles driven rather than gasoline would be better from an
economic perspective. This highlights the important fact that the choice of what to tax may be as
important as the level of a tax.

Notice that as we have discussed market-based approaches to environmental policy, all of the options
we have mentioned require some role for government intervention, setting a tax, for example, or
enforcing a cap on pollution. This is a critical point. Market-based approaches should not be conflated
with voluntary (nonregulatory) environmental policies.
MARKET-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY INSTRUMENTS IN
PRACTICE

Reducing Air and Water Pollution

Taxes on air and water pollution are common, though existing environmental taxes tend to be lower than
efficient levels.26 The Canadian province of British Columbia established a carbon tax in 2008, currently
set at about $30 (US) per ton. In 2019, Canada implemented a nationwide carbon pricing policy, which
sets a minimum carbon price (ramping up over time) and allows provinces to achieve it by various
means, including cap-and-trade (like the system already in place in Quebec) and a carbon tax (such as
that in British Columbia). The Canadian government imposes the national minimum price on provinces
without a system of their own. Australia levied a carbon tax beginning in 2012 but repealed it in July
2014, after an election in which debate over the carbon tax played an important role. Among developing
countries, China’s pollution levy system appears to have reduced both air and water pollution.27 Also in
China, the Lake Tai Basin “pay for permit” policy reduced water pollution emissions from regulated
industrial plants by about 40 percent in its first two years.28

We have already discussed the US SO2 trading program as a classic cap-and-trade example, and there
are many others. For example, in the 1980s, the EPA implemented a lead trading policy to enforce a
regulation reducing the allowable lead content of US gasoline by 90 percent. Earlier in this chapter, we
discussed the benefit–cost analysis of this policy, which suggested that the benefits of eliminating lead
in gasoline exceeded its costs. The policy the EPA chose to implement the lead phasedown had
something to do with this. Refiners producing gasoline with a lower lead content than was required
earned credits that could be traded and banked. This policy successfully met its environmental goal, at a
cost savings of approximately $250 million per year, relative to prescriptive approaches, until the
phasedown was completed in 1987.29

Many cap-and-trade policies focus on mitigating the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are
changing the global climate.30 Among industrialized countries that took on emissions reduction targets
under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the countries of the EU opted to use an emissions trading system (ETS),
established in 2005, to meet their emissions reduction targets, and this program remains an important
component of the EU’s approach to meeting its obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement. The ETS
sets a cap on CO2 emissions for the EU as a whole, allocated by the EU to member countries. Covered
industries include: electric power generation; refineries; iron and steel; cement, glass, and ceramics;
pulp and paper; and air travel. The EU ETS is the world’s largest ETS, covering almost 12,000 facilities
in 27 countries in 2020, and accounting for about 45 percent of EU CO2 emissions.31 Determining the
impact of the EU ETS on emissions is difficult, in part because the binding of caps beginning in 2008
coincided with the Great Recession (resulting in falling CO2 emissions). However, studies suggest that
the ETS has decreased emissions by 2–5 percent below “business as usual” in the pilot phase, by about
8 percent in 2008–2009, and by almost 4 percent from 2008 to 2016.32 The cap in the EU system in the
pilot phase was a small reduction below expected emissions in the absence of the policy, and in
retrospect permits in the pilot phase were overallocated. Multiple reductions in the cap from the pilot
through phase 3, partial postponement of permit auctioning from the early years of phase 3 toward the
later years, and the 2019 introduction of a Market Stability Reserve (which responds to surpluses and
shortages automatically by adjusting available permits) have put upward pressure on prices since the
program’s early years.33

China’s emerging cap-and-trade system for CO2 emissions, launched in 2017, could eventually become
the world’s largest, surpassing the EU ETS. It is too early to assess this system’s effectiveness,
however.
The Obama administration committed the United States to reduce GHG emissions by about 25 percent
over 2005 levels by 2025 when it signed the 2015 Paris Agreement, largely relying on prescriptive
regulations (discussed further in Chapters 7 and 12) to meet this goal.34 Many of these regulations have
been repealed or are in the process of repeal by the Trump administration, which announced in 2017 its
intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement (effective November 2020). However, support for action
on climate change has led some US states to enact cap-and-trade policies. California’s Global Warming
Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32) committed to reducing GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, with
further commitments to reduce by 40 percent below 1990 by 2030. A cap-and-trade policy, which began
in 2013, is an important component of California’s approach. California’s market covers 85 percent of
GHG emissions (from power plants, large industrial sources, natural gas distribution, and the
transportation sector). The cap declines annually, and the program linked with Quebec’s permit market
in 2013 (an aspect challenged in court by the Trump administration in 2019). In 2020, permits trade
around $15 per ton, a level many suggest is too low to make a substantial dent in emissions, due to a
relatively lenient cap thus far.

Another US market-based initiative is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade
system among electricity generators in nine northeastern states, covering about 18 percent of regional
emissions in 2020. The RGGI began in 2009, so similar to the EU ETS, this timing makes it difficult to
disentangle Great Recession–related emissions decreases from those due to RGGI. Careful work
accounting for this suggests that RGGI has reduced CO2 emissions within participating states by about
9 million tons per year (2004–2012), counterbalanced by an emissions increase in surrounding states
equal to about one-half of that effect.35
Individual Tradable Quotas for Fishing
Thus far, we have talked about cap-and-trade policies as if they applied only to pollution problems. But a
common application is to fisheries management, to avert the tragedy of the commons. The world’s
largest market for tradable individual fishing quota (IFQ), created in 1986, is in New Zealand.36 By 2004,
it covered seventy different fish species, and the government of New Zealand had divided coastal
waters into “species-regions,” generating 275 separate markets that covered more than 85 percent of
the commercial catch in New Zealand’s territorial waters. In the United States, Pacific halibut and
sablefish off the coast of Alaska, mid-Atlantic surf clams and ocean quahogs, South Atlantic wreckfish,
and red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico are all regulated using IFQ markets. Iceland manages stocks of
twenty fish and shellfish species using IFQ markets, in a system established in 1990.

A market for fishing quota works similarly to a market for pollution permits. The government establishes
a total allowable catch (TAC), distributing shares to individual fishers. Fishers can trade their assigned
quota, which represents a percentage of the TAC for a particular species-region. An analysis of catch
statistics from 11,315 global fisheries between 1950 and 2003 provides the first large-scale empirical
evidence for the effectiveness of these approaches in halting, and even reversing, the global trend
toward fisheries collapse. The authors empirically estimate the relative advantage of IFQ fisheries over
non-IFQ fisheries in terms of a lower probability of collapse, and estimate that, had all non-IFQ global
fisheries switched to management through tradable quota in 1970, the percentage of collapsed global
fisheries by 2003 could have been reduced from more than 25 percent to about 9 percent.37
Waste Management Policies
Market-based approaches have also been used to manage solid waste. Some waste products have
high recycling value. If you live in a community with curbside recycling, you may have seen low-income
residents of the community picking aluminum cans out of recycling bins at the curb; they do this
because it is much less costly to produce aluminum from scrap metal than from virgin ore, and as a
result, those cans are quite valuable. But most household waste ends up as trash, disposed of legally in
landfills or incinerators or illegally dumped. The marginal cost of public garbage collection and disposal
for an American household has been estimated at $1.03 per trash bag, but until recently, the marginal
cost of disposal borne by households was approximately zero.38 An increasingly common waste
management policy is the “pay-as-you-throw” system, a volume-based waste disposal charge often
assessed as a requirement for the purchase of official garbage bags, stickers to attach to bags of
specific volume, periodic disposal charges for official city trash cans of particular sizes, and (rarely)
charges based on the measured weight of curbside trash. These systems function like an environmental
tax, internalizing the costs of disposing of household waste. In 2006, more than 7,000 US communities
had some form of pay-as-you-throw disposal.39 Studies suggest that these policies increase the sorted
waste ratio by 25–35 percent, and reduce municipal solid waste disposal by 15–74 percent.40 For
example, an 80-cent tax per bag in Charlottesville, Virginia, reduced the number of bags households
threw out by about 37 percent.41 However, the effect was offset by two factors: (1) the reduction in the
total weight of trash thrown away was much smaller (about 14 percent), since consumers compacted
their trash in order to reduce the number of bags they used; and (2) illegal disposal increased. A study
of two hundred towns in New Hampshire suggests that the introduction of such policies reduces
municipal solid waste generation very significantly, with an additional marginal effect of increasing the
disposal cost per bag.42
Habitat and Land Management Policies
Tradable development rights (TDRs) have been applied to solve problems as diverse as deforestation in
the Brazilian Amazon and the development of former farmland in the Maryland suburbs of Washington,
DC.43 About 140 US communities have implemented TDRs, with many other potential programs in the
pipeline.44 The program in Calvert County, Maryland, preserved an estimated thirteen thousand acres of
farmland between 1978 and 2005. In Brazil since 1998, TDRs have been used to slow the conversion of
ecologically valuable lands to agriculture; each parcel of private property that is developed must be
offset by preserving a forested parcel elsewhere (within the same ecosystem and with land of greater or
equal ecological value). Landowners can develop the most profitable land and preserve less profitable
land. But this raises two key issues. First, how can regulators ensure that a preserved parcel is really
additional—that it would not have remained in forest without the developer’s efforts? Second, are the
traded land parcels really ecologically equivalent? In the case of carbon emissions, each ton of
emissions has essentially the same impact on atmospheric carbon concentrations, no matter where it is
emitted. In contrast, the effects of land preservation are spatially heterogeneous.

A related policy, wetlands mitigation banking, holds similar promise and faces similar challenges.
Wetlands are classic public goods. They provide a rich set of ecosystem services, for which there are no
markets and from which everyone benefits, regardless of who pays for their preservation. Wetlands
have been depleted rapidly in the United States and other parts of the world by conversion to
agricultural and urban use. The externalities to wetlands conversion include increased flood risk; loss of
habitat for birds, fish, and mammals; and reduced groundwater recharge. Since the early 1990s, the
United States has experimented with mitigation banking, a policy under which land developers must
compensate for any lost wetlands by preserving, expanding, or creating wetlands elsewhere.45 Wetland
banks serve as central brokers, allowing developers to purchase credits and to fulfill credits through the
physical process of wetlands preservation, creation, and management. In 2020, there were more than
3,700 US wetland banks listed in the US Army Corps of Engineers’ database that tracks these
institutions.

As in the case of TDRs, wetlands mitigation banking reduces the costs of preserving wetlands acreage
but faces significant challenges. A wetland in a particular location provides a specific portfolio of
biophysical services. For example, coastal wetlands support shellfish nurseries and may reduce
damages from storm-related flooding. Inland wetlands may filter contaminants and provide islands of
habitat for migratory bird species in overland flight. If development pressures in coastal cities create
incentives for landowners to develop wetlands in these locations, and to pay for wetlands creation
inland, the net effect of these kinds of trades must be considered. This is a significant change from the
simple ton-for-ton trading that occurs for some air pollutants.

This section offered a handful of examples of the many applications of market principles to
environmental policy.46 We emphasized the strong arguments in favor of taxes, tradable permits, and
other market-based approaches, especially given that these policies can achieve environmental policy
goals at less cost than more prescriptive approaches. But they are not appropriate solutions to all
environmental problems. The issues we raised in our discussion of market-based land management
policies arise in other contexts, as well. Market-based policies can be designed for situations in which
the location of pollution emissions or natural resource amenities matters for the benefits of pollution
control or resource management. But they are not workable in extreme cases. For example, the impacts
of a toxic waste dump are highly localized. Economists would not advise setting a national limit on toxic
waste disposal, allowing firms to trade disposal permits, and letting the waste end up where it may.
Environmental problems at this end of the spectrum—the opposite end from a problem like carbon
emissions, which can be reduced anywhere with essentially the same net effect—may be better
addressed through prescriptive approaches.
CONCLUSION
Economics offers a powerful pair of tools—efficiency and cost-effectiveness—with which to evaluate
environmental policy trade-offs. Efficiency has to do with the setting of environmental policy goals: how
much pollution should we reduce, or how many acres of wetlands should be preserved? An efficient
pollution control policy equalizes the monetized benefits and costs of the last ton of pollution eliminated.
The process used to determine whether an environmental policy is efficient is benefit–cost analysis. If a
strict benefit–cost test were applied to the decision of how much SO2 pollution to eliminate from power
plant smokestacks in the 1990s, additional reductions would have been required. Benefit–cost analysis
would also have suggested that lead be eliminated from US gasoline sooner than it was. In other cases,
applying the rule of efficiency suggests that environmental standards should be weakened.

However, efficiency is not the only potential input to good environmental policy. The treatment of
benefit–cost analysis in the major US environmental statutes is a good indication of our ambivalence
toward analyzing environmental trade-offs in this systematic way; the statutes alternately “forbid, inhibit,
tolerate, allow, invite, or require the use of economic analysis in environmental decision making.”47 For
example, the CAA forbids the consideration of costs in setting the National Ambient Air Quality
Standards, and the US Safe Drinking Water Act requires benefit–cost analysis of all new drinking water
contaminant standards. Environmental regulatory agencies are not economic agencies. While laying out
the trade-offs involved in setting environmental standards is critically important from an economic
perspective, political, social, and ethical concerns may hold more influence than benefit–cost analysis in
this process.

Even when environmental standards are inefficient, however, policymakers can choose policies to
achieve those standards at least cost. The billions of dollars saved by policies like SO2 trading, paired
with their proven environmental effectiveness, have made market-based approaches such as tradable
permits and taxes appealing policy instruments for solving environmental problems. Ironically, as the
theoretical and empirical evidence of the cost savings and environmental effectiveness of these policies
has stacked up, US political support for them has not only eroded but also been thoroughly demonized,
and especially so by Republicans in Congress,48 in direct conflict with their support for markets in most
other contexts. At the same time, Democratic politicians have shifted away from discussion of carbon
taxes and cap-and-trade toward ambitious but prescriptive climate proposals such as the Green New
Deal. These political shifts may make it much harder in the future to implement market-based policies,
unnecessarily raising the cost of environmental regulation. Market-based environmental policy
approaches are not appropriate for all situations. But where market incentives create environmental
problems, market principles should be harnessed to solve them.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Center for Effective Government (www.foreffectivegov.org) This center follows budgets and
regulatory policies.

Climate Leadership Council (www.clcouncil.org) This nonprofit, bipartisan institute advocates for a
specific US carbon tax proposal of its own design, endorsed by thousands of economists from
across the political spectrum.

EPA National Center for Environmental Economics (www.epa.gov/environmental-economics)

This page provides access to research reports, regulatory impact analyses, and other EPA
publications.

Resources for the Future (www.rff.org) This nonprofit research organization is devoted to
environmental and resource economics and policy.
NOTES
1. For competing scientific opinions about Snake River salmon decline, see Charles C. Mann and Mark
L. Plummer, “Can Science Rescue Salmon?” Science 298 (2000): 716–19, with letters and responses.
See also David L. Halsing and Michael R. Moore, “Cost-Effective Management Alternatives for Snake
River Chinook Salmon: A Biological-Economic Synthesis,” Conservation Biology 22, no. 2 (2000): 338–
50.

2. In reality, each ton of emissions is not equivalent. SO2 emissions in urban areas or those upwind of
critical ecosystems may cause relatively greater harm. In addition, costs and benefits may not follow the
smooth, continuous functions we depict in Figure 10.1. The simple curves help us to develop intuition
that carries through even in more complex situations.

3. Since marginal benefits and costs represent the rate at which benefits and costs change when we
add an additional ton of emissions reduction, they are also measured by the slope of the total benefit
and cost curves; notice that net benefits are largest in Figure 10.1 (at Q*) when the slopes of B(Q) and
C(Q) are equal.

4. Dallas Burtraw, Alan Krupnick, Erin Mansur, David Austin, and Deirdre Farrell, “The Costs and
Benefits of Reducing Air Pollutants Related to Acid Rain,” Contemporary Economic Policy 16 (1998):
379–400.

5. Kenneth J. Arrow, Maureen L. Cropper, George C. Eads, Robert W. Hahn, Lester B. Lave, Roger G.
Noll, Paul R. Portney, Milton Russell, Richard Schmalensee, V. Kerry Smith, and Robert N. Stavins, “Is
There a Role for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulation?” Science (April
12, 1996): 221–22.

6. Stephen Kelman, “Cost-Benefit Analysis: An Ethical Critique,” with replies, AEI Journal on
Government and Social Regulation 5, no. 1 (January/February 1981): 33–40.

7. Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling, Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value
of Nothing (New York, NY: New Press, 2004).

8. This discussion is based on Nathaniel O. Keohane, Benjamin Van Roy, and Richard J. Zeckhauser,
“Managing the Quality of a Resource with Stock and Flow Controls,” Journal of Public Economics 91
(2007): 541–69.

9. See A. Myrick Freeman III, Joseph A. Herriges, and Catherine L. Kling, The Measurement of
Environmental and Resource Values, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 2014).

10. Albert L. Nichols, “Lead in Gasoline,” in Economic Analyses at EPA: Assessing Regulatory Impact,
ed. Richard D. Morgenstern (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 1997), 49–86.

11. See Martin L. Weitzman, “A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change,”
Journal of Economic Literature 45, no. 3 (2007): 703–24.

12. Robert Costanza, Ralph d’Arge, Rudolf de Groot, Stephen Farber, Monica Grasso, Bruce Hannon,
Karin Limburg, Shahid Naeem, Robert V. O’Neill, Jose Paruelo, Robert G. Raskin, Paul Sutton, and
Marjan van den Belt, “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital,” Nature 387
(1997): 253–60.

13. Michael Toman, “Why Not to Calculate the Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural
Capital,” Ecological Economics 25 (1998): 57–60.

14. We emphasize the cost-effectiveness of market-based approaches to environmental policy in the

short run, a critical concept and one that is relatively easy to develop at an intuitive level. However, the
greatest potential cost savings from these types of environmental policies may be achieved in the long
run. Because they require firms to pay to pollute, market-based policies provide strong incentives for
regulated firms to invest in technologies that reduce pollution abatement costs over time, either
developing these technologies themselves or adopting cheaper pollution control technologies developed
elsewhere.

15. Nathaniel O. Keohane, “Cost Savings from Allowance Trading in the 1990 Clean Air Act,” in Moving
to Markets in Environmental Regulation: Lessons from Twenty Years of Experience, eds. Charles E.
Kolstad and Jody Freeman (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007).

16. The definitive overview of the SO2 permit-trading program is found in A. Denny Ellerman, Richard
Schmalensee, Elizabeth M. Bailey, Paul L. Joskow, and Juan-Pablo Montero, Markets for Clean Air: The
U.S. Acid Rain Program (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

17. These concepts are described in much greater detail in Nathaniel O. Keohane and Sheila M.
Olmstead, Markets and the Environment, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2007), Chapter 5.

18. Pollution is a negative externality, but externalities can also be positive. For example, a child
vaccinated against measles benefits because she is unlikely to contract that disease. But a vaccinated
child in turn benefits her family, neighbors, and schoolmates, as she is less likely to expose them to
disease.

19. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–48.

20. Richard Schmalensee and Robert N. Stavins, “The SO2 Allowance Trading System: The Ironic
History of a Grand Policy Experiment,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (2013): 103–22.

21. This difference between the two approaches—taxes and permits—can cause one approach to be
more efficient than the other; see Martin L. Weitzman, “Prices v. Quantities,” Review of Economic
Studies 41 (1974): 477–91.

22. This distinction disappears if permits are auctioned rather than given away. But auctioned permit
systems are less common than free allocation.

23. This decision of how best to use the revenues from an environmental tax is complicated because
environmental taxes can exacerbate the distortions introduced by other taxes. For a straightforward
discussion of this problem and for other comparisons between taxes and permits, see Lawrence H.
Goulder and Ian W. H. Parry, “Instrument Choice in Environmental Policy,” Review of Environmental
Economics and Policy 2, no. 2 (2007): 152–74.

24. Ian Parry and Kenneth Small, “Does Britain or the United States Have the Right Gasoline Tax?”
American Economic Review 95 (2005): 1276–89.

25. C.-Y. Cynthia Lin and Lea Prince, “The Optimal Gas Tax for California,” Energy Policy 37, no. 12
(2009): 5173–83.

26. Robert N. Stavins, “Experience with Market-Based Environmental Policy Instruments,” in Handbook
of Environmental Economics, vol. 1, eds. Karl-Göran Mäler and Jeffrey Vincent (Amsterdam: Elsevier
Science, 2003), 355–435.

27. Hua Wang, “Pollution Regulation and Abatement Efforts: Evidence from China,” Ecological
Economics 41, no. 1 (2002): 85–94; and Avraham Ebenstein, “The Consequences of Industrialization:
Evidence from Water Pollution and Digestive Cancers in China,” Review of Economics and Statistics 94,
no. 1 (2012): 186–201.

28. Pan He and Zhang Bing, “Environmental Tax, Polluting Plants’ Strategies and Effectiveness:
Evidence from China,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 37, no. 3 (2018): 493–520.
29. EPA, Office of Policy Analysis, Costs and Benefits of Reducing Lead in Gasoline, Final Regulatory
Impact Analysis (Washington, DC: EPA, 1985).

30. The World Bank surveys global carbon pricing policies every two years. See: World Bank Group,
State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2020, Washington, DC, available at:
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/33809.

31. See A. Denny Ellerman and Barbara K. Buchner, “The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme:
Origins, Allocation, and Early Results,” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 1, no. 1 (2007):
66–87; A. Denny Ellerman and Paul L. Joskow, The European Union’s Emissions Trading System in
Perspective (Washington, DC: Pew Center on Global Climate Change, 2008); Frank J. Convery and
Luke Redmond, “Market and Price Developments in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme,”
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 1, no. 1 (2007): 88–111; and European Commission,
The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets/index_en.htm.

32. Christian Egenhofer, Monica Alessi, Anton Georgiev, and Noriko Fujiwara, The EU Emissions
Trading System and Climate Policy towards 2050: Real Incentives to Reduce Emissions and Drive
Innovation? CEPS Special Report (Brussels: Centre for European Policy Studies, 2011); and Patrick
Bayer and Michaël Aklin, “The European Union Emissions Trading System Reduced CO2 Emissions
Despite Low Prices,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (2020): 8804–12.

33. See A. Denny Ellerman and Barbara K. Buchner, “The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme:
Origins, Allocation, and Early Results,” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 1, no. 1 (2007):
66–87; A. Denny Ellerman and Paul L. Joskow, The European Union’s Emissions Trading System in
Perspective (Washington, DC: Pew Center on Global Climate Change, 2008); Frank J. Convery and
Luke Redmond, “Market and Price Developments in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme,”
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 1, no. 1 (2007): 88–111; and Sascha Kollenberg and
Luca Taschini, “Dynamic Supply Adjustment and Banking Under Uncertainty in an Emission Trading
Scheme: The Market Stability Reserve,” European Economic Review 118 (2019): 213–26.

34. In June 2009, the US federal government appeared to be taking significant steps toward setting up
an economy-wide cap-and-trade system to reduce CO2 emissions, with the passage in the House of
Representatives of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey
bill. In July 2010, the US Senate abandoned its effort to draft companion legislation (see Chapter 5).

35. Harrison Fell and Peter Maniloff, “Leakage in Regional Environmental Policy: The Case of the
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative,” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 87 (2018):
1–23.

36. See Suzanne Iudicello, Michael Weber, and Robert Wieland, Fish, Markets and Fishermen: The
Economics of Overfishing (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999). For assessments of New Zealand’s
policy, see John H. Annala, “New Zealand’s ITQ System: Have the First Eight Years Been a Success or
a Failure?” Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 6 (1996): 43–62; and Richard G. Newell, James N.
Sanchirico, and Suzi Kerr, “Fishing Quota Markets,” Journal of Environmental Economics and
Management 49, no. 3 (2005): 437–62.

37. Christopher Costello, Stephen D. Gaines, and John Lynham, “Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries
Collapse?” Science 321 (2008): 1678–81.

38. See Robert Repetto, Roger C. Dower, Robin Jenkins, and Jacqueline Geoghegan, Green Fees:
How a Tax Shift Can Work for the Environment and the Economy (Washington, DC: World Resources
Institute, 1992).

39. Skumatz Economic Research Associates, Inc., “Pay as You Throw (PAYT) in the U.S.: 2006 Update
and Analyses,” Final report to the EPA Office of Solid Waste, December 30, 2006, Superior, CO. See
https://archive.epa.gov/wastes/conserve/tools/payt/web/pdf/sera06.pdf.
40. Ju-Chin Huang, John M. Halstead, and Shanna B. Saunders, “Managing Municipal Solid Waste with
Unit-Based Pricing: Policy Effects and Responsiveness to Pricing,” Land Economics 87, no. 4 (2011):
645–60; and Alessandro Bucciol, Natalia Montinari, and Marco Piovesan, “Do Not Trash the Incentive!
Monetary Incentives and Waste Sorting,” Scandinavian Journal of Economics 117, no. 4 (2015): 1204–
29.

41. Don Fullerton and Thomas C. Kinnaman, “Household Responses to Pricing Garbage by the Bag,”
American Economic Review 86, no. 4 (1996): 971–84.

42. Ju-Chin Huang, John M. Halstead, and Shanna B. Saunders, “Managing Municipal Solid Waste with
Unit-Based Pricing: Policy Effects and Responsiveness to Pricing,” Land Economics 87, no. 4 (2011):
645–60.

43. On Brazil, see Kenneth M. Chomitz, “Transferable Development Rights and Forest Protection: An
Exploratory Analysis,” International Regional Science Review 27, no. 3 (2004): 348–73. On Calvert
County, Maryland, see Virginia McConnell, Margaret Walls, and Elizabeth Kopits, “Zoning, Transferable
Development Rights and the Density of Development,” Journal of Urban Economics 59 (2006): 440–57.

44. Virginia McConnell and Margaret Walls, “U.S. Experience with Transferable Development Rights,”
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 3, no. 2 (2009): 288–303.

45. National Research Council, Compensating for Wetland Losses under the Clean Water Act
(Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2001); and David Salvesen, Lindell L. Marsh, and
Douglas R. Porter, eds., Mitigation Banking: Theory and Practice (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996).

46. For surveys of these approaches, see Stavins, “Experience with Market-Based Environmental Policy
Instruments”; Thomas Sterner and Jessica Coria, Policy Instruments for Environmental and Natural
Resource Management, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 2011); and Theodore
Panayotou, Instruments of Change: Motivating and Financing Sustainable Development (London:
Earthscan, 1998).

47. Richard D. Morgenstern, “Decision Making at EPA: Economics, Incentives and Efficiency,” draft
conference paper in EPA at Thirty: Evaluating and Improving the Environmental Protection Agency
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 36–8.

48. Richard Schmalensee and Robert N. Stavins, “The SO2 Allowance Trading System: The Ironic
History of a Grand Policy Experiment,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (2013): 103–22.
Descriptions of Images and Figures
Back to Figure

The graph depicts the comparison between total benefits and costs of pollution abatement. Total costs
or C(Q) along with total benefits or B (Q) are calculated based on benefits rising more quickly and more
slowly than costs which equals to the net benefits rising or falling, i.e., B (Q)-C(Q). The value of reducing
emissions declines as more tons of SO2 is abated.

Back to Figure

The graph is a calculation of the marginal costs of protecting the California Condor. Ranging from $0–
$450 dollars per year, the total condors saved per year are estimated as follows: Habitat protection in
various low-lying areas cost annually $4000 where 0.53 condors are saved per year. With each condor
costing $7–$8 per year. Stepping up law enforcement costs $5000 with 0.02 condors saved per year,
and each condor costing $270. Modifying man-made structures total to $105,000, where 0.50 condors
are saved per year, each costing $210. Reducing contaminants such as lead shotgun pellets costs
annually $20,000, where 0.67 condors are saved, each costing $30.

Back to Figure

The graph shows the cost-effective pollution abatement measures taken by two firms. Firm A’s and B’s
abatement are calculated in million ton. The marginal cost curves, MCA and MCB are determined from
the associated costs of the two firms. The abatement increases from left to right for Firm A and vice
versa for Firm B. At any point along the horizontal axis, the sum of the two firms’ reductions equal 10.
11 SUSTAINABILITY AND RESILIENCE IN CITIES :
WHAT CITIES ARE DOING
—Kent E. Portney and Bryce Hannibal
If the “sustainability epoch” of environmental policy described by Daniel Mazmanian and Michael Kraft
seems completely foreign to national policymakers in Washington, DC, it has nonetheless taken hold in
many of the world’s cities, including in numerous cities in the United States.1 This chapter takes a close
look at what cities in the United States are doing in order to try to become more sustainable and
resilient. The focus here is on local public policies and programs that are designed to make progress
toward protecting and improving cities’ biophysical environments while still seeking to grow municipal
economies. Over the last twenty years or more, many US cities have made significant commitments to
achieving these goals. They have enacted and implemented many different types of programs and
policies and have sought to do this with an eye toward becoming more livable, sustainable, and resilient
places.

Of course, cities vary in how seriously they pursue these goals, and they vary in what kinds of programs
and policies they create. After briefly discussing the idea and origins of city sustainability, this chapter
contrasts sustainability with the emerging idea of resilience, and then reviews the wide array of local
policies and programs that major US cities have adopted and implemented in the pursuit of these goals,
providing examples from a range of cities that have made significant commitments. The chapter ends
with a look at some of the challenges that cities face as they try to do more and then suggests some
strategies to facilitate these efforts.
THE IDEA OF SUSTAINABILITY IN CITIES
Sustainability is a very broad, and sometimes misunderstood, concept that has evolved over the last
thirty years or so.2 The core of the concept of sustainability, as articulated in the 1987 report of the
United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development, refers to economic development
activity that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs.”3 This means that sustainability does not readily accept a trade-off between
protecting the environment and growing the economy; rather, the two go hand in hand to support and
improve human well-being. Sustainability has become an important principle in a variety of contexts,
including the private sector (as discussed by Olmstead in Chapter 10 and Fiorino in Chapter 14), state
government (as discussed by Rabe in Chapter 2), and others.

Over the more than twenty years since US cities started developing sustainability programs, experience
and research have painted a fairly clear picture of what cities can do if they wish to try to become more
sustainable places. One aspect of sustainability that seems to be constant across nearly all definitions is
the fact that the environment is at the core of what it means to be, or become more, sustainable. Today,
as will be elaborated below, cities’ efforts to try to become more sustainable have included policies and
programs on mass transit and transit-oriented development, smart growth, energy efficiency, housing
densification, water conservation and protection, climate protection (climate mitigation and adaptation),
carbon footprint reduction, urban agriculture and food systems, and many other programs. Although
early research argued that such sustainability programs only were found in wealthy places, places with a
well-educated population, or cities on the West Coast, subsequent analysis has firmly established that
communities of all sorts have successfully pursued sustainability policies. The fact is, many US cities—
indeed, cities around the world—have come to understand that to grow and thrive, they need to pay
close attention to the quality of life offered to current and prospective residents. Cities may embark on
sustainability policies because they wish to be responsive to demands placed by residents through local
environmental and other nonprofit groups, but they quickly learn that these policies represent a new and
effective way to engage in economic development.
BUILDING RESILIENCE IN CITIES
Resilience has risen in prominence and popularity in urban planning and among city managers in the
recent years. Many cities and several nonprofit organizations have dedicated significant resources to
building resilience. Like the concept of sustainability, resilience is broadly defined and applicable to a
wide array of social, psychological, physical, and biological phenomena. Building resilience can include
numerous policy strategies and programs.

Defining resilience has been a challenge for many stakeholders and scholars. Cities use resilience as a
concept that reflects the ability to “bounce back” from some external shocks or stressors such as natural
disasters. In the narrowest definition, cities seek to prepare for various potential shocks by improving
their respective disaster and emergency management functions. Other, more expansive, definitions try
to capture the idea that instead of bringing cities back to the condition before the shock, they should
strike to “bounce forward” so that the city is better prepared to resist and recover from future shocks.
Such broader definitions include aspects of adaptation to changing climate conditions, such as moving
people out of harm’s way and reducing social vulnerabilities. Building city resilience, then, can include a
variety of strategies that assist in facilitating bouncing back, recovering quickly, and adapting.

Cities undertake many initiatives to build resilience such as hardening physical infrastructure, creating
redundant city service systems, poverty reduction, equitable access to healthy food and clean water,
and others. Numerous policy areas have been used by cities to try to build resilience. Specifically, some
cities have used land use policies, regulated through zoning and building codes, transportation
infrastructure, climate mitigation through pollution and carbon reduction programs, enhanced public
health, and others. Building resilience does not look the same in all cities. Resilience building efforts in
coastal cities, such as Fort Lauderdale or San Diego, look dramatically different than resilience efforts in
noncoastal Tulsa or Dallas. Pragmatically, building resilience in a city needs to take into account what
areas of that city are the most vulnerable. This also influences what policies and programs carry the
most impact to the population. Regardless of the specific policies and programs, specific projects and
upgrades to build resilience, such a renewed or replaced infrastructure, cost money, often in the form of
capital expenses. Cities often need to create innovative financing strategies in order to fund some of the
more capital-intensive projects.

Perhaps the most obvious need in many cities today is to build this kind of resilience in anticipation of
climate change that could well pose major risks to infrastructure and public well-being, particularly to
coastal cities and others that are prone to flooding from increased rainfall or to droughts from insufficient
precipitation. As the evidence of climate change mounts (see Chapter 12), cities and states may well
find themselves searching for effective ways to respond. Similarly, the coronavirus pandemic in 2020
demonstrated significant risks to cities and neighborhoods where high density housing and concentrated
retail stores and restaurants make it difficult for residents to maintain a safe distance when
circumstances warrant doing so. Impacts from both climate change and pandemics also point to the
need to rethink city and state planning and budgets to ensure adequate resources are available when
needed.
CITY SUSTAINABILITY POLICIES AND PROGRAMS
What can a city do to try to become more sustainable? In fact, based on the efforts of cities all around
the United States, cities can do a lot. What have cities done as a matter of local public policy in order to
try to become more sustainable? By 2016, at least forty-nine of the fifty-five largest cities in the United
States had created significant sustainability programs, and only five seem to have made no effort to try
explicitly to become more sustainable as a matter of public policy. By 2020, nearly every major city in
the nation had created some program oriented toward building or becoming more sustainable.4
Sustainability programs take many different forms and include many different programmatic elements. In
Seattle, the heart of the program is found in the city’s comprehensive plan Toward a Sustainable
Seattle. In New York City, sustainability represents the core of its OneNYC. In Philadelphia, the program
is encapsulated in its Greenworks Philadelphia program. In Denver, the sustainability program got its
start in the Greenprint Denver program. After more than twenty years of experience, cities have tended
to settle on several dozen specific types of programs and policies. Of course, not all cities are the same.
Some take a much more comprehensive approach to their policies than others. After this chapter
reviews an array of municipal sustainability policies and programs, variations across the fifty-five largest
US cities will become evident.

The content of cities’ sustainability efforts spans a wide range of programs and environmental results.
The policies and programs include general statements of sustainability policy as reflected in city
comprehensive plans, planning documents, and resolutions of chief executives and legislative bodies.
They also include specific programs designed to address climate protection (climate change mitigation
and adaptation), energy efficiency, smart growth, and the reduction of metropolitan sprawl. Many other
initiatives are pursued as well, such as developing transit-oriented housing, housing densification, and
the protection of environmentally sensitive lands. We can think of thirty-eight categories of these kinds of
actions, and they focus on programs and policies that include the following: household and industrial
recycling, hazardous waste recycling, brownfield redevelopment, hazardous waste site remediation, tax
incentives for environmentally friendly development, alternatively fueled city vehicles, car pool lanes, the
operation of public transportation, eco-industrial projects, the use of zoning to protect environmentally
vulnerable land, air emissions (greenhouse gas) reduction and climate mitigation and adaptation,
bicycle ridership, asbestos and lead abatement, green building, urban infill and transit-oriented housing
development, energy efficiency, renewable energy for city and general residential customers, water
conservation and water quality protection, recycling wastewater and reduction in stormwater runoff,
creating a citywide comprehensive sustainability plan, having a single city agency responsible for
managing sustainability, green city purchasing, and initiating a sustainability indicators or performance
management program.

Table 11.1 shows the results of an assessment designed to determine how many different sustainability
program elements each of the largest US cities had adopted and implemented as of July 2012, though a
similar assessment in 2020 would likely show similar results. This assessment is based on a
comprehensive effort to examine cities’ policies and programs by considering materials available on
each city’s respective website, by consulting independent surveys of city officials, and by talking to
selected city administrators. In order for a city’s program to be counted, there must be tangible evidence
that it has actually been implemented in some way. A program that exists only on paper would not be
counted in this assessment. The evidence to support the assessments is found in the context of city
sustainability and comprehensive plans, and from the programs that are operated by a variety of
different city departments.
Table 11.1 2012 Sustainability and 2019 Resilience Scores for the Fifty-Five Largest US Cities
 2012 Sustainability Score* (Number of 2019 Resilience Score** (Number of
Sustainability Programs Adopted and Resilience Programs Adopted and
City
Implemented Out of a Possible Total of Implemented Out of a Possible Total
38) of 109)
Portland 35 49
San 35 96
Francisco
Seattle 35 83
Denver 33 70
Albuquerque 32 55
Charlotte 32 58
Oakland 32 78
Chicago 31 79
Columbus 31 65
 2012 Sustainability Score* (Number of 2019 Resilience Score** (Number of
Sustainability Programs Adopted and Resilience Programs Adopted and
City
Implemented Out of a Possible Total of Implemented Out of a Possible Total
38) of 109)
Minneapolis 31 75
Philadelphia 31 72
Phoenix 31 77
Sacramento 31 66
New York 30 97
City
San Diego 30 70
San Jose 30 70
Austin 29 87
Dallas 29 71
Fort Worth 29 61
Nashville 29 59
Tucson 29 58
Washington, 29 82
DC
Boston 28 66
Kansas City 28 75
Los Angeles 28 81
Indianapolis 27 63
Fresno 26 54
Las Vegas 26 42
Louisville 26 69
Miami 26 53
Raleigh 26 60
San Antonio 26 82
Baltimore 25 69
El Paso 25 61
Cleveland 24 56
Milwaukee 24 59
Atlanta 23 66
Jacksonville 23 65
Honolulu 22 49
Houston 22 72
Long Beach 22 60
Mesa 22 48
Arlington, 20 50
TX
Memphis 20 49
Tampa 20 65
Tulsa 20 54
Colorado 19 44
Springs
 2012 Sustainability Score* (Number of 2019 Resilience Score** (Number of
Sustainability Programs Adopted and Resilience Programs Adopted and
City
Implemented Out of a Possible Total of Implemented Out of a Possible Total
38) of 109)
Omaha 19 45
St. Louis 19 65
Oklahoma 18 46
City
Detroit 17 50
Virginia 17 51
Beach
Pittsburgh 16 63
Santa Ana 16 47
Wichita 7 36
Sources: *Drawn from Kent E. Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: Economic Development, the Environment, and Quality of
Life in American Cities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 23–24, updated. **Derived from the 2019 Resilient Cities Policies
and Programs Project Online.

The results show that three cities have adopted and implemented thirty-five of the thirty-eight different
policies and programs—Portland, Oregon; San Francisco, California; and Seattle, Washington. Denver,
Colorado, has adopted thirty-three programs. Oakland, California; Charlotte, North Carolina; and
Albuquerque, New Mexico, have adopted thirty-two; and six cities have adopted thirty-one each. At the
lower end, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Detroit, Michigan, have adopted seventeen; Santa Ana,
California, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have adopted sixteen each; and Wichita, Kansas, has adopted
only seven. The exact content of these efforts may well vary considerably. Although Portland, San
Francisco, and Seattle reside at the top of the list, the character of any one particular type of program
could very well differ. All three cities have energy efficiency programs, yet the programs differ in how
they have gone about trying to achieve greater efficiency. These latter differences are not captured in
the sustainability scores presented in Table 11.1.

It should also be noted that this chapter focuses on cities’ policies and programs—the programs that
they have adopted and implemented in their efforts to try to become more sustainable. It is perhaps
natural to want to know what these programs have achieved—what their results are. Yet assessing the
“outcomes” of these programs is no small task, and indeed, even as of 2020 there are no
comprehensive data available to allow such assessments to be conducted. As cities push forward with
their programs, our understanding of the efficacy of these programs will improve. At this moment,
however, it is not possible to know with any degree of accuracy whether these programs have improved
the quality of the air, the water, and the environment broadly.
CITY SUSTAINABILITY PROGRAMS: A CLOSER LOOK
One way to get a sense of the character of cities’ sustainability programs is to look at them as individual
cases and to describe in detail what they are doing. This chapter provides at least a glimpse into what a
number of US cities are doing in their efforts to try to become more sustainable and resilient. We will first
look at sustainability in four large cities—New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. These
cities are very similar in terms of the numbers of specific programs they have implemented, having
adopted and implemented between twenty-eight and thirty-one of the programs. After discussing these
four cities, our attention will turn to examining resilience efforts and policy in four major cities—San
Francisco, Austin, Seattle, and Washington, DC. These cities are also similar in the number of policies
they have enacted in efforts to build resilience. What these cities also tend to have in common is that
they have been able to pursue sustainability and grow their local economies by protecting the
environment. We think the efforts these cities have made over the past decade and more are broadly
representative of larger US cities. But even medium to smaller cities have engaged in comparable
efforts even though they often have fewer resources to pursue sustainability and resilience policies.
Sustainability in Four Large Cities
Although four of the five largest cities in the United States, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and
Philadelphia, came to the pursuit of sustainability somewhat later than many other cities, they
nonetheless have gotten very serious about enacting and implementing programs. Because of their
population sizes, and perhaps their geographic sizes as well, these four cities face a somewhat more
formidable set of challenges than do other cities, and that is perhaps why these cities did not stand out
as early adopters of sustainability programs and policies.

New York City, NY

New York City’s sustainability effort is summarized in its OneNYC plan, an updated version of the earlier
PlaNYC, a comprehensive plan first released in 2007 during the administration of Mayor Michael
Bloomberg. PlaNYC addressed ten different sustainability-related policy areas and involved at least
twenty-five major city departments and agencies,5 all geared toward the city’s effort to create jobs while
protecting the environment and becoming more resilient in the face of rising sea levels and increasingly
severe storms. The 2011 update of PlaNYC contained 132 specific program initiatives with over four
hundred “milestones” or goals to be achieved between 2013 and 2030, and it addressed sustainability
issues related to the city’s housing and neighborhoods, parks and public spaces, brownfield
redevelopment, waterways and water resources, transportation, energy, air quality and climate action,
and solid waste, as well as “crosscutting” issues such as public health, food, natural systems, green
building, waterfront development, economic development, and public engagement. The 2011 plan
update provided a comprehensive implementation plan and assessment, showing each milestone or
goal, its timeline, what had been accomplished, who was responsible for accomplishing it, where the
funding was supposed to come from, and what progress had been made to date.6 It also presented the
city’s sustainability indicators report, with annual progress report assessments of accomplishments in
twenty-nine broad indicators. The explicit inclusion and treatment of public health as part of its
sustainability plan stands out, as very few other cities make this connection.7

OneNYC, released in 2015 under the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, represents an expansion of
PlaNYC, adding goals related to making the city more resilient and increasing emphasis on issues of
environmental equity. It is organized around four broad “visions”: to promote economic growth and
development, to achieve greater equity in public services and public well-being, to become more
sustainable and aggressive in fighting climate change, and to adapt to the realities of climate change by
becoming more resilient.

What does OneNYC prescribe for programs and goals related to the environment and environmental
sustainability? Most of the goals associated with the biophysical environment are incorporated in Vision
3, referred to as “Our Sustainability City,” and address climate protection, energy, air quality, water,
hazardous and solid waste, and many other areas. The city’s climate plan contains dozens of different
initiatives with associated milestones, including conducting and releasing an annual inventory of
greenhouse gas emissions, assessing opportunities to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80
percent by 2050, regularly assessing climate change projections, partnering with the Federal
Emergency Management Agency to update flood insurance rate maps, developing tools to measure the
city’s current and future climate exposure, updating regulations to increase the resilience of buildings,
working with the insurance industry to develop strategies to encourage the use of flood protection in
buildings, protecting New York City’s critical infrastructure, identifying and evaluating citywide coastal
protective measures, mitigating the urban heat island effect, and enhancing the city’s understanding of
the impacts of climate change on public health.

Ostensibly, all of the programs and projects outlined in the sustainability vision, along with many of those
associated with the fourth vision, “Our Resilient City,” represent a full statement of the city’s policy and
planning around the environment. A few of the pertinent policies outlined in Vision 4 include the effort to
integrate climate change projections into emergency management and preparedness, working with
communities and neighborhoods to increase their climate resilience, and improving the city’s critical
infrastructure.8

OneNYC is designed to be used, in part, as an implementation tool, as it specifies performance metrics

or measures, along with goals and milestones for each action area. Even so, some of the action areas
and milestones do not seem terribly well tailored to serve this purpose, particularly when the milestone
is just a restatement of the action area. OneNYC provides assessments of progress on each milestone,
although, unlike many other sustainability plans, it has no clear-cut interventions prescribed when
milestones are not met. Presumably, the designation of funding sources, while typically not very specific,
does provide some sense that internal funding decisions may well be tied to these action areas,
milestones, and goals. And, of course, there is always the question as to whether any of the specific
programs, when implemented, will have their intended effects on the environment or resiliency. For
example, although there are no serious assessments available, Brian Paul argued that the NYC
approach to transit-oriented development would actually increase the city’s greenhouse gas emissions
by putting many more motor vehicles on the streets.9

In April 2019, Mayor de Blasio announced OneNYC 2050, a new expansion of the plan that set forth a
vision for the future of New York City and a strategy focused on building a “strong and fair city.”10 The
2019 report shows the significant progress made by the City in working towards goals established in the
2015 plan11 and details a new strategy comprised of eight goals and thirty initiatives to reach the vision
for 2050. The plan consists of volumes that each detail a different goal, including a vibrant democracy,
thriving neighborhoods, equity and excellence in education, efficient mobility, an inclusive economy,
healthy lives, a livable climate, and modern infrastructure. Through these volumes, the plan sets more
aggressive goals than the original OneNYC plan, including a commitment to carbon neutrality by 2050.
The actions laid out in the plan, along with previous actions taken by the Mayor de Blasio administration
and former Mayor Bloomberg administration, set the city up to reach a 40 percent reduction in emissions
from 2005 levels by 2030 and to reach the carbon neutrality goal by 2050.12 A 2020 report of the city’s
progress on their goals and initiatives is forthcoming.13

Los Angeles, CA

Although Los Angeles had developed elements of a sustainability plan earlier, its sustainability policy
became official in 2007 when the then mayor Antonio Villaraigosa issued Executive Directive 10,
instructing all city departments to create sustainability plans. The city’s Department of Environmental
Affairs had primary responsibility for managing and coordinating these plans. Much of this sustainability
effort focused on the environment. Programs such as the “Mayor’s Green Agenda” and green
infrastructure, air quality and climate change, green building, energy, solid and hazardous waste,
brownfield redevelopment, water, and urban habitats initiatives were all placed under the auspices of the
Environmental Affairs Office. Los Angeles has not worked from a single comprehensive sustainability
plan; instead, it defined specific programs, which, taken together, make up its initiative. Sustainability
plans in many cities change when the political leadership changes, and this is true in Los Angeles. After
the election of Eric Garcetti as mayor in 2013, questions arose about his commitment to sustainability,
particularly after his early elimination of the Department of Environmental Affairs, whose functions have
been distributed to numerous other agencies, and in his message of “back to basics,” which appeared to
downplay earlier emphases on sustainability. However, these concerns declined during later stages of
his tenure.

Over the last decade, one of the key components of the Los Angeles sustainability program has been
the city’s Green LA climate change initiative. The program is complemented by a Clean Air Action Plan,
which calls for the city to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 35 percent below 1990 levels by 2030
and to increase the city’s use of renewable energy to 40 percent by 2020. The plan includes about fifty
specific initiatives designed to produce the targeted carbon reduction levels, such as the increased use
of energy-efficient lighting, extensive plans for green building, and the hallmark creation of an extensive
wind turbine farm. In 2009, Los Angeles completed the construction of the Pine Tree Wind Power
Project, consisting of eighty municipally owned wind turbines producing about 120 MW of electricity to
serve about 56,000 households in the city. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power operates
this facility, along with numerous other energy efficiency and alternative energy programs, and claims to
be on track to generate 20 percent of the city’s energy from renewable sources by 2020.

The Los Angeles sustainability program also includes efforts to convert the city’s fleet vehicles to ones
using alternative fuels, a bicycle ridership program, a significant brownfield redevelopment effort, and
extensive tree and native planting efforts. Two specific initiatives deserve special mention. The first, a
major initiative on water conservation, is important because of the limited supplies available to the city.
The second, a commitment to public transit, focuses its attention on the city’s relatively new subway
system. Operated by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro), the regional
transit authority, the subway system is much smaller than those in other major cities, including New
York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. About 150,000 people ride the subway
daily, with estimated ridership per mile of track making it the ninth busiest subway in the United States.
The system has received extensive criticism, primarily for its cost and, because the population of Los
Angeles is so widely dispersed, for “not going anywhere” that people want to go. Yet one of the
purposes of the system was to influence the patterns of new development, encouraging more transit-
oriented development and nudging people back toward the “downtown” of the city. Whether and to what
extent this has started to happen is still unclear.

In April 2019, Mayor Garcetti launched Los Angeles’ Green New Deal: Sustainable City pLAn. The 2019
plan serves as an update to his 2015 sustainability plan and addresses a number of topics relative to
sustainability in LA.14 Among these are some of the same areas addressed by sustainability initiatives in
the past, including renewable energy, urban ecosystems, local water efforts, mobility and public transit,
among others. The plan also sets more ambitious goals and targets than previously in place, including
reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2025, carbon neutrality by
2050,15 55 percent renewable energy supplied by 2025 and 100 percent by 2045.16 A key chapter
included in the 2015 and 2019 versions of the plan is that of “Lead by Example,” which commits the city
government as a leader in sustainability initiatives by setting more aggressive targets for government-
owned properties and city services than for the city as a whole.17

Chicago, IL

By the time Mayor Richard M. Daley declared that Chicago would become the greenest city in America,
he had already made a commitment to improving the biophysical environment of the city. Particularly
over the last five or so years of his twenty-two-year tenure as mayor, Daley and his administration made
significant commitments to sustainability. Although making substantial changes to the way the people
operate in a city is fraught with challenges and obstacles, the city created a Department of Environment,
headed by a commissioner, with four offices each headed by a deputy commissioner. These offices,
Energy and Sustainable Business, Permitting and Enforcement, Natural Resources and Water Quality,
and Urban Management and Brownfield Redevelopment, combine a number of traditional city functions,
such as permitting, with a broader environmental mandate. Additionally, the city’s Department of
Planning and Development has a division of Sustainable Development with responsibility for applying
sustainable design to all of the city’s economic and housing development projects. Together, these
made up the heart of the administrative apparatus responsible for sustainability until 2012 when the city
released a comprehensive sustainability plan. Under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who served from 2011
through 2019, a Sustainability Council, composed of numerous department heads, was established, as
was the office of “Chief Sustainability Officer.”

Unlike New York City or Philadelphia, Chicago did not have a unified, comprehensive sustainability plan
until 2012. Previously, “greening” efforts were defined fairly piecemeal, with many different departments
developing a part of the overall effort. For example, the Sustainable Development division worked with a
guide for encouraging, and sometimes requiring, green urban design in new construction. This plan,
Adding Green to Urban Design, was probably the closest thing to a full sustainability plan in the city until
the release of the 2015 Sustainable Chicago Action Plan.18 The primary purpose of the earlier
document was to provide all city departments, the city council, and the city Plan Commission with some
guidance as to what constitutes sustainable development, so they could apply sustainability principles
when it was time to review and approve specific development projects. The guide provided a rationale
for why each proposed project needed to take into consideration a wide array of environmental impacts
on the land, the air, the water, and ultimately the quality of life in the city. Presumably, the intent behind
this effort was to encourage the disapproval of projects that did not meet the implied standards of what
constitutes sustainable development.

But certainly not all of the programs and policies that make up Chicago’s sustainability activities are
contained in this, or any other, single document. For example, the Sustainable Development division
also has responsibility for the Eat Local, Live Healthy program, outlined in a separate document.19 This
program seeks to coordinate Chicago’s sustainable food system in order to support local and regional
agriculture while improving human nutrition and health. Another program not represented in any
comprehensive plan is the Department of Aviation’s Sustainable Airport Initiatives, designed to
encourage the airports in the city to adopt a variety of practices that are consistent with sustainability in
construction, renovation, and daily operations.20 The city’s Department of Transportation has
responsibility for traffic management, including a bicycle ridership program, but the mass transit system
is managed by the Chicago Transit Authority, an independent agency. Climate action has been tackled
by a task force appointed by the mayor and operating as a nonprofit organization called the Chicago
Climate Action Plan. This group, which works with the Chicago Department of the Environment and
Sustainability and many other city agencies, has responsibility for the city’s greenhouse gas inventory,
and for the plan to reduce the city’s carbon footprint.21 The city still operates under the 2015 Action
Plan, which incorporates and consolidates the various elements developed previously.22

In 2018, the Mayor’s office created Sustain Chicago, a project that provides resources and guidance to
residents on climate change and sustainability.23 Sustain Chicago has a number of goals established
with the focus of reducing emissions and improving air quality, as well as preparedness for the impacts
of climate change. Just before that, in late 2017, former Chicago mayor Emanuel signed a Chicago
Climate Charter, committing the city to achieve carbon emissions reductions in line with the Paris
Agreement on Climate Change.24

Philadelphia, PA

Although there were rumblings of interest in sustainability during the latter part of the term of former
mayor John F. Street, it wasn’t until the beginning of Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration in 2008 that
the city seemingly started to get interested in sustainability issues. Nutter campaigned, in part, on a
platform of engaging the city in a major sustainability effort, and, upon taking office, he created the
Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, now a permanent part of the city’s administrative structure.

The city’s comprehensive plan is founded on the “five Es” of sustainability: energy, environment, equity,
economy, and engagement. It has outlined three target areas for energy: to lower city government
energy use by 30 percent between 2008 and 2015; to reduce citywide building energy consumption by
10 percent over this same period; and to retrofit 15 percent of the city’s housing stock with insulation, air
sealing, and cool roofs. The three environmental target areas include reducing greenhouse gas
emissions by 20 percent, improving overall air quality to attain federal standards, and the diversion of 70
percent of solid waste from landfills. The plan’s four equity targets are to manage stormwater to meet
federal standards, to provide parks and recreation resources within ten minutes for 75 percent of
residents, to bring local food within ten minutes of 75 percent of residents, and to increase tree
coverage toward 30 percent in all neighborhoods by 2025. The three economy targets focus on
reducing vehicle miles traveled by 10 percent, increasing the state of repair of the city’s resilient
infrastructure, and doubling the number of low- and high-skill green jobs. The single “engagement
target” is to engage residents in the definition, planning, and evaluation of the results of the initiatives
used to achieve the plan’s targets.
Philadelphia’s Local Action Plan for Climate Change is a significant part of the responsibility of
Greenworks Philadelphia. Unlike many other cities, Philadelphia conceives of climate action as an
explicit part of sustainability. Its greenhouse gas emission reduction goals are embedded in its
environmental targets.25 Its greenhouse gas inventory, efforts to reduce emissions, and progress toward
achieving those reductions are reported in the Greenworks Philadelphia annual report.26 Additionally,
the city has worked closely with its regional transit authority, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit
Authority (SEPTA), to coordinate emissions reduction strategies.

Although the Greenworks Philadelphia progress report itemizes dozens of specific activities, projects,
and programs designed to achieve results in the fifteen target areas, including the installation of
biodiesel fueling stations for city vehicles, the installation of porous pavement on city streets, and
partnerships with local businesses, including an arrangement with the Philadelphia Eagles professional
football team to make its stadium energy independent, three specific efforts at implementing its
programs deserve additional discussion here. First, as one of Greenworks Philadelphia’s equity targets,
the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability worked with the US Forest Service to launch a local carbon offset
market. This simple idea makes a personal carbon footprint calculator available to residents and
provides an opportunity for residents to purchase carbon offsets; collected funds go to the Fairmount
Park Conservancy to support its extensive tree-planting program.27 Second, in order to implement its
energy conservation and climate action programs, the city developed numerous initiatives to help
building owners retrofit their facilities. Although many cities have created similar programs, Philadelphia
has explicitly made this an equity target with the intent of making sure that the benefits of energy
savings are broadly distributed across neighborhoods within the city. And third, the city took the unusual
step of creating an Office of Watersheds within the Water Department to manage its water resources
and wastewater with an eye toward explicitly protecting the seven watershed areas that service the city.
Although all cities are serviced by watersheds and all cities have administrative agencies responsible for
managing water and wastewater, Philadelphia is perhaps the first to organize and manage these
administrative functions while paying such unequivocal attention to watersheds. This, of course, requires
a high degree of collaboration and cooperation with other municipal water agencies.28
CITY RESILIENCE POLICIES AND PROGRAMS
The idea of city resilience has emerged at least in part in response to growing recognition that cities
face a variety of new challenges as a result of climate change. There is no dominant understanding of
what constitutes resilience, and as noted earlier, there is a wide range of possible definitions. Some
conceptions of resilience look a lot like sustainability, and others are far more narrowly drawn. Some
discussions of city resilience advocate using this terminology instead of sustainability because it is
thought to generate less political debate and opposition. Other discussions suggest that resilience is
part of sustainability, but only a part. A city cannot be sustainable if it is not resilient, so the argument
goes, but a city could pursue resilience policies and programs independent of any effort to try to become
more sustainable.

A project conducted at Texas A&M University during 2019 studied city resilience policies and programs
much like the earlier project studied city sustainability policies.29 The resilient cities project created a list
of some 109 different specific policies and programs that have been put forth as important pieces of
resilience. These include programs to mitigate various natural and human-made hazards, pollution
reduction and prevention, hardening critical infrastructure, renewable energy and energy efficiency, and
many others. A full list of these programs is available from the authors. The project then conducted
extensive analysis of city websites to determine whether each of the largest fifty-five cities had adopted
and implemented each program. The results of this analysis are also reported in Table 11.1. The number
reported in the right-most column represents the total number of the 109 policies and programs each
city had adopted and implemented. As a general rule, cities that have done a lot to pursue sustainability
have also done a lot to try to become more resilient. The correlation between these two scores is +.625,
reflecting this tendency.
CITY RESILIENCE PROGRAMS: A CLOSER LOOK
The tendency for cities to enact and implement both sustainability and resilience policies hides some
important differences between the two. A comparison of the scores in Table 11.1 shows that there are
some cities with high sustainability scores but relatively low resilience scores, and some cities with high
resilience scores but low sustainability scores. Portland, OR, for example, is highly ranked for its
sustainability policies and programs, but is ranked relatively low on resilience. A number of cities have
relatively low sustainability scores but high resilience scores, many of which are in Texas. Presumably,
recent experiences with flooding, especially from hurricanes, has prompted those cities to take
resilience seriously. The details of what cities’ resilience initiatives look like are apparent in the four cities
profiled below.
Resilience in Four Major Cities
Like sustainability, major cities have taken building resilience seriously in the recent years. This may
largely be due to the increasing costs of impacts from natural and man-made hazards and disasters and
the effect that preventative measures can have on the population and city budgets. Like sustainability,
resilience is a multidimensional concept that includes numerous factors. As defined above, what a city
can do to more easily bounce back from hazards and disasters is largely dependent on what type of
hazards and disasters are common in the area. Though not all hazards and disasters are predictable, a
city can examine its geographic history with natural disasters, assess industry risks and hazards and
make preparations accordingly. As a result, building resilience may look quite differently depending on
the city, though there are some commonalities, such as refraining from promoting development in
vulnerable or risky areas. What may vary, however, is how a particular city chooses to define
vulnerability or risk.

A range of strategies and policies have been considered, enacted, and implemented in “building
resilience.” For example, building resilience to natural disasters may involve hardening the city’s water,
electricity, and gas delivery infrastructure systems, or providing redundant systems for distribution and
delivery of goods and services. Building social resilience often involves pursuing equity programs such
as ensuring sufficient affordable housing, creating small business support programs such as recovery
plans, job training or workforce development programs, among others. Cities may also promote
individual or personal resilience through wellness and exercise opportunities available to the public such
as creating or expanding bike paths, providing asbestos or lead paint and water pipe removal
assistance in older homes, or expanding HOV lanes to reduce air pollution. Below, we highlight the
efforts that four cities are making or planning in their resilience building policies.

San Francisco, CA

San Francisco has had a long history with devastating fires and earthquakes. Its booming technology,
finance, and tourist industries require secure infrastructure to continue growth and economic
development. To further complicate matters, San Francisco’s geography as a coastal city near the San
Andreas Fault requires that serious thought, planning, and strategy be dedicated toward making San
Francisco resilient to acute and prolonged hazards. As a response, the city has developed and
implemented several policy goals, strategies, and programs to help build resilience to various hazards
and disaster that potentially threaten the area.

In April 2016, San Francisco released its resilience strategy titled Resilient San Francisco—Stronger
Today, Stronger Tomorrow.30 Resilient San Francisco boasts four individual resilience goals: (1) Plan
and Prepare for Tomorrow; (2) Retrofit, Mitigate and Adapt; (3) Ensure Housing for San Francisco Today
and After a Disaster; and (4) Empower Neighborhoods Through Improved Connections. As of 2020, the
San Francisco Resilience website lists their ongoing and completed projects.

A significantly serious and daunting task for a major coastal city is preparing for sea level rise. San
Francisco’s Sea Level Rise Action Plan was released in March 2016. Its purpose was to define goals
and a guiding overarching action plan to prepare for and mitigate potential sea level rise risks through
four strategic tasks that address planning vulnerability and assessment risks, address data gaps, and
provide a foundation for a city-wide sea level rise plan. Out of the Sea Level Rise Action plan came the
Sea Level Rise Vulnerability and Consequences Assessment. This assessment identifies public
infrastructure that fall within the sea level rise vulnerability zone as well as provides assessment and
potential consequences for people, the economy, and the environment as a result of sea level rise.

Another innovative goal of San Francisco’s resilience plan is the Better Roofs initiative. As of 2017, San
Francisco became the first city to mandate living and solar roofs on most new construction projects. It
was determined that 30 percent of the city’s total land are rooftops. This unused space carried the
potential to create or increase economic, social, and benefits. The initial cost–benefit analysis yielded
largely positive results of the living roof. The largest cost of the roof seems to be the initial setup or
installation of the roof. This is offset partially by avoiding the stormwater management equipment that
would be incurred with a nonliving roof. Other potential benefits come from increased real estate values,
added insulation which can reduce utility fees, and community benefit for neighbors and residents.

The final project to be discussed here is Bay Area Resilient by Design.31 Bay Area Resilient by Design
provides comprehensive and innovative strategies to reduce vulnerability that business, people, and
infrastructure may experience as a result of earthquakes or other climate change–related issues. As
stated on their website, this acts as a call to residents, organizations, public officials, and local, national,
and international experts in efforts to strengthen resilience to hazards and disasters. There are
numerous subprojects within the larger project that will use efforts such as elevating vulnerable areas,
widening, deepening, and clearing sediment from channels and creeks, creating more public green
spaces where there is a lack, as well as redesigning underutilized industrial areas to be more conducive
to ecological and modern industrial development. The Bay Area Resilient by Design purports to take on
large-scale issues exacerbated by potential threats of climate change. Its undertaking is massive, and
efforts to realize the proposed changes must be equal in size. The results, however, would set
precedent among large US cities of what is possible when communities, public officials, and industry
unite to take on threats to progress.

Austin, TX

Geographically, Austin may not appear to resemble San Francisco much at all. Yet its dedication to
building resilience is notable. Austin is the capital of Texas and one of the largest cities in the United
States. Like many Texas cities, Austin is confronted by seemingly opposing threats, including intense
heat which brings threat of drought and water scarcity, and flooding. Central Texas experiences
numerous storms which can often bring about flash flooding. In fact, some metropolitan areas in Texas
experience nearly annual flooding and serious storms and hurricanes have become expected in the
hurricane season. The rising costs of recovery from these storms has brought focus to what cities need
to do to become more resilient to these ongoing threats.

In 2013, numerous research teams began to identify potential environmental, economic, and social
impacts resulting from climate change. The final report, “Toward a Climate Resilient Austin,” provides
details on goals and recommendations from the project and helped guide strategies listed in the Climate
Resilient Action Plan. At the forefront of Austin’s environmentally centered focus is an aggressive
carbon neutrality goal as well as a net-zero community-wide greenhouse emission goal. The Climate
Resilience Action Plan identifies three city-owned critical assets for resilience: (1) utility infrastructure,
(2) transportation infrastructure, and (3) community facilities such as recreation centers and libraries. It
further identifies four climate hazards specific to Austin: extreme heat, drought, flooding, and wildfire.
Finally, recommendations and strategies are provided to build resilience in these areas, which is what
we focus on below. There are four resilience strategies outlined in the Action Plan: strengthen
emergency response, expand staff safety plans, evaluate and upgrade existing facilities and
infrastructure, and future-proof new facilities and infrastructure.

There are several ongoing efforts to strengthening emergency responses in Austin, some of which
directly involve efforts from the Department of Homeland Security. It is clear, however, that upgrading
and improving critical infrastructure systems has been given priority to some extent. Like many cities,
Austin’s infrastructure was in need of serious upgrades. As a result, City Council approved a $1.4 million
capital renewal fund to address facilities maintenance. While this fund is a step in the right direction for
building resilience, the Action Plans estimate a $70 million backlog in facilities maintenance.

Austin has also emphasized and made efforts to harden critical infrastructure. Beginning with hardening
pavement with innovative pavement technology, Austin transportation has also assessed the impact of
heat on access to community facilities. Improvements in this area will potentially allow for more access
to community facilities for vulnerable populations. With increased flooding in central Texas, Austin has
set out to make improvements to its flood protection and flood control measures by hardening roadways,
using erosion-resistant materials. The Austin Convention Center is a specific area of emphasis and
focus for these measures.

Creating redundant utilities system is a lofty, yet ideal strategy to build resilience. The redundant
systems allow for distribution of public goods even after the initial system fails. Austin has laid out plans
to create a redundant power supply which will provide critical facilities with at least one redundant
source of electricity which will make it capable of operating if a primary source of electricity fails. A
similar strategy is intended for the cooling system as the Austin Convention center. It should be noted
that as of 2020, the financial impact of this redundant system has not been released, though several
private companies have formed that can supply temporary sources of power.

Austin provides a good example of efforts cities can take to build resilience in the face of unique
hazards. Its efforts also show that regardless of geographic realities, there are a variety of policies,
plans, and programs that cities can take on in order to build resilience to a variety of hazards and
disasters.

Seattle, WA

As seen above, Seattle stands out as a leader in sustainability. In the recent years, however, Seattle has
made building resilience a central focus in their planning efforts. Like San Francisco, Seattle is a coastal
city which draws a lot of tourism and industrial growth, primarily from the Internet and technology
sectors. Due to its economic growth, Seattle has come to experience several transportation congestion
issues as well as a lack of affordable housing options as income inequality grows.

In 2019, Seattle released its resilience roadmap.32 The roadmap provides a comprehensive statement
of the City’s resilience policies and programs, and details 15 goals and 69 action points that fit into four
overall themes: building opportunities, making Seattle more affordable for all, creating a city where
everyone is welcome, and fostering generational investments. The resilience roadmap also fits in with
other development and comprehensive plans developed previously.

According to the 100 Resilient Cities project, Seattle’s greatest environmental threat is earthquakes. The
impact of an earthquake may be exacerbated by infrastructure issues in the aging masonry buildings,
many of which are occupied by low-income residents. The City of Seattle counts an estimated 1,164
unreinforced, highly vulnerable, masonry buildings (URMs). The Office of Emergency Management and
Seattle’s Department of Construction and Inspections worked for years to explore and develop policy
options for retrofitting the buildings to increase public safety. In the absence of a city resilience policy,
these buildings create a serious threat to public safety. Building resilience requires that these buildings
be made less vulnerable to earthquake damage.

Retrofitting public buildings has been under way in Seattle for some time. All fire stations and some
water reservoirs have been seismically strengthened. Natural gas emergency shutoff valves have been
installed in 35 critical city facilities to isolate and minimize damage from broken gas mains. Another
upgrade Seattle is making is an early warning system that will “automatically warn infrastructure control
systems and personnel about earthquakes” with enough advance that appropriate measures can be
taken to ensure safety. These early warning systems, among other things, can slow trains or return
elevators to the ground floor when seismic activity is detected.

Local policies designed to build resilience in Seattle also incorporate a variety of nonenvironmental
characteristics and issues. Social issues, such as income inequality and poverty, can increase exposure
of entire populations of people to hazards and disasters. Building resilience for all populations can
accelerate recovery for the city as a whole and Seattle has taken this charge very seriously. At least
nine of the fifteen goals outlined in the City’s Resilience Roadmap address inequality, and some of them
are dedicated solely to reducing inequality.

One strategy to assist in building resilience for all is to assure widespread access to affordable housing.
Seattle has experienced significant economic opportunity and growth which often is followed by
increasing home costs and property taxes, among other negative outcomes, all of which threaten to
increase homelessness. Seattle has proposed and enacted numerous measures to help protect
vulnerable populations. For example, the Just Cause Eviction provides specifications to landlords about
what conditions must be present before an eviction can be pursued legally. Additionally, Mayor Durkan
signed an executive order to develop and implement strategies to increase access to affordable
benefits, including rental assistance for lower-income residents. Seattle plans to double its
homeownership opportunities with the Affordable Middle-Income Housing Advisory Council. One goal of
the Council is to find solutions that will help middle-income families stay in Seattle. Other housing efforts
include support for homeless populations, develop land oriented toward affordable housing, prevent
displacement, and increase the diversity of housing financing sources.

Out of concern that lower-income areas have less access to healthy food options, Seattle’s resilience
policies and programs include efforts to deal with access to healthy food regardless of income level.
Fresh fruits and vegetables are important for building individual resilience and healthy younger
populations. Seattle’s Fresh Bucks program provides assistance to families in need to purchase fresh
fruits and vegetables. There are over 60 locations in Seattle and King Counties which include farmer’s
markets, farm stands, and neighborhood grocers including all Safeway grocery stores. The City
sponsors two different Fresh Bucks programs, the SNAP Market Match program and the Complete Eats
program, that together provide fresh food assistance to people who might otherwise find such foods
inaccessible (see www.freshbuckseattle.org).

Washington, DC

After over two years since the initial announcement, Mayor Bowser released Washington DC’s
(hereafter DC) resilience plan in early 2019, titled Resilient DC.33 Resilient DC gives emphasis to 4
goals: inclusive growth, climate action, smarter DC, and safe and healthy Washingtonians. Unlike the
other cities mentioned above, Resilient DC elaborates on how technological advancements can be used
to build resilience. We spend the majority of focus on that aspect of building resilience in DC. There are
three components of the Smarter DC goal: automation and the future of work, movement of people and
goods, and increased cyber threats in an increasingly connected city.

Projections and employment automation trends suggest that many aspects of today’s work environment
will be automated in the future. This automation may range from ordering food via a touchscreen
computer today to autonomous vehicles in the future. Resilient DC projects that fewer jobs will be
available to individuals without advanced degrees or training. Similarly, there will be a shortage of
technology workers that have the requisite skills for cybersecurity and software development. To prepare
for this, DC set out to be the highest ranked city on the Economist Intelligence Unit Digital Security
Index. This will require significant and strategic advancements and policy emphasis in digital security.

To meet the digital security objectives, Resilient DC lays out 4 initiatives with tasks. The first is to adopt
cybersecurity best practices to improve the District Government cybersecurity posture. Increasing
cybersecurity efforts in DC is incredibly important as DC information systems are likely the targets of
numerous attacks. In fact, in 2018, there was a five-day review period in which over 330,000 potential
threats to DC networks were mitigated. The second initiative is to launch a cybersecurity partnership to
best practices. This voluntary partnership is intended to be up and running before 2023. The third
initiative is to launch a cybersecurity corps program to train the next generation of cybersecurity
professionals. This program will involve numerous universities in the area to train high school and
university students in cybersecurity and defense techniques that will propel their careers. Finally, the
fourth initiative is to ensure that all DC agencies plan for cyberthreats by 2023. To date, the plans to
mitigate threats have been primarily focused on physical threats, such as floods. These increased
efforts will ensure that they are prepared for cyber threats as well.

Resilient DC focuses on climate action as well. Heat waves, river tide, land subsistence, and flooding as
a result of seal level rise are of particular concern to DC residents and agencies. Virtually all
environmental threats have increased over the past century and they are projected to continue to pose
increased threat to DC residents. Of notable concern is the rise of days experiencing extreme heat and
the number of residents that do not have adequate cooling, which can result in dehydration and other
heat-related health issues. A simple solution is to provide cooling for these residents. However,
increased air condition units put added strain on the city’s electrical grid and increases greenhouse gas
emissions, potentially exacerbating the problem. To begin to address these potential issues, DC sets out
to be carbon neutral by 2050. Some policies and programs to achieve this lofty goal are incorporating
climate projections into land management and capital improvement project, retrofitting at-risk buildings,
designing climate-ready neighborhoods including increasing resilience at the neighborhood and
household level, and creating a tool for individuals to track and prepare for climate events and risks.
TAKING CITY SUSTAINABILITY AND RESILIENCE POLICIES
AND PROGRAMS SERIOUSLY: A SUMMARY AND THOUGHTS
FOR THE FUTURE
City sustainability and resilience policies span a wide array of specific programs designed to try to
improve and protect the quality of the biophysical environment. These policies do this by addressing the
quality of the air and by seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, by trying to improve and protect
access to high-quality drinking water, by managing wastewater and stormwater runoff, by managing how
environmentally vulnerable or sensitive land is used, and by pursuing many other goals. When we look
at efforts in these nine US cities, it is clear that there is substantial variation in the extent to which cities
seem to take the goal of sustainability seriously. Some cities, notably Portland, Seattle, San Francisco,
and Denver, stand out as having the greatest commitment to sustainability, as is seen in their policies
and programs. But all of the cities profiled here have accomplished impressive policy changes in pursuit
of their sustainability and resilience goals. The exact content of their sustainability and resilience policies
and programs varies, perhaps having been tailored to the specific conditions these cities face. Yet they
all seem to have found ways of defining these policies so as to promote sustainability and resilience to
protect and improve the quality of the environment in ways never entertained years ago.

As these and other cities face the growing need to create or improve resilience and sustainability
programs, they will discover that the challenge only gets more difficult. With two to three decades of
experience, cities now face the challenge of developing a deeper understanding of what their policies
and programs have accomplished. Have cities’ climate protection programs really decreased their
carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions? Have their energy conservation programs reduced
energy consumption or altered the forms of energy their citizens consume? Has the quality of drinking
water improved? Have cities’ concerted efforts to build resilience actually allowed them to be protected
from the consequences of disasters, and to bounce back or bounce forward after disasters strike?
These are the kinds of questions that cities and researchers need to focus on in the future.

Despite the idea that they will be able to share their experiences and find “best practices” to use as
models, cities will face new environmental challenges that will undoubtedly make their work more
daunting. Problems surrounding climate change—rising sea levels and increased storm surges from
more intense weather events in coastal communities, drought and water shortages, and rising carbon
dioxide emissions—promise to be long-term challenges. At the same time, many cities find that their
efforts to pursue sustainability meet with political resistance from those who neither understand the
magnitude of the environmental problems nor appreciate the governmental actions required to address
them. A number of state governments, for example, have established policies barring their cities from
operating sustainability or related programs. Although the US federal government, particularly the US
Department of Energy and the US Environmental Protection Agency, has provided modest support in
the form of grants to help cities create sustainability programs, the future of these programs is anything
but assured. Yet cities will likely continue to provide an important location for the pursuits of
sustainability and resilience.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

100 Resilient Cities (https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/100-resilient-cities/) This nonprofit

organization, started with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, provided guidance and
assistance to cities around the world as they search for ways to cope with and prepare for the
physical, economic, and social challenges associated with environmental changes. After declaring
its efforts a success, it ceased operations in 2019.

Clinton Foundation—Climate Change (www.clintonfoundation.org/our-work/by-topic/climate-

change) This international effort provides technical assistance and resources to major cities around
the world in order to help them reduce their air pollution and carbon emissions.

ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability USA (www.icleiusa.org) This is the American
chapter of the international organization that was originally formed to help cities implement local
Agenda 21 programs. It provides information and technical assistance to cities and towns that elect
to become members.

International City/County Management Association—Resilient and Sustainable Communities

(https://icma.org/topics/resilient-and-sustainable-communities) This section of the ICMA website
provides members with extensive information about “best practices” and facilitates communications
across cities on both resilience and sustainability.

Partnership for Sustainable Communities (www.sustainablecommunities.gov) This collaborative

effort on the part of the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US Department of Housing and
Urban Development, and the US Department of Transportation provides information and support to
cities and towns.

Smart Growth America (www.smartgrowthamerica.org) The organization advocates for a wide

range of local “smart growth” policies and programs, and it provides support and advice to
communities to promote sustainability leadership and coalition building.

STAR Communities (www.starcommunities.org/about) This nonprofit organization based in

Washington, DC, provides its member cities and towns with “Sustainability Tools for Assessing and
Rating Communities.” Now part of the US Green Building Council.

US Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Center

(https://www.usmayors.org/programs/mayors-climate-protection-center/) The center provides
mayors who enroll in its program with guidance, technical assistance, and “best practices”
information focused on efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
NOTES
1. See Daniel A. Mazmanian and Michael E. Kraft, “The Three Epochs of the Environmental Movement,”
in Toward Sustainable Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy, eds.
Daniel A. Mazmanian and Michael E. Kraft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 3–32.

2. Kent E. Portney, Sustainability (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 1–56.

3. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 39.

4. Kent E. Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: Economic Development, the Environment, and
Quality of Life in American Cities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 23–24.

5. City of New York, OneNYC (New York, NY: City of New York, 2015),
http://www.nyc.gov/html/onenyc/downloads/pdf/publications/OneNYC.pdf.

6. City of New York, PlaNYC, 2011 Update (New York, NY: City of New York, 2011),
http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc/downloads/pdf/publications/planyc_2011_planyc_full_report.pdf.

7. Jason Corburn, Toward the Healthy City: People, Places, and the Politics of Urban Planning
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

8. City of New York, OneNYC, 214–51.

9. Brian Paul, “How ‘Transit-Oriented Development’ Will Put More New Yorkers in Cars,” Gotham
Gazette, April 21, 2010, http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/Transportation/20100421/16/3247.

10. City of New York, OneNYC 2050: Building a Strong and Fair City (New York, NY: City of New York,
2019), http://1w3f31pzvdm485dou3dppkcq.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/01/OneNYC-2050-Full-Report-1.3.pdf.

11. City of New York, OneNYC2050: Building a Strong and Fair City, 10.

12. New York City Press Office, “Action on Global Warming: NYC’s Green New Deal,” April 22, 2019,
https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/209-19/action-global-warming-nyc-s-green-new-deal#/0.

13. Daniel A. Zarrilli, “Memo to NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson Re: OneNYC 2050 Progress
Report,” April 22, 2020, http://1w3f31pzvdm485dou3dppkcq.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/04/OneNYC-Letter-20200422_FINAL.pdf.

14. Los Angeles, L.A.’s Green New Deal: Sustainable City pLAn 2019 (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles
Mayor Eric Garcetti, 2019), https://plan.lamayor.org/sites/default/files/pLAn_2019_final.pdf. For the 2015
plan, see
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/mayorofla/pages/17002/attachments/original/1428470093/pLAn.
pdf?1428470093.

15. Los Angeles, L.A.’s Green New Deal: Sustainable City pLAn 2019, 13.

16. Los Angeles, L.A.’s Green New Deal: Sustainable City pLAn 2019, 36.

17. Los Angeles, L.A.’s Green New Deal: Sustainable City pLAn 2019, 138.

18. City of Chicago, Adding Green to Urban Design: A City for Us and Future Generations (Chicago, IL:
City Plan Commission, November 2008),
https://www.chicago.gov/dam/city/depts/zlup/Sustainable_Development/Publications/Green_Urban_Desi
gn/GUD_booklet.pdf.
19. City of Chicago, Eat Local, Live Healthy (Chicago, IL: Department of Planning and Development,
November 2006),
https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/zlup/Sustainable_Development/Publications/Eat_Local_
Live_Healthy_Brochure/Eat_Local_Live_Healthy.pdf.

20. Chicago Department of Aviation, Sustainable Airport Manual (Chicago, IL: City of Chicago, 2012),
https://www.flychicago.com/community/environment/sam/Pages/default.aspx.

21. City of Chicago, Climate Action Plan (Chicago, IL: City of Chicago, 2008),
https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/progs/env/climateaction.html.

22. City of Chicago, 2015 Sustainable Chicago: Action Agenda 2012–2105 Highlights and a Look Ahead
(Chicago, IL: City of Chicago, December 2015),
https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/progs/env/Sustainable_Chicago_2012-2015_Highlights.pdf.

23. Sustain Chicago: A Project by the City of Chicago, “About,” https://sustainchicago.cityofchicago.org/;

Rahm Emanuel, The Nation City: Why Mayors are Now Running the World (New York, NY: Knopf,
2020).

24. The pledge is available at:

www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press_releases/2017/december/ChicagoClimateSum
mitCharter.html.

25. City of Philadelphia, Greenworks Philadelphia: A Vision for a Sustainable Philadelphia (Philadelphia,
PA: City of Philadelphia Office of Sustainability, 2016),
https://beta.phila.gov/media/20161101174249/2016-Greenworks-Vision_Office-of-Sustainability.pdf.

26. Richard Freeh and Sarah Wu, Greenworks Philadelphia 2015 Progress Report (Philadelphia, PA:
City of Philadelphia Office of Sustainability, 2015), https://beta.phila.gov/media/20160419140539/2015-
greenworks-progress-report.pdf.

27. See “Erase Your Trace,” Ms. Philly Organic, August 24, 2009,
http://msphillyorganic.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/erase-your-trace/.

28. See Philadelphia Water Department, Office of Watersheds, “What’s on Tap,”

https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/philadelphia.pdf.

29. See Sierra C. Woodruff, Ann Bowman, Richard Feiock, Bryce Hannibal, Ki eun Kang, Jeongmin Oh,
and Garett Sansom, “Resilience in U.S. Cities: A Survey of Policies and Programs,” Texas A & M
University, 2020,
https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/189324/Final%20report%20T1%20101%20resi
lient%20cities%20survey.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

30. See https://sfgsa.org/sites/default/files/Document/Resilient%20San%20Francisco.pdf.

31. See www.resilientbayarea.org/.

32. See https://durkan.seattle.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2019/08/Resilient-Seattle_ONLINE.pdf.

33. See https://app.box.com/s/d40hk5ltvcn9fqas1viaje0xbnbsfwga.

 PART IV GLOBAL ISSUES
AND CONTROVERSIES
12 GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE GOVERNANCE : CAN
THE PROMISE OF PARIS BE REALIZED?
—Henrik Selin and Stacy D. VanDeveer
Our planet is warming. The 5 years from 2014 and 2018 were the warmest on record. Starting in 1880,
18 of the 19 warmest years occurred since 2000.1 In the Arctic, indigenous peoples struggle to sustain
their economic and cultural lives, polar bears fight to stay alive, and melting sea ice opens up new
shipping lanes for oil tankers, cargo vessels, and warships. In coastal cities from Boston to Amsterdam,
Dhaka, and Guangzhou, and on low-lying islands from South Asia to the South Pacific and the
Caribbean, people worry about the consequences of sea level rise and intensifying storm surges.
Farmers from California to Cameroon grow more anxious about severe droughts and extreme weather
events, while historic fires raged from Portugal to California and Australia. In response, people
participate in climate change initiatives in churches, schools, boardrooms, and public offices from city
governments to the United Nations (UN), where former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon declared
climate change “the defining issue of our time.”2 They also organize and join protests and climate strikes
around the globe. Despite strong political statements and the clear dangers of changing the climate
system, international institutions and the states that drive decision-making have moved much too slowly
over the last 30 years, failing to reverse global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Climate change politics and policymaking focus on both mitigation and adaptation issues. Mitigation
efforts center on different ways to reduce GHG emissions. Many current mitigation policies focus on
switching to less carbon-intensive energy sources (including wind, solar, and hydro power); improving
energy efficiency for vehicles, buildings, and appliances; and supporting the development and
deployment of technologies that help reduce GHG emissions. Adaptation efforts seek to improve the
ability of human societies (broadly) and local communities (more specifically) to adjust to a changing
climate (for example, to alter agricultural practices in response to seasonal and precipitation changes or
to prepare for rising sea levels, localized flooding, intense heatwaves, and other severe weather
occurrences). Complicating climate change policymaking is the fact that mitigation and adaptation
issues are fraught with difficult political, moral, and ethical challenges, as some countries contribute
much more to the causes of climate change than do others, and many people and societies struggle to
adapt to dangerous climatic changes they largely did not cause. Our world is also a very unequal place,
and that makes climate politics and policymaking both more difficult and more important.

This chapter explores climate change governance across global, regional, national, and local levels. As
countries struggle to formulate meaningful mitigation and adaptation policies, more aggressive action by
intergovernmental forums, firms, small communities, and individuals is necessary to meet the
challenges posed by climate change causes and impacts. The next section discusses the history of
climate change science and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is followed by
an outline of the global political framework on climate change that has developed in conjunction with the
IPCC assessments, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 1997
Kyoto Protocol, the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, and the 2015 Paris Agreement. Next, three important
aspects of climate change politics are addressed: (1) European Union (EU) leadership and policy
responses, (2) North American climate change policymaking, and (3) the challenges facing the
developing world and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The chapter ends with
a few remarks about the future of global climate change governance.
SCIENCE, GHG EMISSIONS, AND THE IPCC
Energy from the sun reaches Earth in the form of visible light. Most of this sunlight reaches the Earth’s
surface while some is reflected back into space by clouds before it can get through. The sun’s energy is
absorbed by land and water that heats up. As the Earth’s surface warms, it gives up energy in the form
of infrared radiation. Naturally occurring GHGs in the lower atmosphere trap some of this outgoing
infrared radiation before it can go back into space, which makes the Earth warmer in what has been
termed the greenhouse effect. GHGs have been present in the atmosphere for much of Earth’s 4.5
billion-year history; without them, the planet would have average surface temperatures of approximately
−20°C (0°F). The amount of energy that remains trapped in the atmosphere by GHGs has important
long-term effects on the climate, as human activities add both naturally occurring and human-made
GHG to the atmosphere.3

Researchers in different academic fields for over 150 years have contributed to our current—and still
developing—understanding of the global climate system. American scientist Eunice Foote and British
researcher John Tyndall in the 1850s studied how carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases in the
atmosphere influence the Earth’s temperature, arguing that surface temperature levels are higher with
CO2 than without CO2 (i.e., early work establishing the dynamics of the greenhouse effect).4 In 1896,
Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius explored what could happen to the climate system if atmospheric
CO2 concentrations increased, but he did not predict actual, significant changes. In 1938, however,
British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar proposed that human CO2 emissions were changing the climate.
Furthermore, in 1956, Gilbert Plass, an American scientist, calculated that adding CO2 to the
atmosphere would have significant heat-trapping effects, contributing to a warming climate.

Science advanced when Charles David Keeling at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii began
measuring actual CO2 concentrations in open air in 1960. Before industrialization, atmospheric CO2
concentrations were approximately 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv). Ice core data show that
historical concentrations were relatively stable for up to 800,000 years prior to the Industrial Revolution.
Measured atmospheric CO2 concentrations at the Mauna Loa Observatory exceeded 415 ppmv in 2019,
then the highest ever throughout human history, and concentrations continue to grow.5 While other
GHGs besides CO2 also add to the ongoing warming, other emissions (mostly sulfate aerosols and
other particulates) have a cooling effect in that they repel incoming sunlight. The future relationship
between GHGs and particulates on the overall warming trend and how changes in cloud formation may
impact the Earth’s climate system are major areas of contemporary climate change science.6

Current global climate changes are different from earlier alterations between warmer and cooler eras in
that recent critical changes are driven by human behavior. Since the beginning of industrialization,
human activities have dramatically altered the composition of GHGs in the lower atmosphere by adding
to the volume of naturally occurring gases (for example, CO2 and methane) as well as by releasing
human-made GHGs (for example, hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs). Human activities influence the amount
of energy trapped by GHGs (largely by releasing CO2 into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil
fuels in manufacturing and transport, and GHGs stemming from agricultural production) and the amount
of incoming energy absorbed by the Earth’s surface (through land use changes including deforestation).
Approximately 10 percent of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions stem from deforestation and other
land use changes.7

Emissions are commonly calculated as either CO2 or CO2 equivalents, where the global warming
potential of other GHGs is converted into that of CO2.8 Many GHGs, including methane and HFCs, trap
much more energy in the atmosphere than does the same amount of CO2. There exist varying
calculations of CO2 emissions, but one estimate is that since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
the United States has emitted 25 percent of all CO2 emissions, followed by the EU (22 percent), China
(13 percent), the Russian Federation (6 percent), and Japan (4 percent).9 In 2017, China (27.5 percent),
the United States (14.7 percent), and the EU (9.8 percent) were responsible for over 50 percent of
global CO2 emissions, but with vastly different emission trends (see Table 12.1). The latter is also true
for other major country emitters of CO2. These large differences result from multiple factors, including
the scope and stringency of environmental policy, the profile of the national economy, country size and
population density, public transportation infrastructure, trade patterns, consumption habits, varying
access to renewable energy, and differences in energy policy.
Table 12.1 Top Ten Global Emitters of CO2 in 2017

Percentage Share of Metric Tons CO2

Percentage Change in
Country/Region Global Emissions in Emissions per Capita in
Emissions 1990–2017
2017 2017
1. China +307 27.5 7.0
2. United States +3 14.7 16.2
3. EU-28 −21 9.8 8.8a
4. India +298 6.9 1.8
5. Russian −35 4.6 11.8
Federation
6. Japan +3 3.3 9.5
7. Iran +228 1.9 8.3
8. South Korea +159 1.8 12.1
9. Saudi Arabia +241 1.8 19.3
10. Canada +24 1.6 15.6
a
EU-28 per capita emissions for 2017 are for CO2 equivalent based on data provided by Eurostat
(https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/t2020_rd300/default/table?lang=en).
Source: Data on changes in country CO2 emissions 1990–2017 and percentage of global CO2 emissions in 2017 are from
the Global Carbon Project (https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/19/data.htm). Data on per capita CO2
emissions in 2017, with the exception of the EU-28, are from Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-
greenhouse-gas-emissions#per-capita-co2-emissions).

There were also major differences in CO2 emissions per capita across the world’s countries in 2017 (see
Table 12.1). The global average CO2 emissions per person were 4.8 metric tons. Canadian and US per
capita emissions were over 15 metric tons. Per capita emissions in Saudi Arabia were over 19 metric
tons while the world’s highest were found in Qatar at 49 metric tons (the latter not shown in the table).
EU-28 emissions per person were under 9 metric tons, and some member states were much lower with,
for example, Sweden at 4.2 metric tons. Per capita emissions in India remained under 2 metric tons, and
many other developing countries were lower still. The average American in 2017 emitted as much CO2
in 2.3 days as the average Malian or Nigerian did during the entire year.10

Today, most scientists agree that changes to Earth’s climate system pose significant ecological,
humanitarian, and economic risks. A 2016 study confirms that approximately 97 percent of published
climate research agrees that humans are causing contemporary climate change.11 Through the IPCC—
established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environment Programme—
thousands of climate change scientists and experts from around the world work together, tasked with
assessing, summarizing, and publishing the latest peer-reviewed data and analysis. The IPCC was
created to inform policymaking, but not to formulate policy. Most IPCC work is divided into three working
groups (WGs). WG I studies the physical science basis of the climate system and climate change. WG II
focuses on the vulnerability of socioeconomic and natural systems to climate change, the negative and
positive consequences of climate change, and adaptation options. WG III examines mitigating options
through limiting or preventing GHG emissions and enhancing activities that remove them from the
atmosphere.
The IPCC has produced five sets of assessments with WG I reports released in 1990, 1995, 2001,
2007, and 2013.12 The first of these reports stated that, although much data indicated that human
activity affected the variability of the climate system, the authors could not reach consensus. Signaling a
higher degree of consensus, the 1995 report stated that the “balance of evidence” suggested “a
discernible human influence on the climate.” The subsequent three reports were critical in building a
much higher degree of confidence within the scientific community. The 2013 report states that the
human influence is clear, as the warming of the climate system (atmosphere and ocean) is
“unequivocal” with atmospheric concentrations of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide having increased to
levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Additional GHG emissions will cause further
warming and changes in all components of the climate system.

The 2014 WG II report outlines a litany of impacts of climate change, including altered precipitation
patterns and amounts, ice loss, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and the frequency and increased
intensity of extreme weather events. Such changes already impact ecological systems and human
health and societies, raising the risk of conflict. WG III reports include emissions scenarios that project
possible GHG emissions levels decades into the future, based on a different set of assumptions about
future levels of economic growth and the choices made by governments and citizens that affect the
generation of GHG emissions. Scenarios are designed to help decision-makers and planners think
about how climate change may impact societies and how quickly various mitigation strategies could
change future emissions. They also inform thinking about projects such as building new sewage
treatment systems in a coastal area, new power plants, or the design of new water policies in drought-
stricken regions. Together with reports by WG I and WG II, they make it clear that all countries face
adaptation challenges, even if these vary tremendously across societies and regions.

The sixth set of IPCC reports are scheduled for publication in 2021 and 2022, but two other major
reports came out recently. A 2018 special IPCC report on global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius found
that the 1.5 degrees Celsius target would likely be met sometime between 2030 and 2052; the world is
already more than halfway there with an estimated likely range of a 0.8–1.2 degrees Celsius increase so
far.13 Achieving the 1.5 degrees goal is probably politically impossible, given that GHG emissions must
be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 and by 100 percent by 2050. A 2019 report
released by the United Nations Environment Programme concluded that countries collectively failed to
stop global GHG emissions growth, resulting in a need for much deeper and faster emission cuts.14
Reports like these—and reactions to them—shape political debate because they are widely reviewed
and cited by people in international organizations, local governments, large and small firms,
environmental advocacy groups, journalism, and scientific research.
INTERNATIONAL LAW AND CLIMATE CHANGE NEGOTIATIONS
International law on climate change is shaped by a complex mix of evolving scientific consensus and the
material interests and values of state, nongovernmental, and private sector actors. Over two decades of
global negotiations have left many frustrated and disappointed with the results and dispirited about the
prospects of addressing the problem.15 Along with a growing number of policy responses at every level
of the public, private, and civil society spheres, the world’s countries have adopted four major
multilateral agreements: the 1992 UNFCCC, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the 2009 Copenhagen Accord,
and the 2015 Paris Agreement. The UNFCCC was negotiated between publication of the first IPCC
report and the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, where it was
adopted. It entered into force in 1994, and by 2020, 196 countries and the EU were parties to the treaty.
As a framework convention, the UNFCCC sets out a broad strategy for countries to work jointly to
address climate change.

Like other framework conventions, the UNFCCC defines the issue at hand, sets up an administrative
secretariat to oversee treaty activities, and lays out a legal and political framework under which states
cooperate over time. The UNFCCC contains shared commitments by states to continue to research
climate change, to periodically report their findings and relevant domestic implementation activities, and
to meet regularly to discuss common mitigation and adaptation issues at conferences of the parties
(COPs). Usually, framework conventions do not include detailed regulatory commitments, leaving those
issues to be addressed in subsequent agreements. Similar approaches using the framework
convention–protocol model have been applied to issues such as protection of the stratospheric ozone
layer, acid rain and related transboundary air pollution problems, and biodiversity loss.

The UNFCCC sets the long-term objective of “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the
atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate
system” (Article 2). The UNFCCC establishes that the world’s countries have common but differentiated
responsibilities in addressing climate change. This principle refers to the notion that all countries share
an obligation to act, but industrialized countries and countries with economies in transition (then, former
communist countries) have a particular responsibility to take the lead because of their relative wealth
and disproportionate contribution to the problem through historical emissions. These forty countries, plus
the EU, are listed in Annex I of the UNFCCC. They agreed to reduce their anthropogenic emissions to
1990 levels, but no clear deadline was set for this target. The UNFCCC did not assign developing
countries any GHG reduction commitments.

Responding to mounting scientific evidence about human-induced climate change in the mid-1990s,
much of it presented in the second IPCC report, and to growing concern about the negative economic
and social effects of climate change among environmental advocates and policymakers, the UNFCCC
parties negotiated the Kyoto Protocol between 1995 and 1997. The protocol came together when the
EU and US negotiators struck a deal, helped along by last-minute compromises brokered, in part, by
then vice president Al Gore. The Kyoto Protocol covered six GHGs: CO2, methane, nitrous oxide,
perfluorocarbons, HFCs, and sulfur hexafluoride. UNFCCC Annex I countries committed to reduce their
GHG emissions collectively by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008–2012. Toward this goal, thirty-
nine states had individual targets.16 Some agreed to cut their emissions, while others merely consented
to slow their emissions growth. For example, the EU-15 took on a collective target of an 8 percent
reduction, while the United States and Canada committed to cuts of 7 percent and 6 percent,
respectively. In contrast, Iceland committed to limit its emissions at 10 percent above 1990 levels.

Annex I countries could meet their targets through different measures, including the development of
national policies that lower domestic GHG emissions. They could also calculate the benefits from
domestic carbon sinks that soak up more carbon than they emit by, for example, preserving forests or
adopting sustainable practices such as reforestation. In addition, they could participate in transnational
emissions trading schemes with other Annex I parties, develop joint implementation (JI) programs with
other Annex I parties and get credit for lowering GHG emissions in those countries, or design a
partnership venture with a non-Annex I country through what is known as the Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM) and get credit for lowering GHG emissions in the partner country. These three
options were intended to provide flexibility and reduce mitigation costs by allowing parties to cut
emissions wherever it was most efficient, including in other countries.

Developing countries, lacking individual GHG reduction requirements based on the principle of common
but differentiated responsibility, strongly supported the Kyoto Protocol, which entered into force in 2005.
Among industrialized countries, a stark transatlantic difference emerged.17 The EU took an early
leadership role in defense of the Kyoto Protocol, succeeding in reducing GHG emissions beyond its
target (see also EU section below). In contrast, the United States refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol
(and tried to convince other countries to do the same). Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002 but
announced in 2011 its official withdrawal from the agreement, after failing to curb its emissions. Both US
and Canadian GHG emissions increased significantly after 1990 (see Table 12.1). Australia, Japan, New
Zealand, and Russia all became parties but displayed varying levels of support.

In Bali in 2007, the UNFCCC parties launched a process to negotiate a follow-up agreement to the
Kyoto Protocol, to be adopted at the 2009 COP in Copenhagen.18 However, national leaders were
unable to agree to a legally binding agreement. Instead, they settled on a Copenhagen Accord, under
which countries adopted their own voluntary and widely divergent GHG targets for 2020. The
Copenhagen Accord also set the goal that average global temperature increases should remain below
2°C (a target related to the UNFCCC goal to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the
climate system). In addition, the Copenhagen Accord noted that industrialized countries would try to
mobilize $30 billion from 2010 to 2020, with the goal of reaching $100 billion a year by 2020, to support
mitigation and adaptation projects in developing countries. Parties at the 2010 COP in Cancun created
the Green Climate Fund as a central financial mechanism to operate alongside other bodies, including
the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank, and regional development banks.

At the 2011 COP in Durban, the parties adopted the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, launching a
new round of negotiations to develop “a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with
legal force,” to be concluded in 2015. The 2012 COP in Doha formulated a second Kyoto commitment
period wherein Annex I countries agreed to reduce their overall GHG emissions by at least 18 percent
(collectively) below 1990 levels by 2020. However, some Annex I countries—Canada, Japan, New
Zealand, Russia, and the United States—refused to take on a second, formal round of Kyoto targets for
2020. Parties also added nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) to the list of regulated GHGs, bringing the total to
seven, and they extended the CDM and JI mechanisms. The 2013 COP in Warsaw and the 2014 COP
in Lima laid the foundation for a global agreement in Paris in 2015, as both industrialized and
developing countries for the first time moved forward with a system of GHG reduction plans for the post-
2020 period.19 A bilateral climate change agreement between the United States and China in November
2014 helped pave the way for the Paris Agreement, including by specifying more significant emission
targets for the two countries than had been previously announced.20

The Paris Agreement entered into force in November 2016, and 188 countries and the EU were parties
by early 2020. The United States became a party in early 2016. This was made possible by the Obama
administration classifying it as an executive agreement that did not need Senate approval because it
required no changes to US federal law. The only UNFCCC parties not joining the Paris Agreement by
2020 were Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, South Sudan, Turkey, and Yemen. The conclusion of the Paris
Agreement returns to the adoption of international legally binding agreements, but it also builds on
language in the Copenhagen Accord, setting the goal of holding global average temperature increases
to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. To this end, the
parties aim to reach a global peak in GHG emissions as soon as possible, as well as a balance between
GHGs from anthropogenic sources and a corresponding removal by sinks between 2,050 and 2,100
(i.e., emissions would come down to “net zero”). Recognizing the principles of equity and common but
differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities in the light of different national circumstances,
developed countries must continue to lead by undertaking economy-wide absolute GHG emission
reduction targets, while developing countries are encouraged to do the same over time.
Continuing the approach from the Copenhagen Accord, the Paris Agreement allows countries to
determine their own commitments. All parties voluntarily formulate their own nationally determined
contributions (NDCs) under a “pledge and review” system.21 Importantly, NDCs are not part of the Paris
Agreement but are submitted separately by each party—done to satisfy those countries rejecting legally
binding GHG commitments. Total emission cuts by the initial NDCs fall well short of those required to
meet the agreed-upon temperature goals. Even if all countries were to fulfill their individual NDC pledges
—which is uncertain—global average temperatures are expected to increase by between 2.6 and 3.1°C
by 2100 (with some estimates higher than that).22 The parties to the Paris Agreement agreed to start the
process of submitting updated NDCs in 2020, to be repeated every 5 years. However, the 26th COP for
the UNFCCC, scheduled for November of 2020, was postponed because of the COVID-19 crisis. It is
estimated that countries must increase their ambitions in their initial NDCs threefold for realizing the 2°C
target and by more than fivefold for meeting the 1.5°C target.23 Parties are expected to make finance
flows consistent with a pathway toward low GHG emissions, and developed countries shall provide
financial resources to assist developing countries. However, developed countries did not take on any
individual finance targets but determine themselves how much they want to contribute.

Because many climatic changes are already under way and significant amounts of additional GHGs will
be emitted over the coming decades, the Paris Agreement recognizes the importance of adaptation and
climate-resilient development, mainly as a result from demands by developing countries. Developing
countries also secured the inclusion of language on “loss and damage” as separate from adaptation.
The idea is that countries contributing very little to the problem should be compensated for impacts
related to climate change that cause extensive or irreversible damage, including, for example, loss of
lives and property during extreme weather or the disappearance of coastal areas and small islands due
to sea level rise. At the insistence of industrialized countries, however, a conference decision attached
to the Paris Agreement states that such language does not constitute a legal basis for any liability or
compensation. Wealthier countries secured this decision in order to avoid any clear financial or other
responsibilities to compensate poorer ones for losses induced by climate change.

The Paris Agreement is widely hailed as a significant step forward by policymakers and environmental
activists from many parts of the globe. Global cooperation on nearly every issue moves quite slowly, so
calling Paris Agreement the “end of the beginning” for global climate politics or “good enough
governance” qualifies as endorsement in international politics.24 But it is far from perfect, and its
success rests on what states and subnational and private sector actors do next. Global climate change
governance is increasingly “polycentric” as it happens at multiple levels of authority and in many types of
forums beyond the UNFCCC.25 Some decisions under the Montreal Protocol to protect the stratospheric
ozone layer on substances such as HFCs introduced as substitutes for other substances that depleted
the stratospheric ozone layer but that are potent GHGs can have climate benefits. Other examples
include decisions taken within the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Maritime
Organization, the World Bank, and regional development banks—to name only a few. All of these bodies
will need to do more to help rapidly curb GHG emissions if the 2°C goal is to be met, as countries must
continue to act more aggressively to reduce emissions. For example, as some countries dramatically
scale back coal usage, others burn more, as coal interests fight curbs on CO2 emissions.26
EU LEADERSHIP AND POLICY RESPONSES
Since the 1990s, the EU, representing the majority of the world’s industrial countries, has emerged
(comparatively) as a global leader in climate change politics and policymaking.27 Even as the EU grew
from fifteen members in the mid-1990s to the current twenty-seven members (following the UK’s “Brexit”
in 2020), EU bodies such as the European Commission (the administrative bureaucracy), the Council of
the European Union (comprising member state government officials), and the European Parliament (of
representatives elected by member state citizens) have worked together and collaborated with civil
society and private sector actors to enact and implement a set of pan-European climate change and
energy-related goals and policies. With a population of roughly four hundred and fifty million people, the
EU remains a major contributor to climate change and a major player in climate change politics and
policymaking, including in the implementation of the Paris Agreement.28

The desire to meet the Kyoto target served as an important early impetus for EU policymakers to
develop a growing number of joint policies and initiatives. The then 15 EU member states’ collective
Kyoto target (8 percent below 1990 GHG emission levels by 2012) was divided among members under
a 1998 burden-sharing agreement. To facilitate intra-EU policymaking and implementation, each
member state took on a differentiated target under this burden-sharing approach.29 Several more
economically developed member states took on relatively far-reaching commitments to reduce national
GHG emissions, while less wealthy member states could increase their GHG emissions in the period up
to 2012, as part of these countries’ efforts to expand industrial production and accelerate economic
growth.

In 2009, the EU adopted a major climate and energy package in support of the so-called 20-20-20 by
2020 goals. These goals, all with a 2020 deadline, refer to a 20 percent reduction in GHGs below 1990
levels, 20 percent of the total energy consumption coming from renewable sources, and a 20 percent
reduction in primary energy use compared with projected trends. The 20 percent GHG reduction goal by
2020 was submitted as the EU goal under the Copenhagen Accord and was also included in the Kyoto
Protocol’s second commitment period. In its NDC for the Paris Agreement, the EU raised its goals to 40
percent for GHG reduction and 27 percent for both renewable energy generation and improved energy
savings, all to be achieved by 2030. The suite of policies toward the 2020 and 2030 goals also uses a
burden-sharing approach in which each member state is allotted national targets.

Receiving much attention as the world’s first international GHG trading scheme, the EU Emissions
Trading System (ETS) serves as a main policy instrument. Ironically, the EU was opposed to GHG
emissions trading during the Kyoto negotiations—an issue championed by the United States in part
because of its domestic experience with emissions trading for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. The EU
attempted to enact a carbon tax in the late 1990s, but this effort failed when member states could not
agree on a common tax. In the face of this policy failure and the EU’s need to meet its Kyoto target, EU
officials developed the ETS.30 The ETS launched with a first phase (2005 and 2007), a second trading
period (2008–2012), and a third starting in 2013. As the fourth phase of the ETS starts in 2021, the
scheme has been significantly amended and expanded since 2005, and it includes all EU members as
well as Iceland, Lichtenstein, and Norway (while the United Kingdom plans to leave the ETS in 2021).

Currently, the ETS sets a regional cap for three GHGs—CO2, nitrous oxide, and perfluorocarbons—from
over eleven thousand major point sources in power generation and manufacturing as well as airlines
operating between member states, collectively covering 45 percent of all EU GHGs.31 The cap was
designed to shrink annually so that emissions from covered sectors in 2020 would be 21 percent lower
than in 2005. Every year, the EU allots emissions allowances to each participating country, which, in
turn, allocates these to domestic firms. Allowances are increasingly auctioned off, rather than distributed
for free, across different economic sectors. Firms can also use some emission credits generated under
the CDM and JI mechanisms to meet their obligations. Those without enough allowances to cover their
emissions by the end of each year are fined. This is part of an overall strategy to increase the stringency
and effectiveness of the ETS over time (see also Chapter 8).
As the EU looks, and sometimes struggles, to maintain a prominent leadership role both regionally and
globally, EU data show that the EU-15 cut collective GHG emissions by 12.2 percent from 1990 to the
2008–2012 period, thus exceeding the Kyoto Protocol target.32 The EU is on track to exceed its 2020
GHG reduction goal of 20 percent, having achieved over a 23 percent reduction by 2018. However,
region-wide GHG emissions are not on a strong enough downward trajectory to reach the 2030 target of
a 40 percent reduction without further policy measures. Based on current numbers and trends, the EU
seems likely to meet its 20 percent renewable energy goal by 2020, having achieved 18 percent in
2018. Again, it appears likely that additional policy actions will be needed to meet the 2030 renewables
goal. Additionally, the EU may not meet either the 2020 or 2030 energy efficiency goals based on
existing measures, but further initiatives are required.33
NORTH AMERICAN AND US CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY AND
POLITICS
In contrast to EU bodies and many EU member states, North American federal governments have been
slow to act, and they produced a much less regionally integrated response despite sharing a common
market under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).34 The United States and Canada
have been laggards among industrialized countries for more than 20 years, starting in the mid-1990s.
National CO2 emissions increased in all North American countries between 1990 and 2017—United
States +3 percent, Canada +23 percent, and Mexico +55 percent.

While the United States ratified the UNFCCC rather quickly, US skepticism of global climate change
policy dates back to the Kyoto Protocol era.35 Vice President Al Gore signed the Kyoto Protocol on
behalf of the Clinton administration (1993–2001), although President Clinton never pushed for its
ratification because of strong opposition in the US Senate. President George W. Bush (2001–2009)
made rejection of the Kyoto Protocol official US foreign policy. The Canadian federal government, led by
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien (1993–2003), ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002 but failed to enact any
meaningful implementation policies. In the face of growing GHG emissions, the subsequent Stephen
Harper governments (2006–2015) took the very rare step of formally withdrawing Canada from the
Kyoto Protocol in 2011, before the agreement’s commitment period came to an end. Mexico joined the
Kyoto Protocol in 2000.

At the 2009 Copenhagen COP, both the Obama administration (2009–2017) and the Harper
administration opposed the idea of a legally binding agreement mandating national GHG reductions.
The United States and Canada submitted identical voluntary targets under the Copenhagen Accord: a
17 percent reduction below 2005 levels by 2020. Mexico stated a goal to reduce GHG emissions by 30
percent by 2020, as compared to emission levels in a business-as-usual scenario, but only conditionally
upon receiving adequate financial and technological support from developed countries. During the
Durban Platform negotiations, the United States and Canada stressed that all major GHG emitters must
be included in an agreement. The Obama administration, with support from Canada’s new Justin
Trudeau government (2015–) as well as from the EU, China, and other countries, worked to build
momentum for a more significant agreement in Paris.36

All three North American countries submitted NDCs in the lead-up to the Paris conference. The United
States stated a goal to reduce GHG emissions by 26–28 percent below its 2005 level by 2025 and to
make best efforts to reduce its emissions by 28 percent (stemming from the 2014 joint US-China climate
change deal that helped secure American and Chinese support for the Paris Agreement).37 Canada,
where the new government had campaigned on promises to take climate change policy more seriously,
committed to reducing national GHG emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Mexico
intends to reduce GHG emissions by 25 percent relative to a business-as-usual baseline by 2030, which
would translate into a net peaking of national emissions by 2026. Mexico also declared that this
reduction target could be increased to 40 percent if it were provided external assistance at a scale
commensurate to the challenge of global climate change. The leaders of Canada, the United States,
and Mexico also announced the North American Climate, Clean Energy, and Environment Partnership in
June 2016, which, among other things, set the goal to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas
sector by 40–45 percent by 2025.38

North American climate change politics have changed significantly at national and subnational levels.
President George W. Bush opposed mandatory national GHG reductions throughout his presidency.39
US federal policy under the Bush administration focused instead mainly on voluntary programs and the
funding of scientific research and technology development. The Obama administration expressed early
support for regulating GHG emissions and appointed many climate change scientists and policy
advocates to government. In 2009 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), based on a 2007 US
Supreme Court ruling that CO2 can be classified as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, issued an
endangerment finding stating that current and projected atmospheric GHG concentrations threatened
the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

Obama’s first term saw little regulatory action beyond increases in automobile fuel efficiency standards,
as the US Congress failed to pass climate change legislation. It was not until 2015 that the EPA issued a
regulatory plan containing a series of measures. Chief among these was the proposal to cut national
CO2 emissions from large power plants by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The plan also
supported expanded investments in renewable energy production and measures to improve energy
efficiency. In addition, it stressed the need to prepare the United States for the impacts of climate
change. The proposed EPA rules came under immediate scrutiny, as opponents took legal action to
block their implementation. The Obama administration also raised fuel efficiency requirements for heavy
trucks, proposed a set of regulations to curb methane emissions from the natural gas industry, launched
a series of energy efficiency increases for appliances, denied permits to the Keystone XL pipeline, and
worked with climate and energy policy leaders in various US states to facilitate state-level policy
development. Climate change, energy efficiency, and renewables also became priority issues in US
national security assessment and planning.

The 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump as US president resulted in a sharp reversal of federal efforts to
address climate change mitigation and adaptation (see Chapter 4).40 As part of a wide-ranging
environmental rollback agenda, the Trump administration quickly launched initiatives to end or review
Obama-era regulations aimed at reducing GHG emissions and other pollutants from power plants, the
natural gas industry, and cars and heavy trucks.41 The administration installed climate science skeptics
in leadership positions in a host of federal agencies, including the EPA; proposed deep cuts in programs
related to climate change and in federal funding for climate change science and public health initiatives;
and reversed the Obama decisions regarding the Keystone XL pipeline and his increases in vehicle fuel
efficiency standards. In June 2017, President Trump announced that he would withdraw the United
States from the Paris Agreement. Formal notice of withdrawal can be given 3 years after the date of the
agreement’s entry into force, which the Trump administration did on November 4th, 2019. The
withdrawal came into effect 1 year after that. The Trump administration also ceased all implementation
of the nonbinding parts of the Paris Agreement, including the goals and actions outlined in the US NDC,
and any further contributions to the Green Climate Fund. The incoming Joe Biden administration has
pledged to rejoin the Paris Agreement and its related initiatives.

Similar to climate change policy in the United States under George W. Bush, Canadian federal GHG
policy under the Harper government did not mandate or incentivize GHG reductions. The 2015 election
of Trudeau, together with growing climate policy action at the provincial level, appears to have changed
the direction of Canadian climate policy toward more serious emissions reductions. In 2016, the
Trudeau administration in support of Canada’s NDC under the Paris Agreement announced that all
Canadian provinces must establish a carbon pricing scheme (e.g., a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade
system) that meets a federal benchmark (“floor price”) no later than 2018. If any province fails to do so,
the federal government will impose its own carbon price on that province. The 2019 reelection of the
Trudeau government affirmed the government’s climate and energy policies. The federal government’s
carbon price started at twenty Canadian dollars (CAD) per metric ton in 2020, and is set to increase to
CAD 50 by mid-2022 (or from approximately 14 US dollars to about 35 US dollars). Most Canadian
households will receive rebates for some of the taxes paid. If fully implemented, this carbon-pricing
scheme will result in a stark difference between Canadian and US federal climate change policy.

Mexico, which early on engaged in modest voluntary initiatives, took several legal and political steps
during the 2010s. Legislation enacted in 2012 passed Mexico’s Copenhagen Accord commitment into
law. This was followed in 2013 by a legal commitment to cut GHGs by 50 percent from 2000 levels by
2050 and the goal of generating 35 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2024.42 A modest
carbon tax supports Mexican GHG reductions. The 2012 and 2013 legislation gave Mexico at the time
the distinction of having the most comprehensive federal climate change law in North America, and it
established Mexico as a Latin American leader in climate change policymaking and prodded other
South and Central American states to move forward.43 These federal measures alongside actions by
Mexican states also form the foundation for Mexico’s NDC under the Paris Agreement. In contrast,
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, elected in 2018, has prioritized fossil fuel investments and
policies over climate change action and renewable energy expansion.

Beyond the federal level, subnational actors have developed an important and diverse set of responses
(see Chapter 2). Figures 12.1 and 12.2 show the variance among total and per-capita energy-related
CO2 emissions in US states in 2016.44 Between 2005 and 2016, energy-related CO2 emissions fell in 41
US states and increased in 9.45 The states with the greatest reductions were New Hampshire (−35.3%),
Maryland (−29.8%), and Maine (−28.8%). At the other end of the spectrum, CO2 emissions increased by
+11.1% in Nebraska, +12.8% in South Dakota, and +16.3% in Idaho. These differences stem from a
host of factors, including climate, substantial variance in the sources of energy used, differential
economic and population growth rates and density, diverging transportation infrastructure and needs,
and large differences in state and local climate change and energy policies. Some US states such as
Texas and California emit total CO2 emissions on par with large industrialized countries, and many other
US states emit about as much as smaller industrialized countries. Wyoming was the US state with the
highest per capita CO2 emissions in 2016 at 108 metric tons per person, followed by North Dakota at 72
metric tons. Meanwhile, states at the low end—including New York, California, Massachusetts, and
Oregon—each emitted less than 10 metric tons per person.

Description

Figure 12.1 Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions by State, 2005–2016

Description

Figure 12.2 Per Capita Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions by State, 2005–2016

Many US states have taken policy actions in support of their GHG reduction goals. These include
enacting renewable portfolio standards requiring electricity providers to obtain a minimum percentage of
their power from renewable sources, formulating ethanol mandates and incentives, pushing to close
coal-fired power plants, setting vehicle emissions standards, mandating the sale of more efficient
appliances and electronic equipment, and changing land use and development policies to curb
emissions as discussed in Chapters 2 and 8. Several states, through their respective attorneys general,
were a driving force behind the 2007 Supreme Court decision declaring CO2 a pollutant. Especially
California, building on its tradition of air pollution and energy leadership, has adopted a suite of climate
change policies comparable to those of the EU.46 These policies aim to increase energy efficiency
across the state; reduce GHG emissions from power plants, homes, businesses, and transportation; and
expand renewable energy generation. Among Canadian provinces, British Columbia distinguished itself
(in Canada and globally) by implementing a relatively comprehensive carbon tax in 2008, which climbed
to 40 CAD (or about 28 US dollars) by 2019.47

Subnational state leaders also enact collaborative standards and policies. Launched in 2009, the
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) creates a cap-and-trade scheme across 10 states:
Maryland, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and
Delaware (New Jersey, an original member, left for several years and then rejoined). Virginia and
Pennsylvania have announced plans to join. RGGI was designed to stabilize CO2 emissions from power
plants between 2009 and 2015 and to achieve a 10 percent reduction by 2019. By 2013, emissions
were already far below the cap, prompting states to cut the 2014 emissions cap by 45 percent and plan
for it to decline through 2020 (resulting in emissions 68 percent below the 2000–2006 period).48 By
2019, regional electricity sector emissions were already down by 47 percent (exceeding the 2020 goal),
coal use had declined 58 percent between 2005 and 2015, and auctioning emission permits has
produced over $2.6 billion for energy efficiency and other public benefits investments, saving consumers
an estimated $4.6 billion and creating over 30,000 jobs.49 RGGI’s success helped engender a 2019
initiative by 12 states in the US Northeast to design a new cap-and-trade scheme to help curb
transportation emissions.

Under the Western Climate Initiative, British Columbia, California, and Québec work to harmonize GHG
mitigation efforts. By 2020, California, Québec, and Nova Scotia were actively coordinating their
emissions trading programs (Ontario, previously a member, left the initiative in 2018). California climate
change and renewable energy collaboration with Mexico expands subnational efforts into the third
NAFTA member. Many Obama administration EPA proposals, if implemented, were designed to further
incentivize state action and collaboration. This is not the goal of Trump administration initiatives, which
often tried to restrict state-led efforts to address climate change. Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau’s climate change and clean energy initiatives are designed to push provinces to take more
mitigation and adaptation leadership. Some provinces are also moving beyond Canada’s national goal
as formulated in its NDC in terms of their own GHG reduction goals. For example, Québec’s reduction
goals are minus 20 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) and minus 37.5 percent by 2030.

In addition, large and small municipalities all over North America are taking action, both individually and
through networks such as the United States Climate Alliance, International Council for Local
Environmental Initiatives and its Cities for Climate Protection program, the US Conference of Mayors’
Climate Protection Agreement, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Partners for Climate
Protection program, and the C40 group.50 Although many municipal climate change programs are
modest, cities such as New York City, Toronto, and Portland have achieved noteworthy results. North
American municipalities are also increasingly developing new GHG reduction and energy efficiency
programs that rely in part on innovative private financing. Additionally, a growing number of North
American firms are voluntarily reducing GHG emissions and investing in low carbon technology.
However, it is important to note that a significant number of firms still take only limited action, while many
others continue to fund lobbying efforts to prevent climate policy adoption.51

Even as important political and technical precedents for future climate change actions are being set all
over the United States and Canada, significant public and private sector resistance to mandatory action
and controls continues in North America (more so than in Europe). Polls demonstrate that US voters are
deeply split along partisan lines. Also, the fact that many companies were enthusiastic about Trump-era
regulatory rollbacks, including auto companies that previously endorsed higher fuel efficiency standards,
illustrates continuing corporate opposition to climate change policy. Some states, provinces, and
municipalities also delayed or even rolled back enacted climate change policies due to combinations of
local political opposition and tougher economic times during the economic downturn starting in the late
2000s. In the US Congress, opponents of climate and clean energy policies (and of climate science)
remain determined to limit the EPA’s regulatory authority (see Chapter 5)—and even its voluntary
programs.

The energy futures of the North American countries are deeply linked. On the one hand, opportunities
exist for much more cross-border renewable energy development and trade between Canada and the
United States and the United States and Mexico. In all three countries, the cost competitiveness of
renewable energy sources such as solar and wind has improved, and renewable energy capacity and
generation have increased in recent years. On the other hand, the tar sands extraction in Alberta and
the related presidential executive actions to advance approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline
system connecting Canadian oilfields with US refineries and ports in the Gulf of Mexico—as well as
Trump’s promise to expand the extraction and use of coal and other fossil fuels—were welcomed and
supported by the fossil fuel industry. Other related controversies fester: whether to expand US oil, gas,
and coal exports; how many new areas to open for additional fossil fuel extraction; and what, if any,
subsidies to offer to renewable energy investments and production. A final, noteworthy development of
the Trump era, however, was the continuing decline of coal extraction and coal-fired electricity
generation across the United States, despite the frequent pro-coal rhetoric of Trump administration
officials.52 In fact, as of 2020, renewable energy seems likely to permanently surpass coal as the
second largest source of electricity in the United States (behind natural gas).53
THE DEVELOPING WORLD AND THE BRICS
As the international community attempts to move forward collectively under the Paris Agreement, many
developing countries face myriad mitigation and adaptation problems, alongside a multitude of other
critical sustainable development issues. The situation of relatively vulnerable countries to climatic
changes gives rise to important procedural and distributive social justice issues, from a global equity
perspective.54 Procedural justice refers to the ability of peoples and countries to partake fully in
collective decision-making processes focusing on mitigation and adaptation issues, including under the
Paris Agreement. Distributive justice concerns how climate change impacts or how mitigation policies
affect societies and people differently, in part because countries have greatly varying domestic
capacities to deal with these challenges.

For many developing countries, procedural justice issues relate to how international climate change
policy is formulated and how these countries’ interests are represented and taken into account. Many
smaller developing countries face multiple obstacles to engaging actively in multilateral environmental
negotiations and assessments.55 These obstacles include having fewer human, economic, technical,
and scientific resources with which to prepare for international negotiations or implement resulting
agreements. The significant capacity differences between wealthier industrialized countries and poorer
developing countries risk skewing international debates and decision-making in favor of the
perspectives and interests of more powerful countries, which are often interested in minimizing their own
mitigation costs.

On distributive justice issues, the preambles to both the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement recognize
that many developing countries are “particularly vulnerable” to the adverse effects of climate change.
For example, countries in South Asia with vast and densely populated low-lying coastal areas, including
Bangladesh and India, will experience many of the first impacts of sea level rise and increased storm
intensity, as will the inhabitants of small island states. Changes in seasons and precipitation present a
more acute threat to millions of poor, small-scale farmers in Africa and other tropical countries than they
do to those in rich countries. Similar issues can be extended to indigenous populations all over the
world, who are often among the most vulnerable in any society.56 The IPCC's fifth assessment report
included chapters on “Human Security” and “Sustainable Development and Equity” that catalogue vast
and growing risks to citizens and communities in the developing world, as well as the complexity and
urgency of equity and social justice issues related to climate change causes, implications, and mitigation
and adaptation policymaking.57

The developing world has often tried to speak with one voice on climate change through the Group of 77
(G-77).58 Evident in G-77 pronouncements is the strong interest of member states in preserving the
principle of common but differentiated responsibilities as key for assigning GHG reduction requirements
and in prioritizing economic development partly based upon the continued use of fossil fuels. The ability
of the very diverse group of G-77 members to present a unified front has always been inconsistent,
becoming more difficult in recent times. One major change over the last two decades is the rapid
economic growth and increasingly assertive positions of major developing countries, often exemplified
by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Despite increasing debates about
whether rapidly industrializing countries such as China and India are well suited to represent the “Global
South”—or even belong in such a category—Indian and Chinese officials remain attached to many of
the ideas and principles associated with developing country identity in global politics in the
environmental arena and beyond.59

Major developing countries, having seen large increases in national emissions over the past three
decades, are under growing pressure to reduce GHGs. For example, low-lying islands fear Chinese and
Indian emissions as much as those originating from North America and Europe, industrialized countries
want a level economic playing field for their firms in international markets, and environmental
organizations push for much deeper global emission cuts as a central sustainable development issue.
Developing country NDCs include a wide range of national goals and measures, and, like US climate
policy, these can change with changes in governments. Brazil, for example, moved from an engaged
participant in the Paris Agreement negotiations, to a most hostile and much less cooperative posture
under President Jair Bolsonaro's government. In China, as air pollution and public health issues are
becoming more salient domestically, the government is stepping up mitigation actions. These include
investing heavily in greener technologies, expanding wind and solar power generation capacities, and
launching pilot cap-and-trade programs.60 Among the major goals in China’s initial NDC are that its
emissions will peak no later than 2030 and then begin to decline. With China’s annual GHG emissions
exceeding those of all other countries, China and its leaders have become essential and influential
participants in all global climate forums—as illustrated by the pre-Paris Agreement US-China bilateral
climate change agreement in 2014. India’s NDC pledges to focus on renewable energy growth and
adaptation. In both India and China, trends in coal use are likely to play a central role in emissions
trajectories over the next decades.

Diverse NDC goals and metrics may be politically necessary, but they may also prove difficult to monitor
and assess collectively. Furthermore, national GHG emissions under many NDCs are predicted to
continue to grow in the short and medium terms. Finally, developing countries pay close attention to
contributions to the Green Climate Fund and other major sources of climate finance as an important
indication of the level of commitment shown by donor countries and the international community. Many,
like Mexico, stipulate that fulfillment of their national GHG reduction targets is at least partially
dependent on the delivery of adequate financial and technological assistance from donor countries.
While there has been an increase in financial pledges, developing countries have cause to be skeptical
about such pledges until funds are actually delivered. In addition, developing countries strongly argue
for the principle of “additionality”—that funds going toward climate change mitigation and adaptation
should be in addition to both development assistance and to funds going to other environmental issue
areas.
LOOKING FOR LEADERSHIP
Climate change policy is developing across global, regional, national, and local governance levels, but
existing initiatives are not enough to meet the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals. Since the 1880s,
average global temperatures have increased by roughly 1°C, and past emissions have already built in
further warming over the coming decades and centuries. The world’s industrialized and developing
countries do not face the same challenges, but climate change threatens all. As global GHG emissions
continue to rise, the challenge of finding ways to reduce these significantly—by upwards of 80–90
percent by 2050, as is often stated—while simultaneously tackling poverty and promoting sustainable
economic and social development cannot be overstated (see Chapter 13). Together with more
aggressive actions by industrialized countries, developing countries must first stop their emissions
growth and then quickly reduce those emissions if the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals are to be
reached. At the same time, the vast majority of the world’s poorest people live in these countries, facing
growing climate-related adaptation problems that hit weaker and poorer communities much more
harshly than they do stronger and richer ones. Even after global GHG emissions have been drastically
reduced, researchers estimate that related climatic changes will be with us for the next 1,000 years.61

The United States re-joining the Paris Agreement under the Biden administration, after Trump’s
withdrawal, means the return of the world’s second largest GHG emitter to global climate change
cooperation. However, the United States on-again, off-again relationship with global climate change
forums leaves it a fickle and unreliable partner. It also undermines American leadership, as others offer
climate change leadership. China and the EU, only 1 day after Trump announced the US withdrawal
from the Paris Agreement, signed a declaration to forge a stronger bilateral alliance to address climate
change and lead the transition to a low-carbon economy. Parties to the Paris Agreement continue to
meet annually and design rules and procedures to implement and review the agreement, with or without
meaningful US engagement. Can a Biden administration offer global leadership? Will the EU, China and
other parties find a committed long-term partner in the United States? What will be the US climate
change posture in other global forums, such as in the ozone layer protection regime, the G7/G20, and
the United Nations Security Council? More aggressive GHG reduction goals are required of all major
emitters—and massive adaptation challenges remain.

Because of frustration with the UNFCCC process, even after the Paris Agreement, and disappointment
in the Trump administration’s decision both to leave the Paris Agreement and to reverse federal
standards while supporting greater fossil fuel extraction and use, some policy advocates look to the
plethora of governance experiences outside of global institutions.62 Actors at every level of social
organization are experimenting with new policies and institutions to address mitigation and adaptation
needs in a myriad of ways. Research makes it clear that innovation around climate and energy
collaboration is nearly infinite, but questions remain about whether this huge variety of nonstate and
private sector governance can meet the climate change challenge without much more significant state
action in both the Global North and the Global South. This debate was reignited in the United States in
the wake of the Trump administration’s many federal and foreign policy actions aimed at weakening
previous initiatives supportive of climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Climate finance needs are also daunting. The International Energy Agency estimates that a $53 trillion
investment in energy supply and in energy efficiency is needed by 2035 to move the world toward the
2°C goal.63 This translates into almost $2.5–3 trillion more per year up to 2035. In 2010, the World Bank
calculated that the world’s developing countries would need to spend between $70 and 100 billion each
year between 2010 and 2050 on necessary adaptation projects under a 2°C scenario.64 A United
Nations Environment Programme report suggested that adaptation costs for developing countries under
different emission scenarios could be even higher, between $140 and 300 billion in 2030 and rising to
between $280 and 500 billion a year by 2050.65 One thing is clear, however: the longer we delay
investments in mitigation and adaptation, the larger the consequences of climate change and the higher
the costs of adapting.
The scientific debate about the reality of human-induced climate change is settled, but significant
disagreements remain within and among countries, and public and private sector actors, about the
allocation of costs and responsibilities for cutting GHG emissions and switching to cleaner technology.
International politics and national and local governments are central to addressing major climate change
mitigation and adaptation challenges, but large and small firms are also critical players in their roles as
investors, polluters, innovators, experts, manufacturers, lobbyists, and employers.66 Major economic
and social changes—such as the drive for low-carbon lifestyles—create both business constraints and
opportunities. Collective action is required, but action by firms, consumers, and citizens are needed as
well. If the challenges posed by climate change are to be met, we must all take responsibility for our
impact on the global climate system, using and expanding our influence over our own behavior and in
our local communities, workplaces, and governments.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (www.c2es.org) This site offers information about
international and US climate change policymaking and private sector action.

EcoInternet (www.ecointernet.org) This portal, search engine, and news feed covers climate
change issues.

European Commission (http://ec.europa.eu/clima) The EC site on climate action provides

information about European perspectives and policy initiatives to address climate change.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (www.ipcc.ch) This panel of international experts

conducts periodical assessments of scientific and socioeconomic information about climate change.

RealClimate (www.realclimate.org) This moderated forum provides commentaries on climate

change science news by scientists working in different fields.

UN Climate Change Newsroom (http://newsroom.unfccc.int) This website operated by the

UNFCCC Secretariat contains information about meetings and other activities organized under the
UNFCCC.
NOTES
1. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144510/2018-was-the-fourth-warmest-year-continuing-long-
warming-trend

2. Robert O’Neill, “Ban Ki-moon Delivers Call to Action on Global Challenges,” News, October 22, 2008,
available from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School at
http://www.belfercenter.org/publication/ban-ki-moon-delivers-call-action-global-challenges

3. Kerry Emanuel, What We Know About Climate Change, 2nd ed., (Cambridge, MA: Boston
Review/MIT Press, 2012).

4. Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, 2nd ed., (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008); and Leila McNeill, “This Lady Scientist Defined the Greenhouse Effect But Didn’t Get the
Credit, Because Sexism,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 5, 2016,
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lady-scientist-helped-revolutionize-climate-science-
didnt-get-credit-180961291/

5. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/05/13/climate-change-co-2-levels-hit-415-parts-per-
million-human-first/1186417001/

6. For discussions about the latest developments in climate change science, see RealClimate
(www.realclimate.org).

7. IPCC, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

8. For a chart of different global warming potentials, see UNFCCC data at

https://unfccc.int/ghg_data/items/3825.php

9. Data taken from: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions

10. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions#per-capita-co2-emissions

11. John Cook, Naomi Oreskes, Peter T. Doran, William R. L. Anderegg, Bart Verheggen, Ed W.
Maibach, J. Stuart Carlton, Stephan Lewandowsky, Andrew G. Skuce, and Sarah A. Green, “Consensus
on Consensus: A Synthesis of Consensus Estimates on Human-Caused Global Warming,”
Environmental Research Letters 11, no. 4 (2016): 1–7.

12. The IPCC reports and other data are available on the IPCC website (www.ipcc.ch).

13. IPCC, 2018: Summary for Policymakers. In: Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on
the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas
emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change,
sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty [Masson-Delmotte V., P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner,
D. Roberts, J. Skea, P. R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J. B.
R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M. I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield (eds.)]
(https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/).

14. UNEP. (2019). Emissions Gap Report 2019: Nairobi: UNEP,

(https://www.unenvironment.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2019).

15. Christian Downie, The Politics of Climate Change Negotiations (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar,
2014); Harro van Asselt, The Fragmentation of Climate Change Governance (Northampton, MA:
Edward Elgar, 2014); and Thomas Hale, David Held, and Kevin Young, Gridlock: Why Climate Change
Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (London: Polity, 2013).
16. These were Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic,
Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia,
Lichtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland,
Portugal, Romania, the Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine,
the United Kingdom, and the United States.

17. Miranda A. Schreurs, Henrik Selin, and Stacy D. VanDeveer, eds., Transatlantic Environment and
Energy Politics: Comparative and International Perspectives (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009).

18. Raymond Clémonçon, “The Bali Roadmap,” Journal of Environment and Development 17, no. 1
(2008): 70–94.

19. Detailed reports about all COPs, for the UNFCCC and many other international environmental
negotiations, can be found in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, available at www.iisd.ca/enbvol/enb-
background.htm

20. Kelly Gallagher and X. Xuan, Titans of the Climate: Explaining the Policy Process in the US and
China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).

21. Robert Falkner “The Paris Agreement and the New Logic of International Climate Politics,”
International Affairs 92 (5) (2016): 1107–25.

22. Joeri Rogelj, Michel de Eizen, Niklas Höhne, Taryn Fransen, Hanna Fekete, Harald Winkler, Roberto
Schaeffer, Fu Sha, Keywan Riahi, and Malte Meinshausen, “Paris Agreement Climate Proposals Need a
Boost to Keep Warming Well Below 2°C,” Nature 534 (June 30, 2016): 631–39.

23. UNEP. (2019). Emissions Gap Report 2019: Nairobi: UNEP,

(https://www.unenvironment.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2019).

24. Paul Bodnar quoted in Graham Norword, “‘End of the Beginning’: What Was Achieved at COP-21,”
NewSecurityBeat, January 6, 2016; and Joshua Busby, “After Paris: Good Enough Climate
Governance,” Current History 115, no. 777 (January 2016): 3–9.

25. Andrew Jordan, Dave Huitema, Mikael Hildén, Harro van Asselt, Tim J. Rayner, Jonas J.
Schoenefeld, Jale Tosun, et al., “Emergence of Policycentric Climate Governance and Its Future
Prospects,” Nature Climate Change 5 (November 2015): 977–82.

26. Tim Boersma and Stacy D. VanDeveer, “Coal after the Paris Agreement,” Foreign Affairs, June 6,
2016.

27. Henrik Selin and Stacy D. VanDeveer, “Broader, Deeper and Greener: European Union
Environmental Politics, Policies and Outcomes,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 40
(2015): 309–35.

28. Sebastian Oberthür, “Where to Go from Paris? The European Union in Climate Geopolitics,” Global
Affairs 2, no. 2 (2016): 119–30.

29. Henrik Selin and Stacy D. VanDeveer, European Union Environmental Governance (New York:
Routledge, 2015).

30. Jon Birger Skjærseth and Jørgen Wettestad, EU Emissions Trading: Initiating, Decision-Making and
Implementation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008).

31. European Commission, The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) (Brussels: European
Commission, 2013); and Selin and VanDeveer, European Union Environmental Governance.

32. European Environment Agency, Trends and Projections in Europe 2013: Tracking Progress Towards
Europe’s Climate and Energy Targets until 2020 (Copenhagen: European Environment Agency, 2013).
33. European Environment Agency, Trends and Projections in Europe 2019: Tracking Progress Towards
Europe’s Climate and Energy Targets (Copenhagen: European Environment Agency, 2019).

34. Henrik Selin and Stacy D. VanDeveer, eds., Changing Climates in North American Politics:
Institutions, Policy Making and Multilevel Governance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

35. Henrik Selin and Stacy D. VanDeveer, “Climate Change Politics and Policy in the United States:
Forward, Reverse and through the Looking Glass,” in Rüdiger Wurzel and Mikael Skou Andersen, eds.,
Multilevel and Polycentric Climate Governance: Pioneers, Leaders and Followers in Multilevel and
Polycentric Climate Governance (Routledge, forthcoming).

36. Coral Davenport, “Obama Pursuing Climate Accord in Lieu of Treaty,” New York Times, August 27,
2014.

37. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “U.S.-China Joint Announcement on Climate Change,”
November 12, 2014, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/11/us-china-joint-
announcement-climate-change

38. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/29/north-american-climate-clean-
energy-and-environment-partnership-action

39. Miranda A. Schreurs, Henrik Selin, and Stacy D. VanDeveer, “Conflict and Cooperation in
Transatlantic Climate Politics: Different Stories at Different Levels,” in Transatlantic Environment and
Energy Politics: Comparative and International Perspectives, eds., M. A. Schreurs, H. Selin, and S. D.
VanDeveer (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 165–85.

40. Henrik Selin and Stacy D. VanDeveer, “Climate Change Politics and Policy in the United States:
Forward, Reverse and through the Looking Glass,” in Climate Governance Across the Globe: Pioneers,
Leaders and Followers, eds., R. K. Wurzel, M. Skou Andersen, and P. Tobin (New York: Routledge,
2020).

41. Nadja Popovich, Kendra Pierre-Lous, and Livia Ripka, “All 98 Environmental Rules the Trump
Administration is Revoking or Rolling Back,” New York Times, May 10, 2020.

42. Rona Fried, “Mexico Unveils National Climate Change Strategy,” SustainableBusiness.com, June
11, 2013, http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/mexico-unveils-national-climate-change-strategy-51628/

43. Lisa Friedman, “Latin Americans Forge Ahead on CO2 Reduction Plans,” ClimateWire, June 9,
2014.

44. https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/state/analysis/pdf/stateanalysis.pdf

45. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions at the State
Level, 2000–2014 (Washington, DC: Department of Energy, January 2017),
https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/state/analysis/pdf/stateanalysis.pdf

46. David Vogel, California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became the Environmental Leader
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

47. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/climate-change/planning-and-action/carbon-tax

48. See the RGGI website: www.rggi.org

49. Michael Bradley and Christopher Van Atten, Power Switch: The Future of the Electric Power System
in the Northeast and the Disruptive Power of Innovation (Concord, MA: MJ Badley & Associates, 2016),
http://www.mjbradley.com/sites/default/files/powerswitch10-19-2016.pdf; Travis Madsen and Rachel
Cross, Doubling Down on Climate Progress: The Benefits of a Stronger Regional Greenhouse Gas
Initiative (Boston, MA: Environment America, 2017); Acadia Center, “The Regional Greenhouse Gas
Initiative: 10 Years in Review (Acadia Center, 2019); and Leigh Raymond, Reclaiming the Atmospheric
Commons (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

50. Christopher Gore and Pamela Robinson, “Local Government Responses to Climate Change: Our
Last, Best Hope?” in Changing Climates in North American Politics: Institutions, Policy Making and
Multilevel Governance, eds., Henrik Selin and Stacy D. VanDeveer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009),
137–58.

51. Charles A. Jones and David L. Levy, “Business Strategies and Climate Change,” in Changing
Climates in North American Politics: Institutions, Policy Making and Multilevel Governance, eds., Henrik
Selin and Stacy D. VanDeveer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 219–40.

52. Tim Boersma and Stacy D. VanDeveer, “World on Fire: Coal Politics and Responsibility among
Great Powers,” in Great Powers, Climate Change and Global Environmental Responsibilities, eds.,
Barry Buzan and Robert Falkner (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); and Robinson Meyer,
“America’s Coal Consumption Entered Free-Fall in 2019,” The Atlantic, January 2020, at
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/01/americas-coal-consumption-entered-free-fall-
2019/604543/

53. Brad Plumer “In a First, Renewable Energy is Set to Pass Coal in the U.S.,” New York Times, May
14, 2020.

54. W. Neil Adger, Jouni Paavola, and Saleemul Huq, “Toward Justice in Adaptation to Climate
Change,” in Fairness in Adaptation to Climate Change, eds., W. Neil Adger, Jouni Paavola, Saleemul
Huq, and M. J. Mace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 1–19.

55. Pamela S. Chasek, “NGOs and State Capacity in International Environmental Negotiations: The
Experience of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin,” Review of European Community and International
Environmental Law 10, no. 2 (2001): 168–76; and Ambuj Sagar and Stacy D. VanDeveer, “Capacity
Development for the Environment: Broadening the Scope,” Global Environmental Politics 5, no. 3
(2005): 14–22.

56. Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, Impacts of a Warming Arctic: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

57. W. Neil Adger, Juan M. Pulhin, Jon Barnett, Geoffrey D. Dabelko, Grete K. Hovelsrud, Marc Levy,
Úrsula Oswald Spring, et al., “Human Security,” in Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and
Vulnerability—Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 755–91; and Marc
Fleurbaey, Sivan Kartha, Simon Bolwig, Yoke Ling Chee, Ying Chen, Esteve Corbera, Franck Lecocq, et
al., “Sustainable Development and Equity,” in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change—
Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 283–350.

58. Adil Najam, “The View from the South: Developing Countries in Global Environmental Politics,” in
The Global Environment, 5th ed., eds., Regina Axelrod and Stacy D. VanDeveer (Washington, DC: CQ
Press, 2020) 245–68.

59. Shangrila Joshi, “Understanding India’s Representation of North-South Climate Politics,” Global
Environmental Politics 13, no. 2 (2013): 128–47; and Philip Stalley, “Principles Strategy: The Role of
Equity Norms in China’s Climate Change Diplomacy,” Global Environmental Politics 13, no. 1 (2013): 1–
8.

60. Joanna I. Lewis and Kelly Sims Gallagher, “How China’s Domestic Energy and Environmental
Challenges Shape Its Global Engagement,” in The Global Environment, 5th ed., eds., Regina Axelrod
and Stacy D. VanDeveer (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2020): 220–44; and Joanna I. Lewis, Green
Innovation in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
61. Susan Solomon, Gian-Kasper Plattner, Reto Knutti, and Pierre Friedlingstein, “Irreversible Climate
Change Due to Carbon Dioxide Emissions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States 106, no. 6 (2009): 1704–9, https://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1704

62. Harriett Bulkely, et al., Transnational Climate Change Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014); Jennifer Green, Rethinking Private Authority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2014); and Matthew Hoffmann, Climate Governance at the Crossroads (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 2011).

63. International Energy Agency, Special Report: World Energy Investment Outlook (Paris: OECD/IEA,
2014), 14.

64. World Bank, Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change: Synthesis Report (Washington, DC:
World Bank, 2010), xxvii

65. UNEP, The Adaptation Finance Gap Report (Nairobi, Kenya: UNEP, 2016), xii.

66. Jones and Levy, “Business Strategies and Climate Change.”

Descriptions of Images and Figures
Back to Figure

The graph is an estimation of the energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in million metric tons by State
for the period 2005–2016. They are as follows: Texas (650) California (350), Florida (210), Pennsylvania
(205), Louisiana (201), Ohio (201), llinois (201), Indiana (190), New York (180), Michigan (170), Georgia
(160), Kentucky (150), North Carolina (140), Missouri (130), Alabama (130), New Jersey (120), Virginia
(110), Tennessee (100), Oklahoma (100), Wisconsin (100), West Virginia (100), Minnesota
(90),Colorado (90), Arizona (95), Washington (85), Iowa (85), South Carolina (85), Mississippi (85),
Massachusetts (85), Kansas (85), Arkansas (85), Wyoming (85), Utah (70), Maryland (70) North Dakota
(65), Nebraska (65), New Mexico (65), Oregon (50), Nevada (50), Alaska (50), Connecticut (50),
Montana (40), Hawaii (20), Idaho (20), Maine (20), South Dakota (10), New Hampshire (10), Delaware
(10), Rhode Island (5),Vermont (0), District of Columbia (0).

Back to Figure

The graph is a depiction of the per capita energy-related carbon dioxide emission by state for period
2005–2016. The estimation for each state as per metric ton is as follows: Wyoming (105), North Dakota
(75), West Virginia (50), Alaska (45), Louisiana (42), Montana (25), Kentucky (22), Indiana (23),
Oklahoma (22), Nebraska (23), Alabama (22), Texas (22), Iowa (22), New Mexico (22), Mississippi (22),
Kansas (21), Arkansas (20), Missouri (20), Utah (20), Ohio (19), South Dakota (19), Pennsylvania (19),
Wisconsin (19), Minnesota (19), Colorado (19), Illinois (19), Tennessee (19), Michigan (19), South
Carolina (19), Delaware (19), Georgia (19), Hawaii (17), Arizona (17), Nevada (16), Virginia (16), Maine
(16), New Jersey (16), North Carolina (16), Massachusetts (8), District of Columbia (3), New York (5),
California (10), Rhode Island (9), Oregon (9), Maryland (10), Vermont (10), Connecticut (8), New
Hampshire (10), Washington (10), Idaho (10), Florida (11).
13 ENVIRONMENT, POPULATION,
AND THE DEVELOPING WORLD
—Richard J. Tobin
Environmental problems occasionally make life in the United States
unpleasant, but most Americans tolerate this situation in exchange
for the comforts associated with a developed economy. Most
Europeans, Canadians, Japanese, and Australians share similar
lifestyles, so it is not surprising that they typically also take modern
amenities for granted.

When lifestyles are viewed from a global perspective, however,

much changes. Consider, for example, what life is like in much of the
world. The US gross national income (GNI) per capita was $65,880
per year, or about $1,267 per week, in 2019. In contrast, weekly
incomes were less than 5 percent of this amount in twenty-six
countries, even when adjusted for differences in prices and
purchasing power. In several African countries, real per capita
incomes are less than 2 percent of those in the United States. Much
of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day.1

Low incomes are not the only problem facing many of the world’s
inhabitants. Before millions of girls reach age fifteen in parts of
Africa, including 85 percent of more in Egypt, Guinea, Somalia, and
Sudan, they suffer from the indignity and emotional and physical
damage of female genital mutilation. In some developing countries,
women, often illiterate and with no formal education, marry as young
as age thirteen. In several countries, about a quarter of girls are
married by the age of fifteen, and in many more countries over 50
percent by age eighteen.2 Many of these marriages are with much
older men who have even less education than their teenage brides.
Girls’ health and well-being are further placed in jeopardy when they
bear children while still in their mid-teens.
During their childbearing years, women in many developing
countries will typically deliver as many as five or six babies, most
without skilled birth attendants. This absence is not without
consequences. The likelihood that a woman will die due to
complications associated with pregnancy, childbirth, or an unsafe
abortion is many times higher in poor countries than in Western
Europe or the United States. In Chad, Sierra Leone, and South
Sudan, as an illustration, the rate of maternal mortality is almost one
hundred times higher than the rate in many European countries.3
COVID-19 has added an additional challenge that has stressed and
overburdened many health systems that were ill-prepared and
understaffed before the virus arrived.

Many of the world’s children are also at risk. In recent years about
one of thirteen children have died before the age of five in sub-
Saharan Africa; in high-income countries that number is about 1 in
185. Half of all deaths under the age of five in 2019 were in sub-
Saharan Africa.4 Every week, tens of thousands of children under
age five die in developing countries from diseases that rarely kill
Americans. Malaria, diarrhea, and acute respiratory infections cause
more than half of these deaths, most of which can be easily and
cheaply cured or prevented.

Of the children from these poor countries who do survive their

earliest years, millions will suffer brain damage because their
pregnant mothers had no iodine in their diets; others will lose their
sight and die because they lack vitamin A. Many will face a life of
poverty, never to taste clean water, breathe unpolluted air, use a
computer, toothbrush, or cell phone, enter a classroom, learn to read
or write, visit a doctor or a dentist, have access to even the cheapest
medicines, or eat nutritious food regularly. Nearly half of all deaths in
children under the age of five are attributable to undernutrition.5 To
the extent that shelter is available, it is typically rudimentary, rarely
with electricity or proper sanitary facilities. Hundreds of millions in the
developing world will also become victims of floods, droughts,
famine, desertification, land degradation, waterborne diseases,
infestations of pests and rodents, and noxious levels of pollution
because their surroundings have been abused or poorly managed.

As children in developing countries grow older, many will find that

their governments cannot provide the resources to ensure them a
reasonable standard of living or even a seat in a classroom. Yet all
around them are countries with living standards well beyond their
comprehension. The United States has about 4 percent of the
world’s population but consumes about 17 percent of the world’s
energy and more than three times as much as India, whose
population is more than four times larger. An Indian mother might
wonder why Americans consume a disproportionate share of the
world’s resources when she has malnourished children she cannot
afford to educate or properly clothe. In short, life in much of the world
provides an array of problems different from those encountered in
developed nations. Residents of poor countries must cope with
widespread poverty, scarce opportunities for employment, and a lack
of development. Yet both developed and developing nations often
undergo environmental degradation. Those without property, for
example, may be tempted to denude tropical forests for land to farm.
Concurrently, pressures for development often force people to
overexploit their natural and environmental resources.

These issues lead to the key question addressed in this chapter:

Can the poorest countries, with the overwhelming majority of the
world’s population, improve their lot through sustainable
development? Sustainable development meets the essential needs
of the present generation for food, clothing, shelter, jobs, and health
without “compromising the ability of future generations to meet their
own needs.”6 Achieving this goal will require increased development
without irreparable damage to the environment.

Whose responsibility is it to achieve sustainable development? One

view is that richer nations have a moral obligation to assist less
fortunate ones. If the former do not meet this obligation, not only will
hundreds of millions of people in developing countries suffer, but the
consequences will be felt in the developed countries as well. Others
argue that poorer nations must accept responsibility for their own
fate because outside efforts to help them only worsen the problem
and lead to an unhealthy dependence. Advocates of this position
insist that it is wrong to provide food to famine-stricken nations
because they have exceeded their environment’s carrying capacity.7

The richer nations, whichever position they take, cannot avoid

affecting what happens in the developing world. It is thus useful to
consider how events in rich nations influence the quest for
sustainable development. At least two related factors affect this
quest. The first is a country’s population; the second is a country’s
capacity to support its population.
POPULATION GROWTH: CURE OR
CULPRIT?
Population growth is one of the more contentious elements in the
journey toward sustainable development. Depending on one’s
perspective, the world is either vastly overpopulated or capable of
supporting as many as thirty times its current population (about 7.8
billion in mid-2020 and increasing at an annual rate of about 77
million per year).8 Many developing nations are growing faster than
the developed nations (Table 13.1), and more than 80 percent of the
world’s population lives outside the developed regions. If current
growth rates continue, the proportion of those in developing
countries will increase even more. Between 2020 and 2050, more
than 97 percent of the world’s population increase, estimated to be
about two billion people, will occur in the latter regions, exactly
where the environment can least afford such a surge. Many of the
new inhabitants will live in countries that are experiencing little, if
any, economic development.
Table 13.1 Estimated Populations and Projected Growth Rates

Estimated Rate of
Population Number of
Annual
Region or (millions) Years to
Natural
Country Double
Mid- Mid- Mid- Increase in
Population
2020 2035 2050 Mid-2020 (%)
World total 7,773 8,937 9,876 1.1 65
United 330 362 386 0.3 240
States
Canada 38 44 49 0.2 360
Mexico 128 142 148 1.2 60
China 1,402 1,424 1,366 0.3 240
India 1,400 1,576 1,663 1.4 51
 Estimated Rate of
Population Number of
Annual
Region or (millions) Years to
Natural
Country Double
Mid- Mid- Mid- Increase in
Population
2020 2035 2050 Mid-2020 (%)
Bangladesh 170 197 216 1.6 45
Japan 126 124 110 −0.4 —
Angola 33 53 82 3.5 21
Chad 17 26 38 3.2 23
Niger 24 42 66 3.8 19
Uganda 46 70 98 3.3 22
Source: Population Reference Bureau, 2020 World Population Data Sheet Shows Older
Populations Growing, Total Fertility Rates Declining (Washington, DC: Population
Reference Bureau, 2020), https://www.prb.org/2020-world-population-data-sheet/.

Africa is particularly prone to high rates of population growth, with

some countries facing increases of 3.5 percent or more per year.
This may not seem to be a large percentage until we realize that
such rates will double the countries’ populations in about twenty
years. Fertility rates measure the number of children an average
woman has during her lifetime. All countries with fertility rates at 5 or
above in 2020 are in sub-Saharan Africa. By comparison, the fertility
rate in the United States was 1.7 in that year.

Although many developing countries have altered their attitudes

about population growth, many have also realized the immensity of
this task. The theory of demographic transition suggests that
societies go through three stages. In the first stage, in premodern
societies, birth and death rates are high, and populations remain
stable or increase at low rates. In the second stage, death rates
decline and populations grow rapidly because of vaccines, better
health care, and more nutritious foods. As countries begin to reap
the benefits of development, they enter the third stage. Infant
mortality declines, but so does the desire or need to have large
families. Population growth slows considerably.
This model explains events in many developed countries. As
standards of living increased, birthrates declined. The model’s
weakness is that it assumes economic growth; in the absence of
such growth, many nations are caught in a demographic trap. They
get stuck in the second stage. This is the predicament of many
countries today. In some African countries, the situation is even
worse. Their populations are growing faster than their economies,
and living standards are declining. These declines create a cruel
paradox. Larger populations produce increased demands for food,
shelter, education, and health care; stagnant economies (and global
pandemics) make it impossible to provide them.

The opportunity to lower death rates can also make it difficult to slow
population growth. The twenty-five countries with the lowest average
life expectancy are all in Africa. If these Africans had access to the
medicines, vitamins, clean water, and nutritious foods readily
available elsewhere, then death rates would drop substantially. Life
expectancies in these countries could be extended by twenty years
or more.

There are several reasons to expect death rates to decline.

Development agencies have attempted to reduce infant mortality by
immunizing children against potentially fatal illnesses and by
providing inexpensive cures for diarrhea, malaria, and other
illnesses. These efforts have met with enormous success, but
COVID-19 has affected this trajectory. Reduced mortality rates
among children can also reduce fertility rates. Nonetheless, the
change will be gradual, and millions of children will be born in the
meantime. Most of the first-time mothers of the next twenty years
have already been born.

The best-known population programs have been in India and China.

India’s family planning program started in the early 1950s as a low-
key effort that achieved only modest success. The program changed
from being voluntary to compulsory in the mid-1970s. The minimum
age for marriage was increased, and India’s states were encouraged
to select their own methods to reduce growth. Through a variety of
approaches, India has been able to cut its fertility rate significantly,
but cultural and religious resistance may stifle further gains.9 India is
expected to add about 175 million more people by 2035 and
surpassed China to become the most populous country by late 2020
or early in 2021.

To reduce the growth rate in China, its government once

discouraged early marriages. It also adopted a one-child-per-family
policy in 1979. Until the policy was relaxed in January 2016, allowing
families to have two children, the government gave one-child families
monthly subsidies, educational benefits for their child, preferences
for housing and health care, and higher pensions at retirement.
Families that had previously agreed to have only one child but then
had another were deprived of these benefits and penalized
financially. The most controversial elements of China’s population
policy involved the government’s monitoring of women’s menstrual
cycles, forced sterilizations, and late-term abortions. The one-child
policy also increased the likelihood of female infanticide in rural
areas.10

China’s initial efforts lowered annual rates of population growth

considerably. Total fertility rates declined from 5.8 in 1970 to 1.5 in
2020, which is well below the replacement rate of approximately 2.1.
As a result of its one-child policy, Chinese officials claimed that
nearly four hundred million births had been averted.11 More recently,
voluntary decisions not to have multiple children mean that China’s
population is expected to be lower in 2050 than in 2020.

For many years, the US government viewed rapidly growing

populations as a threat to economic development. The United States
backed its rhetoric with money; it was the largest donor to
international population programs. The US position changed
dramatically during the Ronald Reagan administration. Due to its
opposition to abortion, the administration said the United States
would no longer contribute to the United Nations Population Fund
(UNFPA) because it subsidized some of China’s population
programs. None of the fund’s resources are used to provide
abortions, but the US ban on contributions nonetheless continued
during George H. W. Bush’s administration.

Within a day of taking office, President Bill Clinton announced his

intention to alter these policies, to provide financial support to the
UNFPA, and to finance international population programs that rely on
abortions. Just as Clinton had acted quickly, so too did George W.
Bush. He reinstated Reagan’s policy banning the use of federal
funds by international organizations to support or advocate
abortions. The cycle continued with President Barack Obama. He
reversed the Bush rules and urged Congress to restore funding for
the UNFPA. President Donald Trump reversed Obama’s position and
halted funding for the UNFPA. In addition, Trump also banned US
support for international nongovernmental organizations working on
health-related issues, such as the control of malaria, unless they
agreed not to perform, discuss, or promote abortions as a method of
family planning in their other activities unrelated to malaria.

Concerns about abortion are not the only reason many people have
qualms about efforts to limit population increases. Their view is that
large populations are a problem only when they are not used
productively to enhance development. The solution to the lack of
such development is not government intervention, they argue, but
rather individual initiatives and the spread of capitalist, free-market
economies. Advocates of this position also believe that larger
populations can be advantageous because they enhance political
power, contribute to economic development and pension systems,
encourage technological innovation, and stimulate agricultural
production.12 Other critics of population control programs also ask if
it is appropriate for developed countries to impose their preferences
on others.

Another much-debated issue involves increased access to abortions,

and who chooses to have them. The consequences of efforts to
affect population growth are not always gender neutral. In parts of
Asia, male children are prized as sources of future financial security,
whereas females are viewed as liabilities. In years past, the sex of
newborns was known only at birth, and in most countries, newborn
males slightly outnumbered newborn females. With the advent of
ultrasound, however, the sex of a fetus is easily ascertained months
before a child is born. This knowledge can be the basis of a decision
to abort female fetuses, notably in parts of China, India, and Eastern
Europe.13

In sum, the appropriateness of different population sizes is

debatable. There is no clear answer about whether growth by itself is
good or bad. The important issue is a country’s and the world’s
carrying capacity. Can it ensure a reasonable and sustainable
standard of living? Can it do so in the future when the world’s
population will be substantially larger?
PROVIDING FOOD AND FUEL FOR
GROWING POPULATIONS
Sustainable development requires that environmental resources not
be overtaxed so that they are available for future generations. When
populations exceed sustainable yields of their forests, aquifers, and
croplands, however, these resources are gradually destroyed.14 The
eventual result is an irreversible collapse of biological and
environmental support systems. Is there any evidence that these
systems are now being strained or will be in the near future?

The first place to look is in the area of food production. Nations can
grow their own food, import it, or, as most nations do, rely on both
options. The Earth is richly endowed with agricultural potential and
production. Millions of acres of arable land remain to be cultivated,
and farmers now produce enough food to satisfy the daily caloric and
protein needs of a world population exceeding twelve billion.15 These
data suggest the ready availability of food as well as a potential for
even higher levels of production. This good news must be balanced
with the realization that hundreds of millions of people barely have
enough food to survive now.

As with economic development, the amount of food available in a

country must increase at least as fast as the rate of population
growth; otherwise, per capita consumption will decline. If existing
levels of caloric intake are already inadequate, then food production
(and imports) must increase faster than population growth to meet
minimum caloric needs. Assisted by the expanded use of irrigation,
improved farming practices, and high-yielding seed varieties, many
developing countries, particularly in Asia, have dramatically
increased their food production. Asia’s three largest countries—
China, India, and Indonesia—are no longer heavily dependent on
imported food.
Other countries can point to increased agricultural production, but
many of these increases do not keep pace with population growth.
The consequence is that average caloric consumption declines or
imports of food increase, although declining consumption and a
growth in imports can happen concurrently. With frequent spikes in
food and fuel prices, many countries find themselves without
sufficient resources to import enough food to ensure that even
minimal levels of nutrition can be maintained. As an illustration, the
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that over 55
percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population suffered from moderate
or severe food insecurity in 2019. For those facing severe food
insecurity, this meant that people were likely to run out of food, to
experience hunger, and often have nothing to eat for several days.
Throughout sub-Saharan Africa more than 225 million people were
believed to face severe food insecurity with another 420 million in
Asia.16 Among the consequences of insufficient food are stunted
growth, weakened resistance to illness and disease, and impaired
learning abilities and capacity for physical labor.

Agricultural production can be increased, but many countries suffer a

shortage of land suitable for cultivation. Other countries have
reached or exceeded the sustainable limits of production. Their
populations are overexploiting the environment’s carrying capacity.
Farmers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and West Africa may
already be farming virtually all the land suitable for agriculture, and
the amount of arable land per capita is declining in many developing
countries. Consider the situation in Bangladesh. Its population of
about 170 million people in 2020 occupied an area smaller than
Iowa, which had a population of just over 3.1 million in that year.
Moreover, the FAO estimates that more than half of the land now
used for agriculture worldwide is moderately or severely degraded,
and an area about twice the size of China is seriously degraded,
sometimes irreversibly. This degradation reduces productivity and
food security, disrupts ecosystems, adversely affects biodiversity and
water resources, and increases carbon emissions and vulnerability
to climate change.17 If these trends continue, millions of acres of
barren land will be added to the millions that are already beyond
redemption.

Shortages of land suitable for farming are not the only barrier to
increased agricultural production. With more people to feed, more
water must be devoted to agriculture. To feed the world’s population
in 2050, the amount of water devoted to agriculture will have to
double between 2000 and 2050, one estimate suggests.18 Doing so
will be a challenge. All the water that will ever exist is already in
existence, and much of this water is already overused, misused, or
wasted in much of the world, including in the United States, one of
the world’s largest users of water on a per capita basis. Some
countries are already desperately short of water, as frequent
droughts in Africa unfortunately confirm.

The World Resources Institute has classified seventeen countries,

which have about one-quarter of the world’s population, as facing
“extremely high” levels of baseline water stress, where irrigated
agriculture, industries, and municipalities withdraw more than 80
percent of their available supply on average every year. Another
forty-four countries, home to one-third of the world, face “high” levels
of stress, where on average more than 40 percent of available
supply is withdrawn every year. Such withdrawal rates are
unsustainable. Once used, this water is often returned to the
environment without any treatment. According to the World Bank,
more than half the wastewater produced in the Middle East and
North Africa is untreated, degrading water quality and availability and
increasing the risk of waterborne diseases.19 Farmers in many
developing countries must also contend with climate change that
affects the amount, intensity, and variability of rainfall.

Many developing countries rely on fish as a major source of protein.

Unfortunately, the condition of many of the world’s fisheries is
perilous. The FAO estimated in 2018 that 33 percent of the world’s
marine fish stocks are fished at biologically unsustainable levels
compared with only 10 percent in 1974. Over 700 oxygen-starved
“dead zones” have been identified in the world’s oceans and coastal
areas. These zones can barely sustain marine life.20

It is important to appreciate, as well, that the nature of diets changes

as nations urbanize. Irrespective of differences in prices and
incomes, according to the International Food Policy Research
Institute, “urban dwellers consume more wheat and less rice and
demand more meat, milk products, and fish than their rural
counterparts.” This preference leads to increased requirements for
grain to feed animals, the need for more space for forage, greater
demands for water, and increased pollution from animal waste.
Changes in the composition of diets can be anticipated in many
countries. In fact, in virtually every low-income country, urbanization
is increasing faster than overall population growth (in many
instances, three to four times faster).

Increased demand for food also has environmental consequences.

More grain must be produced to feed livestock and poultry. In a
typical year, as much as 35–40 percent of the world’s grain
production is used for animal feed, but the conversion from feed to
meat is not a neat one. As many as ten pounds of grain and about
1,900 gallons of water are required to produce one pound of beef.
Production of beef is especially problematic for the environment. In a
report completed for the National Academy of Sciences (NAS),
researchers concluded that beef production requires twenty-eight,
eleven, and five times more land, irrigation water, and greenhouse
emissions, respectively, than the average of the other livestock
categories.21

Ruminant livestock need grazing land, which is already in short

supply in many areas. Throughout the world, about twice as much
land is devoted to animal grazing as is used for crops. If a land’s
carrying capacity is breached due to excessive exploitation, then the
alternative is to use feedlot production, which requires even higher
levels of grain and concentrates waste products in small areas.
Relying on Domestic Production
Imports offer a possible solution to deficiencies in domestic
production, but here, too, many developing countries encounter
problems. To finance imports, countries need foreign exchange,
usually acquired through their own exports or from loans. Few
developing countries have industrial products or professional
services to export, so they must rely on minerals, natural resources
(such as timber or petroleum), or cash crops (such as tea, sugar,
coffee, cocoa, and rubber).

Prices for many of these commodities fluctuate widely. To illustrate,

prices for sugar, cotton, cocoa beans, nickel, aluminum, natural gas,
and crude oil were lower in August 2020 than in August 2010.22 To
cope with oft-declining prices for crops intended for export farmers
often intensify production, which implies increased reliance on
fertilizers and pesticides, or they expand the area under cultivation to
increase production. These seemingly rational reactions can depress
prices as supply eventually outpaces demand. As the area used for
export crops expands, production for domestic consumption may
decline. In contrast, high prices are good for farmers but reduce
affordability for cash-strapped consumers.

COVID-19 worsened the situation. The executive director of the UN

World Food Program raised the possibility that the virus could lead to
an “unprecedented global humanitarian catastrophe” and to “multiple
famines of biblical proportions” in more than thirty-five countries.
Unless millions of people in developing countries were able to
access food and the ability to buy or grow it during the pandemic, as
many as 300,000 people could die of starvation every day for several
months. In each of ten countries, the director added, more than a
million people were already on the brink of starvation.23 In these and
other countries millions of children were not attending school and
thus were missing the meals that their schools had provided before
the virus had descended on them.
In addition to the effects of COVID-19, farmers in eight East African
countries had to contend with a literal plague of desert locusts in
2019 and 2020. As incredible as it might seem, swarms of locusts
can be as dense as 380 million per square mile and eat as much
food in 1 day in that square mile as about 90,000 people.24

Opportunities exist to increase exports to developed countries, but

economic policies in the developed world can discourage expanded
activity in developing countries. Every year, farmers in Japan,
Europe, and the United States receive billions of dollars in subsidies
and other price-related supports from their governments.

The European Union (EU) provided about $65 billion in 2019 for
agricultural support for its farmers, including Queen Elizabeth of the
United Kingdom. In some years, nearly 40 percent of the EU’s
annual budget is devoted to farm subsidies. So large are these
supports, the president of the World Bank once noted, that the
average European cow received a subsidy of about $2.50 per day, or
more than the average daily income of about three billion people.25
Japanese cows were more privileged. They received a daily subsidy
of about $7.50 per day, or more than 1,800 times as much aid as
Japan provided to sub-Saharan Africa each day.

Subsidies often lead to overproduction and surpluses, which

discourage imports from developing countries, remove incentives to
expand production, encourage the use of environmentally fragile
land, and can increase prices to consumers in countries that provide
the subsidies. Rice, sugar, cotton, wheat, and peanuts are easily and
less expensively grown in many developing countries, but the US
government subsidizes its farmers to grow these crops or imposes
tariffs on their importation. Sugar provides an excellent example. In
2019, the cost of refined sugar in the United States was 129 percent
higher than the world refined price. In addition to subsidizing US
sugar growers and increasing the cost to American consumers, the
government imposes a quota on the amount of sugar that can be
imported and imposes a tariff on imports of sugar from all countries
except Mexico.
Developing countries are increasingly irritated with trade and
agricultural policies that they consider to be discriminatory. In
response to a complaint from Brazil, the World Trade Organization
(WTO) agreed that European subsidies for sugar exports violated
international trade rules. This decision followed another WTO
decision in which it ruled that US price supports for cotton resulted in
excess production and exports as well as low international prices,
thus causing “serious prejudice” to Brazil. African producers of cotton
have also called for an end to government support for the production
of cotton in developed countries, especially the United States, the
world’s largest exporter of cotton. Without access to export markets,
developing countries are denied their best opportunity for
development, which, historically, has provided the best cure for
poverty and rapid population growth.
The Debt Conundrum
Developing countries could once depend on loans from private
banks or foreign governments to help finance imports, but many low-
and middle-income countries are burdened with considerable debts.
A common measure of a nation’s indebtedness is its debt service,
which represents the total payments for interest and principal as a
percentage of the country’s exports of goods and services. These
exports provide the foreign currencies that allow countries to repay
their debts, which are denominated in foreign currencies, and to
import food, medicines, petroleum, and machinery. When debt
service increases, more export earnings are required to repay loans,
and less money is available for development. Many developing
nations, especially in Africa and Latin America, encounter this
problem.

Continued borrowing and COVID-19 have worsened the problem of

indebtedness among many developing countries. Loans from
multilateral organizations such as the World Bank and the Asian
Development Bank have long maturities and low interest rates, but
their loans always include requirements that borrowers comply with
guidelines on social and environmental safeguards, procurement,
and financial management. The funded projects must also be
justified economically. These requirements and the banks’ oversight
of compliance with the guidelines can make the loans seem
burdensome to borrowers.

Since 2013, more than sixty-five countries have turned to China for
access to capital. Its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has lent over
$350 billion to build large projects, such as dams, ports, and
railroads. In contrast to loans from multilateral organizations, BRI
loans are less onerous, have higher interest rates, shorter maturities,
and often do not require justification beyond a president’s or a prime
minister’s desire to borrow and build. The Chinese often require
borrowers to provide collateral if the loans cannot be repaid, but
China has been much less tolerant than the multilateral
organizations when countries have trouble with repayments. When
Sri Lanka was unable to repay a loan, it granted the Chinese a 99-
year lease for a strategic port. More recently, as a result of COVID-
19’s disastrous economic consequences, some countries have
asked the Chinese to restructure the loans, to accept delays in
repayments, or to forgive the loans entirely.26 China has been
reluctant to do so.
THE DESTRUCTION OF TROPICAL
FORESTS
The rain forests of Africa, Asia, and South America are treasure
chests of incomparable biological diversity. These forests provide
irreplaceable habitats for as much as 70 percent of the world’s
species of plants and animals. Viable forests also stabilize soils;
reduce the impact and incidence of floods; and regulate local
climates, watersheds, and river systems.27 In addition, increasing
concern about climate change underscores the importance of
tropical forests. Through photosynthesis, trees and other plants
remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into
oxygen. More than one-quarter of the prescription drugs used in the
United States have their origins in tropical plants.

At the beginning of the 20th century, tropical forests covered

approximately 10 percent of the Earth’s surface, or about 5.8 million
square miles. The deforestation of recent decades has diminished
this area by about one-third. If current rates of deforestation continue
unabated, only a few areas of forest will remain untouched. Humans
will have destroyed a natural palliative for climate change and
condemned half or more of all species to extinction.
Causes
Solutions to the problem of tropical deforestation depend on the root
causes.28 One view blames poverty and the pressures associated
with growing populations and shifting cultivators. Landless peasants,
so the argument goes, invade tropical forests and denude them for
fuel wood, for grazing, or to grow crops with which to survive.
Tropical soils are typically thin, relatively infertile, and lack sufficient
nutrients, so frequent clearing of new areas is necessary. Such
areas are ill suited for sustained agricultural production.

Another explanation for deforestation places primary blame on

commercial logging intended to satisfy demands for tropical
hardwoods in developed countries. Whether strapped for foreign
exchange, required to repay loans, or subjected to domestic
pressure to develop their economies, governments in the developing
world frequently regard tropical forests as sources of ready income.
Exports of wood produce billions of dollars in annual revenues for
developing countries, and some countries impose few limits in their
rush to the bank.

Recognizing the causes and consequences of deforestation is not

enough to achieve a solution. Commercial logging can be highly
profitable to those who own logging concessions, and few
governments in developing countries have the capacity to manage
their forests properly. These governments often let logging
companies harvest trees in designated areas under prescribed
conditions. Too frequently, however, these conditions are inadequate
or not well enforced, often due to rampant corruption.
An Alternative View of the Problem
One cause of deforestation is the demand for tropical hardwoods in
developed countries, so these countries have been under pressure
to reduce that demand. Leaders of developing countries quickly
emphasize how ironic it is that developed countries, whose
consumption creates the demand for tropical woods, are
simultaneously calling for developing countries to reduce logging and
shifting cultivation. In addition, developing countries point to
Europe’s destruction of its forests during the industrial revolution and
the widespread cutting in the United States in the 19th century. Why
then should developing countries be held to a different standard than
the developed ones? Just as Europeans and Americans decided
how and when to extract their resources, developing countries insist
that they too should be permitted to determine their own patterns of
consumption.

Will tropical forests survive? Solutions abound. What is lacking,

however, is a consensus about which of these solutions will best
meet the essential needs of the poor, the reasonable objectives of
timber-exporting and timber-importing nations, and the inflexible
imperatives of ecological stability.

There is a growing realization that much can be done to stem the

loss of tropical forests, and some progress is being made. The rate
of deforestation declined by more than 35 percent between 2015 and
2020 compared with the rate in the 1990s.29 Many countries have
developed national forest programs that describe the status of their
forests as well as strategies to preserve them. Unfortunately,
implementation of these plans does not always parallel the good
intentions associated with them. Likewise, rather than seeing forests
solely as a source of wood or additional agricultural land, many
countries are now examining the export potential of forest products
other than wood. The expectation is that the sale of these products—
such as cork, rattan, oils, resins, and medicinal plants—will provide
economic incentives to maintain rather than destroy forests.
Other proposed options to maintain tropical forests include efforts to
certify that timber exports are from sustainably managed forests.
Importers and potential consumers presumably will avoid timber
products without such certification. For such initiatives to be
successful, however, exporters have to accept the certification
process, and there must be widespread agreement about what is
meant by sustainable management. Such agreement is still absent.
In addition, no country wants to subject itself to the potentially costly
process of internationally accepted certification only to learn that its
forestry exports do not meet the requirements for certification or that
less expensive timber is available from countries that do not
participate in a certification program.

Other approaches to sustainable management impose taxes on

timber exports (or imports). The highest taxes would be imposed on
logging that causes the greatest ecological damage; timber from
sustainable operations would face the lowest taxes. Yet another
option is to increase reliance on the community-based management
of forest resources. Rather than allowing logging companies with no
long-term interest in a forest to harvest trees, community-based
management places responsibility for decisions about logging (and
other uses) with the people who live in or adjacent to forests. These
people have the strongest incentives to manage forest resources
wisely, particularly when they reap the long-term benefits of their
management strategies.

Still another promising initiative is the United Nations Collaborative

Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation (REDD) in Developing Countries, which supports
nationally led REDD+ initiatives, broadening the scope of the original
program. An aspect of this international program involves developed
countries paying developing countries not to harvest their tropical
forests.
CONFLICTING SIGNALS FROM
DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
Improvements in the policies of many developing countries are
surely necessary if sustainable development is to be achieved. As
already noted, however, developed countries sometimes cause or
contribute to environmental problems in the developing countries.

Patterns of consumption provide an example. Although the United

States and other developed nations can boast about their own
comparatively low rates of population growth, developing nations
reply that patterns of consumption are the real culprits when it comes
to sustaining the world’s population. This view suggests that
negative impacts on the environment are a function of not only a
country’s population growth but also its consumption and the
technologies, such as automobiles, that enable this consumption.30

Applying this formula places major responsibility for environmental

problems on rich nations, despite their relatively small numbers of
global inhabitants. The inhabitants of these nations own and
consume far more of the Earth’s resources than their numbers justify.
Consider that in mid-2019 the world’s richest 10 percent of adults
owned over 80 percent of its total wealth whereas the bottom half of
adults collectively owned less than 1 percent of this wealth.31 In
addition, residents of developed countries consume a
disproportionate share of all meat and fish and much of the world’s
energy, paper, chemicals, iron, and steel.

During a typical day in the United States, about 330 million

Americans consume more petroleum than the 3.30 billion people
who live in India, Japan, and all the countries in Africa and Central
and South America combined. There are more motor vehicles than
licensed drivers in the United States. An average American driver
uses about five times more gasoline than the typical European. Part
of the explanation is that many European cars, often designed by US
manufacturers, are more fuel efficient than are US cars. The price of
gasoline in much of Western Europe is more than two to three times
higher than it is in the United States.

Americans’ extravagance with fossil fuels provides part of the

explanation for US production of about one-sixth of the emissions
that contribute to global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change has assessed that a relatively safe level of carbon
dioxide emissions is about 2.25 metric tons per person per year.32
Each metric ton is about 2,205 pounds. With the exception of Saudi
Arabia and a few ministates, no country emits as much carbon
dioxide per capita as does the United States. It produced 16.1 metric
tons per capita in 2018, seven times higher than what sustainable
levels of development would require. In Germany, China, and India,
annual per capita emissions in the same year were 9.0, 7.8, and 1.9
metric tons, respectively.33 Although China’s emissions of carbon
dioxide increased by over 270 percent between 2000 and 2018, a
notable portion of the increase was attributable to the production of
goods destined for Europe and the United States.

Americans’ patterns of food consumption are also of interest. An

average American consumes about 3,750 calories per day, almost
the highest level in the world. Among young adults, about 25 percent
of these calories are from sweetened beverages. Not surprisingly,
almost three-quarters of American adults are either obese or
overweight. The Economist labeled the United States the “fattest
country in the world.”34

As much as 30–40 percent of all food is wasted in the United States

each year, and the country spends nearly $220 billion a year
growing, processing, transporting, and disposing of food that is never
eaten. Wasting food has several undesirable environmental
consequences. It consumes about one-fifth of all fresh water and
almost the same proportion of cropland. Energy is required to
produce, harvest, transport, market, and prepare food. All this
energy is squandered when food is wasted. Food is the largest
source of waste in American’s trash. When food rots in landfills it
contributes to emissions of greenhouse gases. If the developed
world reduced the food it wasted by half, the challenge of feeding the
world’s population in 2050 would vanish.35

Due to these kinds of inequalities in consumption, continued

population growth in rich countries is a greater threat to the global
environment than is such growth in the developing world. As the
World Wildlife Fund has explained, “If everyone lived like an average
resident of the USA, a total of four Earths would be required to
regenerate humanity’s annual demand on nature.” Other experts
have suggested that if Americans want to maintain their present
standard of living and levels of energy consumption, their ideal
population is about 50 million, far less than the mid-2020 US
population of about 330 million.36

The data just presented raise questions that merit attention. Are the
world’s environmental problems due to too many poor people who
have few resources and who use them sparingly or to too many rich
people who use more resources than their numbers justify and
whose significant impact on the environment has global
implications? Is it fair and equitable for the relatively small numbers
of rich people to consume excessively and waste indiscriminately
when hundreds of millions of people in developing countries are
undernourished and undereducated, live in slums or their equivalent,
are frequent victims of deadly illnesses and diseases without access
to their cures, and live amidst environmental harms that they cannot
escape but that would be considered scandalous and intolerable in
the rich world?
CAUSES FOR OPTIMISM?
There is cause for concern about the prospects for sustainable
development among developing countries, but the situation is neither
entirely bleak nor beyond hope. The rates of deforestation and
population growth are slowing in many developing countries.
Smallpox, a killer of millions of people every year in the 1950s, has
been eradicated (except in laboratories). Polio may soon be the next
scourge to be eliminated, and deaths due to AIDS, diarrhea,
measles, and respiratory infections such as tuberculosis have
dropped significantly.

The proportion of people living in extreme poverty declined by half

between 1990 and 2010. The mortality rate for children under five in
sub-Saharan Africa dropped by 50 percent between 2000 and 2018.
Fertility rates are declining in most developing countries. Life
expectancies increased in all parts of the world over the same time
period as have the percentages of children who have been
immunized, attend and complete basic education, eat nutritious
meals, have access to clean water and proper sanitary facilities, and
much more.

To build on these successes the world’s nations established

seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets
in late 2015. The goals, to be achieved no later than 2030, focus on
economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental protection.
Goal 15, as an example, seeks to protect, restore, and promote the
sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems; manage forests
sustainably; combat desertification; and halt and reverse land
degradation and halt biodiversity loss. Other goals address the need
for sustainable consumption and for “urgent action” to combat
climate change.

The SDGs demonstrate an increasing awareness of the need to

address the problems of the developing world, but much remains to
be done. Through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief
(PEPFAR), as an example, the United States is the world’s leader in
responding to HIV/AIDS in the developing world. PEPFAR, which
President George W. Bush initiated in 2003, has helped avert more
than eighteen million AIDS-related deaths. Private philanthropic
support for development has also grown significantly. The Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation has provided over $50 billion to improve
health, education, and the status of women in developing countries.
The William J. Clinton Foundation has been similarly active and has
successfully negotiated major reductions in the cost of essential
drugs in many countries, assisted African farmers to improve their
productivity, and worked to reduce deforestation and climate change.

Perhaps the best known target among developed countries is that

each country provide at least 0.7 percent (not 7 percent, but seven-
tenths of 1 percent) of its GNI to official development assistance
(ODA) to meet the needs of developing countries. The United
Nations General Assembly established this target in 1970, with the
expectation that donor countries would meet it by 1975. Sweden and
the Netherlands were the first to do so. Despite this admirable target,
only Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, the United Arab
Emirates, and the United Kingdom met or exceeded this target in
2019. Although the United States typically provides more foreign aid
than any other country, its ODA is often less than 0.2 percent of the
US GNI, which is among the lowest percentages of the world’s major
donors. This situation has led some observers to label the United
States as a “global Scrooge” based on its seeming unwillingness to
share its wealth.

Those who think the United States should continue to scale back its
ODA contributions had an ally in President Trump. His initial budget
stated that it was time to prioritize the well-being of Americans and
“to ask the rest of the world to step up and pay its fair share.” Trump
proposed large reductions in US foreign assistance and wanted the
remaining assistance to be focused in countries of the greatest
strategic significance to the United States—rather than in countries
with a high level of need. He also proposed the elimination of all US
funding of efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change in
developing countries, including those implemented by the United
Nations.37 During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in early
2020, his administration prohibited the use of US foreign assistance
to purchase any personal protective equipment for health workers
without prior approval from the US Agency for International
Development (USAID).

Trump repeatedly proposed the termination of the McGovern–Dole

International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program.
Congress rejected each of the proposals. The program supports
education, child development, and food security in low-income, food-
deficit countries around the globe. This proposal was ironic. Poor
nutrition is probably the single most important threat to the world’s
health, and the program has helped millions of children and pregnant
women avoid malnutrition.

Is it important to assist developing countries with food and finance?

Americans are often ambivalent in their answers to this question.
Surveys of Americans’ opinions about foreign aid present an
interesting but mixed picture. More than 80 percent of those
surveyed in 2008 agreed that developed countries have “a moral
responsibility to work to reduce hunger and severe poverty in poor
countries.” Despite such support, most Americans also believe that
the United States is already doing more than its share to help less
fortunate countries.

In surveys conducted in 2015 and 2016, respondents estimated that

the average amount of the annual federal budget devoted to foreign
aid was 31 percent. When told that the actual amount was less than
1 percent, nearly one-third of respondents said this was still too
much. Among those not aware how much of the budget is devoted to
foreign aid, nearly half of the respondents in a national survey in
2019 said we spend too much.38

The United States is among the world’s largest donors of emergency

food aid. Rather than allowing USAID to purchase less expensive
food closer to where it is needed, Congress requires that much of
the food be purchased in the United States. In addition, the law
requires that at least half of the food be shipped on American-
flagged vessels, which are among the most expensive to use. As a
result of these requirements, US food aid is more expensive than it
would otherwise be, and the food often arrives well after it is most
needed.39 Critics of the program also claim that the US food aid
destabilizes local markets and competes with farmers close to
affected areas who cannot afford to donate their food.

In contrast to Americans’ seeming reluctance to share their wealth,

other nations have demonstrated an increased willingness to
address globally shared environmental problems. The international
community operates a Global Environment Facility, a multibillion-
dollar effort to address global warming, the loss of biological
diversity, the pollution of international waters, and the depletion of
the ozone layer. The Green Climate Fund represents a similar
international initiative. Created in 2010 by 194 countries, the fund
provides resources for low-emission and climate-resilient projects in
developing countries, especially those that are highly vulnerable to
the effects of climate change.

Many developing nations recognize their obligations to protect their

environments as well as the global commons. India’s and China’s
commitment to reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases
provide examples. India produces relatively few of these emissions
on a per capita basis, but it has committed to reduce its emissions
intensity by as much as 33–35 percent by 2030 from the levels
reached in 2005. In addition, although it is facing growing demands
for electricity, which could be met by burning more coal, India has
committed to increasing its reliance on nonfossil fuels by 40 percent
in 2030. China has pledged to reduce its carbon intensity 60–65
percent by 2030 compared with the levels in 2005 and has similarly
pledged to increase its reliance on renewable sources of energy.
China is among the world’s leaders in the use of renewable energy.
Forty-five percent of the electric cars and 99 percent of the world’s
electric buses were in China in 2018.40 Both India and China are
reducing their reliance on fossil fuels more quickly than they had
previously projected, leading the New York Times to conclude that
their progress has been “astonishing.”41

However desirable improved environmental quality may be as an

objective, poor nations cannot afford to address their environmental
problems in the absence of cooperation from richer nations.
Consumers in rich nations can demonstrate such cooperation by
paying higher prices for products that reflect sustainable
environmental management. One example of this situation would be
Americans’ willingness to pay higher prices for forestry products
harvested sustainably. In fact, however, Home Depot found that only
a third of its customers would be willing to pay a premium of 2
percent for such products.42

Another issue of importance is resentment in some countries toward

the environmental sermons from developed countries. Climate
change provides one of several examples. As leaders of several
developing countries have asked, why should they slow or alter their
path to development to accommodate high standards of living
elsewhere? When India released a policy statement on climate
change, its prime minister declared that fairness dictated that
everyone deserves equal per capita emissions, regardless of where
they live.43 India is not willing, he noted, to accept a model of
development in which some countries maintain high carbon
emissions while the options available for developing countries are
constrained.

President George W. Bush once identified a growing middle class in

India, which is “demanding better food and nutrition,” as a cause of
higher prices. The reaction from India was understandably negative.
“Why do Americans think they deserve to eat more than Indians?”
asked one journalist. An Indian public official characterized the US
position as “[g]uys with gross obesity telling guys just emerging from
emaciation to go on a major diet.” This characterization may be
indicative of a larger concern. The perception that Americans are
global environmental culprits is widespread. When people in twenty-
four countries were asked in 2008 which country is “hurting the
world’s environment the most,” majorities or pluralities in thirteen
countries cited the United States.44 President Trump’s decision to
withdraw from the Paris climate agreement reinforced this
perception. President Joe Biden., Jr. is expected to reverse that
decision soon after taking office. If he were not to do so, the United
States would be the only country in the world not to be a party to the
agreement.

Further evidence of America’s seeming lack of commitment to

international environmental issues can be found in the Center for
Global Development’s Commitment to Development Index. The
index ranks the world’s richest countries on their dedication to
policies that benefit people living in poorer nations. In 2020, the
United States ranked twenty-fourth of these twenty-seven countries
in the environmental dimension of the index.45

Contentious debates and inflammatory rhetoric about blame and

responsibility are not productive. The economic, population, and
environmental issues of the developing world dwarf those of the
developed nations and are not amenable to quick resolution,
especially as COVID-19 has jeopardized much of the progress
achieved in recent decades. Now more than ever immediate action
is imperative. Hundreds of millions of people are destroying their
biological and environmental support systems to meet their daily
needs for food, fuel, and fiber. The world will add several billion
people in the next few decades, and all of them will have justifiable
claims to be fed, clothed, educated, employed, and healthy. To
accommodate these expectations, the world may need as much as
50 percent more energy in 2030 than it used in 2010.

Whether the environment can accommodate these unprecedented

but predictable increases in population and consumption depends
not only on the poor who live in stagnant or slow-growing economies
but also on a much smaller number of rich, overconsuming nations in
the developed world. Unless developed nations work together to
accommodate and support sustainable development everywhere,
the future of billions of poor people, many of whom become refugees
seeking better lives, will determine the future of Americans as well.

As the authors of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded,

the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations is
no longer assured.46 Over the past fifty years the world has
experienced unprecedented environmental change in response to
ever-increasing demands for food, fuel, fiber, freshwater, and timber.
Much of the environmental degradation that has occurred can be
reversed, but as these authors warned, “The changes in policy and
practice required are substantial and not currently underway.”47

If these experts are correct, unless the United States acts soon and
in collaboration with other nations, Americans will increasingly suffer
the adverse consequences of environmental damage caused by the
billions of poor people we have chosen to neglect and perhaps even
abandon—just as these people will suffer from the environmental
damage we inflict on them. In short, there are continuing questions
about whether the current economic model that depends on growth
and extravagant consumption among a few privileged countries is
ecologically sustainable and morally acceptable for everyone.48
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

(OECD) (www.oecd.org/development) This website provides
extensive information on aid statistics and effectiveness,
environment and development, and gender and development.

UN Development Programme (www.undp.org) The program’s

website provides links to activities and reports on economic
development and the environment, including the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs).

UN Division for Sustainable Development

(http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org) The “Sustainable
Development Knowledge Platform” within the United Nations
provides useful links to the goals and targets on sustainable
development for the post-2015 development agenda.

UN Food and Agriculture Organization (www.fao.org) The

FAO focuses on agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and rural
development, working to alleviate poverty and hunger
worldwide.

World Bank (www.worldbank.org) One of the largest sources of

economic assistance to developing nations, the World Bank
issues reports on poverty and global economic conditions,
including progress toward the SDGs. Its World Development
Indicators include a wealth of development data.
NOTES
1. World Bank, “GNI per capita, PPP (constant international $),”
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD. Due to
differences in the costs of goods and services among countries, GNI
per capita does not provide comparable measures of economic well-
being. To address this problem, economists have developed the
concept of purchasing power parity (PPP). PPP equalizes the prices
of identical goods and services across countries, with the United
States as the base economy. For an amusing explanation of PPP,
see the “The Big Mac Index” of The Economist, at
www.economist.com/news/2020/01/15/the-big-mac-index, which
compares the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac hamburger in nearly
fifty countries.

2. UNICEF, State of the World’s Children 2019 (New York: UNICEF,

2019), Table 11.

3. World Health Organization, Trends in Maternal Mortality: 2000 to

2017 (Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, 2019).

4. United Nations Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation,

Levels and Trends in Child Mortality: Report 2020 (New York:
UNICEF, 2020).

5. UNICEF, “Malnutrition,”
https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/malnutrition/, accessed October
5, 2020.

6. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our

Common Future (London: Oxford University Press, 1987), 8, 43.

7. John N. Wilford, “A Tough-Minded Ecologist Comes to Defense of

Malthus,” New York Times, June 30, 1987, C3.
8. Population Reference Bureau, 2020 World Population Data Sheet
Shows Older Populations Growing, Total Fertility Rates Declining
(Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, 2020),
www.prb.org/2020-world-population-data-sheet/. For a discussion of
the world’s carrying capacity, see Jeroen C. J. M. Van Den Bergh
and Piet Rietveld, “Reconsidering the Limits to World Population:
Meta-analysis and Meta-prediction,” BioScience 54 (March 2004):
195–204; and Erle C. Ellis, “Overpopulation Is Not the Problem,”
New York Times, September 13, 2013, A19.

9. O. P. Sharma and Carl Haub, “Change Comes Slowly for

Religious Diversity in India,” Population Reference Bureau, March
2009, www.prb.org/Articles/2009/indiareligions.aspx

10. Joseph Kahn, “Harsh Birth Control Steps Fuel Violence in

China,” New York Times, May 22, 2007, A12; and Jim Yardley,
“China Sticking with One-Child Policy,” New York Times, March 11,
2008, A10.

11. Leo Lewis, “China Looks to a Boom as It Relaxes One-Child

Policy,” The Times (London), November 16, 2013.

12. For example, see Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).

13. Carl Haub and O. P. Sharma, “India’s Population Reality,”

Population Bulletin 61, no. 3 (September 2006),
https://www.prb.org/wp-
content/uploads/2006/09/61.3IndiasPopulationReality_Eng.pdf; and
Lisa Jane de Gara, “Asia’s Missing Millions: How Policy and Social
Pressure Made Millions of Women Disappear,” Education about Asia
22, no. 3 (Winter 2017), 56–8.

14. Lester R. Brown, “Analyzing the Demographic Trap,” in State of

the World 1987, ed., Lester R. Brown (New York: Norton, 1987), 21.

15. Per Pinstrup-Andersen, former director of the International Food

Policy Research Institute, believes the world can easily feed twelve
billion people. See “Will the World Starve?” The Economist, June 10,
1995, 39; and Janet Ranganathan, Richard Waite, Tim Searchinger,
and Craig Hanson, “How to Sustainably Feed 10 Billion People by
2050,” World Resources Institute, December 5, 2018,
www.wri.org/blog/2018/12/how-sustainably-feed-10-billion-people-
2050-21-charts

16. FAO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World
(Rome, Italy: FAO, 2020),
http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/2020/en/

17. FAO, “Land assessments and impacts,” www.fao.org/land-

water/land/ldn/en/ (accessed May 20, 2020).

18. Colin Chartres and Samyuktha Varma, Out of Water: From

Abundance to Scarcity and How to Solve the World’s Water
Problems (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2011), xvii.

19. Rutger Willem Hofste, Paul Reig, and Leah Schleifer, “17
Countries, Home to One-Quarter of the World’s Population, Face
Extremely High Water Stress,” World Resources Institute (August 6,
2019), www.wri.org/blog/2019/08/17-countries-home-one-quarter-
world-population-face-extremely-high-water-stress; and World Bank,
Beyond Scarcity: Water Security in the Middle East and North Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018),
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/27659

20. FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020 (Rome,
Italy: FAO, 2020), http://www.fao.org/state-of-fisheries-aquaculture;
and D. Laffoley and J. M. Baxter, eds., Ocean deoxygenation:
Everyone’s problem (Gland, Switzerland: International Union for
Conservation of Nature, 2019), 85.

21. Gidon Eshel, Alon Shepon, Tamar Makov, and Ron Milo, “Land,
Irrigation Water, Greenhouse Gas, and Reactive Nitrogen Burdens of
Meat, Eggs, and Dairy Production in the United States,” Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 111, no.
33, (July 2014): 11996–2001,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1402183111

22. IndexMundi, www.indexmundi.com/commodities/

23. David M. Beasley, “Covid-19 could detonate a ‘hunger

pandemic.’ With millions at risk, the world must act.” Washington
Post, April 22, 2020; and Edith M. Lederer, “UN food agency chief:
World on brink of ‘a hunger pandemic,’” Washington Post, April 21,
2020.

24. Neha Wadekar, “Two new generations of locusts are set to

descend on East Africa again – 400 times stronger,” Quartz Africa,
April 10, 2020; https://qz.com/africa/1836159/locusts-set-to-hit-
kenya-east-africa-again-400-times-stronger/. This website includes
an astounding photograph of a locust swarm.

25. Statement of James D. Wolfensohn, cited in David T. Cook,

“Excerpts from a Monitor Breakfast on Poverty and Globalization,”
Christian Science Monitor, June 13, 2003.

26. Maria Abi-Habib and Keith Bradsher, “China Lent Billions to Poor
Countries: And Now They Can’t Pay It Back,” New York Times, May
19, 2020. There is an extensive and often-critical literature on the
BRI. For example, see Elaine K. Dezenski, “Below the Belt and
Road: Corruption and Illicit Dealings in China’s Global Infrastructure”
(Washington, DC: Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 2020),
www.fdd.org/analysis/2020/05/04/below-the-belt-and-road/

27. NAS, Population Growth and Economic Development: Policy

Questions (Washington, DC: NAS, 1986), 31.

28. For discussions of the causes of deforestation, see Helmut J.

Geist and Eric Lambin, “Proximate Causes and Underlying Driving
Forces of Tropical Deforestation,” BioScience 52 (February 2002):
143–50; and Antoine Leblois, Olivier Damette, and Julien
Wolfersberger, “What has Driven Deforestation in Developing
Countries since the 2000s? Evidence from New Remote-Sensing
Data,” World Development 92 (April 2017), 82–102.

29. FAO, The State of the World’s Forests 2020: Forests,

Biodiversity and People (Rome, Italy: FAO, 2020).

30. Paul R. Ehrlich and John P. Holdren, “Impact of Population

Growth,” Science 171 (1971): 1212–17.

31. Credit Suisse Research Institute, Global Wealth Report 2019

(Zurich: Credit Suisse, 2019), www.credit-suisse.com/about-
us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html

32. Commission on Growth and Development, The Growth Report:

Strategies for Sustained Growth and Inclusive Development
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008), 85–6,
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/6507

33. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Trends in

Global CO2 and Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions: 2019 Report
(The Hague: PBL Publishers, 2020),
www.pbl.nl/sites/default/files/downloads/pbl-2020-trends-in-global-
co2-and-total-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2019-report_4068.pdf

34. “Obesity: Another Thing It’s Too Late to Prevent,” The

Economist, August 15, 2012; and OECD, Obesity Update 2017
(Paris, France: OECD, 2017).

35. RTS, “Food Waste in America in 2020: Statistics + Facts,”

www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/; and “The 9-
billion People Question,” The Economist, May 26, 2011.

36. World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report 2012: Biodiversity,

Biocapacity and Better Choices (Gland, Switzerland: World Wildlife
Fund, 2012), 43; and David and Marcia Pimentel, “Land, Water and
Energy Versus the Ideal U.S. Population,” NPG Forum (January
2005), https://www.npg.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/07/LandWaterAndEnergyVersusTheIdealUSP
opulation.pdf

37. For the quotation, see Executive Office of the President of the
United States, America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America
Great Again (Washington, DC: Office of Management and Budget,
2018), 2.

38. Bianca DiJulio, Mira Norton, and Mollyann Brodie, Americans’

Views on the U.S. Role in Global Health (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser
Family Foundation, January 2016), http://kff.org/global-health-
policy/poll-finding/americans-views-on-the-u-s-role-in-global-health/;
and Liz Hamel, Ashley Kirzinger, and Mollyann Brodie, 2016 Survey
of Americans on the U.S. Role in Global Health (Menlo Park, CA:
Kaiser Family Foundation, April 2016),
http://files.kff.org/attachment/issue-brief-2016-survey-of-americans-
on-the-u-s-role-in-global-health/; Kaiser Family Foundation, “Topline:
KFF Health Tracking Poll–April 2019,”
http://files.kff.org/attachment/Topline-KFF-Health-Tracking-Poll-April-
2019

39. Ron Nixon, “Typhoon Revives Debate on U.S. Food Aid

Methods,” New York Times, November 22, 2013, A3. See also
Randy Schnepf, U.S. International Food Aid: Background and Issues
(Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2016),
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41072.pdf

40. David Sandalow, Guide to Chinese Climate Policy 2019 (New

York: Columbia University, 2019).

41. “On Climate, Look to China and India,” New York Times, May 22,
2017, A24; and Keith Bradsher, “China Turns Economic Engine
Toward Clean-Energy Leadership,” New York Times, June 6, 2017,
A1.

42. “The Long Road to Sustainability,” The Economist, Special

Report: Forests, September 25, 2010.
43. Voice of America, “India Rejects Binding Commitment to Cut
Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” February 7, 2008,
https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2008-02-07-voa20-
66627522/556691.html

44. Heather Timmons, “Indians Find U.S. at Fault in Food Cost,”

New York Times, May 14, 2008, C1; “Melting Asia,” The Economist,
June 7, 2008, 30; and Pew Global Attitudes Project, “Some Positive
Signs for U.S. Image,” June 12, 2008, 65,
http://www.pewglobal.org/files/pdf/260.pdf

45. For the Commitment to Development Index 2020, see

https://www.cgdev.org/publication/commitment-development-index-
2020. In previous years the index also ranked the quality of US
foreign assistance as below average based on four dimensions of
aid quality: maximizing efficiency, fostering institutions, reducing
burden, and transparency and learning.

46. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human

Well-Being: Synthesis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005),
https://www.millenniumassessment.org/documents/document.356.as
px.pdf

47. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, “What Are the Findings of

the MA?” available from the Environment and Ecology website,
http://environment-ecology.com/millennium-ecosystem-
assessment/109-millenium-ecosystem-assesment.html

48. UN Development Programme, Human Development Report

2007/2008: Fighting Climate Change—Human Solidarity in a Divided
World (New York: UNDP, 2007),
http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/268/hdr_20072008_en_
complete.pdf. For an informative and provocative discussion on the
prevailing emphasis on economic growth, see Freakonomics Radio’s
podcast 429, “Is Economic Growth the Wrong Goal?” August 12,
2020.
14 CREATING THE GREEN
ECONOMY : GOVERNMENT,
BUSINESS, AND A SUSTAINABLE
FUTURE
—Daniel J. Fiorino
What do we expect from government? A degree of physical security
and safety, to be sure. An opportunity to earn a living and meet basic
needs for food and shelter, as well as higher-level needs such as
education, healthcare, and a good quality of life. And most people
would expect that government will create conditions for achieving
fairness in society, as well as for providing social safety nets when
bad times or misfortune hits. In sum, we count on governments to
maintain internal order and protect against external threats, promote
national economic well-being, and organize and deliver welfare
services. James Meadowcroft expresses these activities respectively
as those of the security state, prosperity state, and welfare state.1 In
activities and expectations, these have become the core business of
the state, the terms in which political debates occur, policy is defined,
institutions are created, and leadership choices are made.

Beginning in the middle of the last century, these expectations and

activities expanded to encompass the ecological state. A
combination of industrial development, urbanization, expanded food
production, mobility through fossil fuels, and population growth
posed new challenges for the modern state. Air and water pollution,
deforestation, conversion of land for commercial uses, chemical
production and waste, and energy and water use, among other
trends, moved the environment up on policy agendas, and the public
called for action. Governments responded with laws, ministries and
regulatory agencies, scientific capabilities, and new strategies and
policies.2
Yet, in nearly all countries, ecological issues have not achieved
parity with the other core activities of the state: “the environment
remains the most vulnerable of these core domains of state activity
because it is the newest and least institutionally embedded.”3 This is
unfortunate because ecological issues increasingly are linked to
other core activities: climate change, water scarcity, and
deforestation create prospects of geopolitical instability, mass
migration, and political violence that threaten the security state. Just
as compelling, failures in the ecological state increasingly undermine
economic prosperity and human well-being. A changing climate and
its costs are an obvious global threat. Others are health effects of
energy systems based on fossil fuels, ecological degradation from
land conversion and deforestation, and overconsumption of
resources. Threats to prosperity and security undermine the political
stability that enables environmental protection. In sum, a lack of
attention to ecological issues threatens other core activities of the
modern state.

This chapter focuses on one critical linkage among these activities—

that of the prosperity with the ecological state. It reframes the
economy–environment relationship from one of inevitable trade-offs
(of zero-sums) to one in which complementary, positive-sum
relationships are not only possible but increasingly necessary. This
reframing is captured in the concept of a green economy.

A green economy is one in which economic and political choices

account for the effects on the environment—on health, ecosystems,
natural resources, and critical ecological services, such as a healthy
climate system, vibrant wetlands and estuaries, or the protection of
forests and land. It defines both constraints and opportunities. The
constraints are the limits of the planet in the face of steady,
exponential economic and population growth and their
consequences. The opportunities are for healthier air and water;
more vibrant economies and communities; long-term resource
preservation (water or materials); family-supporting jobs; and a more
equitable world.4
This chapter examines the concept of a green economy and its
relevance to such issues as climate change, the energy system,
water quality and security, natural resources, and ecosystems. The
thesis is that human activity is placing more and more stress on
planetary capacities, and that the foundations of current and
especially future well-being increasingly are at risk. At the same
time, economic prosperity is a high priority for all governments, adds
to a high quality of life (at least to a point; more on that later), and will
continue to occur on a global scale. The solution is to rethink the
content of economic growth, how it is achieved, and maybe even its
desirability. The next part of the chapter considers how the worlds of
growth and planetary limits are colliding. Then the chapter addresses
the leading expressions of the green economy, followed by an
analysis of the similarities between greening among business firms
(a microlevel) and an economy-wide, macrolevel. After that, I turn to
a discussion of a policy agenda for a green economy and the need
for global, collective action.
TWO WORLDS COLLIDING
The notion that planetary limits exist and are tested by economic and
population growth goes back to a 1972 analysis by a team from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.5 In an early use of
computers, they projected trends in resource use, pollution, and
waste accumulation to reach controversial findings. Although
specifics varied according to which scenario was used, their
message was that “given postulated limits to resource availability,
agricultural productivity, and the capacity of the ecosphere to
assimilate pollution, some limit was generally hit within 100 years,
leading to the collapse of industrial society and its population.”6 This
argument challenged a post-World War II growth mindset. Economic
growth, captured in the Gross Domestic National Product (GDP,
which is the sum of the value of goods and services produced in a
year), had become a central goal of modern governments and a sign
of the dominance of the prosperity state. The notion that growth had
to be limited to accommodate planetary limits was heavily disputed.
Although still controversial, assessments conclude that the Limits to
Growth thesis largely has been confirmed.7

A recent version of this thesis reconceives the limits to growth as

planetary boundaries and a safe operating space for humanity.8 A
team of scientists collaborated in assessing the state of knowledge
regarding nine planetary boundaries: atmospheric concentrations of
carbon dioxide; biodiversity loss as reflected in extinction rates;
stratospheric ozone depletion; ocean acidification; changes in land
cover (percentage of land converted to cropland); atmospheric
aerosol loading (a measure of air particulate concentrations, a major
threat to global health); chemical pollution; and as measures of water
pollution, trends in the global nitrogen and phosphorous cycles.

Three of the nine boundaries had already been exceeded: carbon

dioxide, biodiversity loss, and the nitrogen cycle. For ocean
acidification, changes in phosphorous, freshwater, and land use the
boundaries are being stretched, and long-term trends are
problematic.

Other evidence of planetary limits is all around us. High coal use in
much of the world, along with growing vehicle use and other trends,
causes extreme air pollution in major cities. The World Health
Organization (WHO) now cites air pollution, especially particulate
matter, as a top threat to global health, responsible for some seven
million premature deaths annually.9 The WHO estimates that in the
15 countries emitting the most greenhouse gases, health damages
due to air pollution cost more than 4 percent of their annual GDP
annually. Much of this harm falls on children, which undermines their
well-being and the prospects in those countries for years to come.

Over a decade ago, in its Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the

United Nations evaluated the state of ecosystems around the world.
Of 24 major ecosystems assessed, fifteen (60 percent) were found
to be degraded.10 Among these are capture fisheries, water
supplies, waste treatment and detoxification, water purification,
natural hazard protection, regulation of air quality, regulation of
regional climate, erosion control, and aesthetic enjoyment. Each
defines a category of ecosystem services—critical ecological
activities on which well-being depends. The drivers of damages are
habitat change from land use, physical modification of rivers, water
withdrawal, overexploitation of resources like fish stocks, pollution,
and effects of climate change. More recently, a 2019 report from the
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and
Ecosystem Services (IPBES) documents the severe impacts land
and sea use, climate change, and pollution are having on global
ecosystems. These are more than environmental issues. As a
statement on the report puts it: “We are eroding the very foundations
of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life
worldwide.”11

Highlighting the case for a transition to a green economy is climate

change, viewed more and more as a climate crisis. Climate change
is occurring due to an accumulation of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere over the last 170 years. While modern energy systems
based on fossil fuels improved human prosperity and quality of life,
they also caused instability in the global climate system that is
playing out in extreme weather, sea level rise, heat waves, droughts
and flooding, new patterns of disease, ecosystem species disruption,
and other effects (see Chapter 13). These will only worsen. Indeed,
successive reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, the United Nations body that tracks science and policy,
predict increasingly dire consequences. An October 2018 update
found that avoiding such effects means “transforming the world
economy at a speed and scale that has no ‘documented historical
precedent.’”12 Emissions globally will have to be reduced by 45
percent from 2010 levels by 2030 and then by 100 percent by 2050.

In sum, there is ample evidence of planetary limits being stretched

and often breached. These are not just environmental issues, limited
to the activities of the ecological state; they affect and threaten to
undermine national and global security, welfare, and especially
prosperity. And yet modern governments are dedicated to the pursuit
of economic growth, which in its current form will increasingly stress
planetary limits. The worlds of limits and growth are on a collision
course.
WHAT IS THE GREEN ECONOMY?
Concepts matter in politics and policy. The concept of the cold war
defined American foreign policy for decades, from the end of World
War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Proponents of aggressive climate
action debate whether we should call it climate change or a climate
crisis. Progressive legislators in the United States linked climate to
an ambitious social agenda by invoking President Franklin
Roosevelt’s policies of the 1930s in the need for a Green New Deal.

The concepts of green economy and green growth also carry

symbolic weight and value. Contrary to the standard assertions of
opponents of environmental protection, the green economy is
focused on the potentially positive relationships among ecological
and economic goals. Such positive relationships abound. An obvious
one is energy efficiency. Using less energy saves money; it also
reduces air pollution, helps with climate mitigation, avoids ecological
devastation, and may even support more resilient communities and
employment.13 Renewable energy is another illustration. As costs of
wind and solar technologies have fallen, the benefits of clean energy
have become more apparent. Conserving water and using it more
efficiently offer other examples, as do the opportunities for using land
better, protecting critical ecosystems, and smart farming practices
(see Chapter 8).

Various definitions of the green economy exist. They were a popular

theme in discussions of environmental and economic policy in the
wake of the Great Recession a decade ago. The most succinct
comes from the Green Economy Coalition, a US-based organization,
as an economy “that generates a better quality of life for all within the
ecological limits of the planet.”14 This view recognizes the reality of
planetary limits, a common feature of green economy formulations,
as well as aspirations for a high quality of life, with emphasis on the
“for all.” The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), an
influential international organization, views the green economy as
“one that results in improved human well-being and social equity,
while significantly reducing environmental risks and economic
scarcities.”15 The Institute for European Environmental Policy
envisions “a resource-efficient, low-carbon, equitable economy that
stays within a ‘safe operating space’—or working within the planet’s
regenerate capacities and avoiding critical ecological thresholds.”16
Meanwhile, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) seeks economies for “fostering economic
growth and development while ensuring that natural assets continue
to provide the resources and environmental services on which our
well-being relies.”17

These definitions accept that at some point in the growth process,

planetary limits will be tested, if not breached. Exponential economic
growth cannot proceed inexorably without serious consequences for
ecosystems, human health, resources, and well-being. At the same
time, they all accept the inevitability of some growth—meaning an
increasing scale of economic activity that delivers a better quality of
life—as not only unavoidable but desirable. This is most critically
important for countries early in the process of economic
development or those that simply are poor, where the imperative for
economic prosperity is most compelling. These definitions also
suggest some elements of this new green economy: it is resource
efficient, low-carbon, reduces environmental risk, protects critical
ecosystem services, and preserves natural capital. To advocates,
this is the path to a far more sustainable world. To critics, it is an
unrealistic fantasy.

There are competing storylines to the green economy, to be sure.

One seeks to avoid the two worlds colliding scenario by deliberately
shrinking economies in rich countries while giving room for poor
countries to grow, up to a limit.18 This school of thought argues that
we cannot expand the biophysical capacities of the planet to fit the
size of the economy, so we have to adjust the size of the global
economies to fit the planet. The term for this line of thinking is
degrowth. It builds on the work of Herman Daly, a prominent
ecological economist, on the need for what he termed a steady-state
economy. Daly wanted to redesign economies: they should deliver a
good quality of life but maintain a constant rate of “throughput,” “the
lowest feasible rates of matter and energy from the first stage of
production to the last stage of consumption.”19 Technology
innovation alone would not be enough, he argued; a rethinking of
economic growth was needed. At the other extreme is all-out growth,
whatever the consequences. Advocates of growth-above-all express
faith in human ingenuity, unfettered markets, and technology. Such
advocates typically come from sectors having the most to lose in a
green economy, such as fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. These
advocates for a brown economy minimize threats of climate change,
argue against mitigation, and ignore degraded ecosystems. As John
Dryzek puts it, this is a world in which “natural resources,
ecosystems, and indeed nature itself, do not exist.”20

The green economy sets out an alternative to these unrealistic and

risky (in the case of degrowth) and irresponsible and eventually
catastrophic (with continued brown growth) alternatives. It is not a
compromise, but an alternative path that seeks and carries out
positive-sum relationships.

A major intellectual influence on the green economy concept is

ecological economics. This emerged in recent decades as a
counterpoint to more traditional economic analysis, which critics say
pays too little attention to planetary limits and to the effects of
exponential growth. The aim is “to provide an integrated and
biophysical perspective on environment-economy interactions” that
is missing in more traditional economic analysis.21 Ecological
economics places natural capital—clean air and water, healthy
ecosystems and forests—on not just an equal but preferential footing
relative to other forms of capital. The field views economies as
subsystems of the ecological system and as subject to biophysical,
planetary constraints. As one ecological economist puts it:
“Continuous exponential growth of any physical sub-system of a
finite system is impossible.”22
Another intellectual influence in the emergence of the green
economy is transformative thinking and practices among major
business firms. Indeed, it is fair to say that the case for positive
relationships among economic and environmental goals first became
evident in the greening of business. If firms can find the economy–
environment win-wins, then why not entire economies?
THE MICROLEVEL: GREENING THE
PRIVATE SECTOR
Well before the concept of the green economy gained wide currency,
leading firms were reaching similar conclusions about the
interactions among ecological and economic goals. Indeed, starting
in the 1980s, claims about a greening of industry started appearing
in writing about business and the environment. Many firms realized
there were sound financial reasons for not only meeting legal
standards but doing more by managing supply chains, reporting
voluntarily on environmental performance, setting goals to go
beyond compliance (like energy or water efficiency), developing
better relationships with communities, redesigning products to
reduce their environmental impacts, and even by anticipating more
stringent standards in their investments, technologies, and planning.
Trends in the Greening of Business
Why would private business firms do more than what the law
requires? One obvious reason is to reduce bottom-line costs. Using
less energy, water, and raw materials, or not having to dispose of
hazardous waste not generated, saves money. Firms also were
becoming more attentive to their reputations and to the effects of bad
publicity on shareholders, customers, and communities. These firms
sought business advantage in getting ahead of competitors on
technology and management practices and improving relationships
with state and federal regulators.23 They also were trying to
anticipate future trends, such as limits on carbon emissions, water
scarcity, or rising energy costs.

A 1995 essay went further, asserting that the old view of unavoidable
trade-offs between financial and environmental success assumes a
static world, not the dynamic and competitive one in which firms
operate. It argued that “properly designed environmental standards
can trigger innovation that may” lower a product’s cost or improve its
performance.24 When firms respond to external pressures for
improving performance, such as government regulation or rules set
by customers and investors, they are pushed to use materials more
efficiently, eliminate unneeded activity, and increase the value of
their products and services. The authors of this essay distinguish
good and bad regulation. Good regulation sets high standards yet
allows flexibility in determining how to meet them. It is reasonably
predictable, focused as much as possible on outcomes (results), and
aims to support technology and management innovation. In contrast,
bad regulation is far less predictable, sets short compliance
deadlines, is prescriptive and inflexible, and is poorly designed. It
may impede needed levels of technology innovation by locking in old
methods and practices.

In sum, it is not hard to find similarities between macro- and

microlevel green economy thinking and practice. Both turn the old
conception of inevitable economy–environment trade-offs on its
head. High levels of environmental performance—improving energy
and water efficiency, using cleaner manufacturing processes, reusing
materials, protecting critical ecosystems, and constantly finding ways
to innovate—all contribute to both economic and environmental
success.25 At both the macro- and microlevel static, short-term
thinking is replaced by dynamic, longer-term thinking. Moreover, at
both levels, some public policy tools are more effective than others
as reflected in distinctions between good and bad public policy,
whether regulatory or in other forms.

It is worth examining how the business sector is reframing economy–

environment trade-offs into opportunities for business and financial
success. These microtrends not only mirror green economy
opportunities at the macrolevel but also illuminate the role that
business can play in the transition to a global green economy built
on a foundation of economy–environment synergies.

A few cases illustrate how firms are doing this. L’Oréal, the
cosmetics manufacturer, set out to reduce water consumption “per
finished unit of product” by 60 percent from a 2005 baseline by
mapping its water consumption systematically, optimizing water use
in production processes, reusing industrial wastewater whenever
feasible, and recycling water after treatment at various stages of
production. Although this required investment, it would pay off not
only in reducing water use but using less energy use to heat water,
cutting costs for chemicals to treat water, and ensuring continued
access to a needed resource in water-scarce areas.26 The company
was promoting a public good—less water use—while also achieving
critical business objectives.

A business strategy known as chemical leasing also illustrates the

alignment of private and public goals in a green economy.27
Chemical use is pervasive in modern economies. Many of these
chemicals pose risks to human health or the environment. From a
public perspective, it makes sense to use as few chemicals as
possible and substitute green chemicals for hazardous ones. The old
pattern was that a user (say a company making washing machines
or painting cars) would buy needed amounts of chemicals and use
them to make products. This rewards inefficient chemical use; the
seller is motivated financially to sell as much product as possible,
and the user may not know how to optimize it. Chemical leasing
defines new relationship: the user pays for the service (such as the
area coated), not the amount. This decouples payments from
chemical consumption and motivates sellers to optimize use based
on an expert knowledge of their products. Among the American
companies leading in use of chemical leasing are GM, Lockheed
Martin, and Harley-Davidson.28 A chemical user benefits from lower
costs, less liability due to hazardous wastes, and a safer workplace.
The seller gains customers with a new business model. Public
benefits include less harmful chemicals and safer workers. Benefits
are substantial: the WHO estimates that 8.3 percent of deaths each
year globally are a result of exposure to hazardous chemicals.29

Clean energy is motivating companies to pursue business options

that yield societal benefit. Rising consumer interest, stimulated by
stringent vehicle standards and government subsidies, led
Volkswagen, one of the world’s largest car manufacturers, to invest
$34 billion over 5 years in electric vehicles (EVs), with the aim of
being the largest global producer of EVs by the mid-2020s.30 Utilities
are getting into the act. Although known previously for relying heavily
on coal, Arizona Public Service joined six other utilities in 2020 in
committing to totally carbon-free electricity generation by 2050. It will
end coal generation by 2031, 6 years ahead of previous
projections.31
Business Greening and Public Policy
Should this greening among many private sector firms influence
public policy? For many environmental advocates critical of
regulation as currently practiced, it should. Although these reform
ideas got lost in the trench warfare of the Donald Trump
administration, there was a dynamic environmental innovation
agenda in the 1990s and into the 2000s. Proenvironmental critics
called for regulation and other policies to recognize changes in
business, account for a new generation of problems, and adapt to
new technologies and knowledge.32 The themes in these reforms
were to set stringent goals but give flexibility in meeting them, rely
more on indicators of performance than just legal compliance, draw
upon a diverse range of policy tools, and recognize different levels of
performance by firms. Among the policy changes proposed were
more use of market incentives, information disclosure, public–private
partnerships, and adaptive policy tools.33

In many ways, these proposed reforms offered a preview of the

green economy policy agenda discussed in the next part of the
chapter. They recognized that the old regulatory model of specifying
technologies and forcing sources to implement them was a partial
solution and one not well suited to new problems and a changing
business landscape. Regulatory laws and agencies had adapted
over the years, to be sure.34 In the 1980s, the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) began to use new policy tools like
emissions trading, leading to the acid rain allowance trading program
in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. Mandatory information
disclosure—forcing firms to track and report on pollution—was
adopted in right-to-know laws at state and federal levels (see
Chapter 7). Agencies tried new relationships with business and
created voluntary programs to cut greenhouse gases, improve water
efficiency, and design greener chemicals. These innovations
recognized that the behavior of leading firms was changing, and the
standard regulatory policy tools were not the most effective or
efficient.

Recognizing the limits in the existing regulatory system and ways of

getting better results at less cost provided options and experience for
policy tools to create a green economy. The array of policy options
was much richer as a result. The green economy adds another layer
to our thinking about policy innovation. At its core is the idea that we
may reframe economy–environment relationships from that of the old
lose-lose to a potential win-win. Leaders in the business community
had begun this transition. Now it was being scaled up to the
macrolevel. The green economy reframes relationships and
organizes policy options into a coherent, pragmatic agenda.

How can public policy be designed to create a green economy? A

start is by making policies predictable, which has proven challenging
in the contentious American system. Uncertainty makes planning
difficult; businesses have a hard time deciding what to invest in and
how to make business decisions about products, markets, and
suppliers. Even an economic tool like a carbon tax loses its
effectiveness if the tax changes unpredictably. Policy also should aim
for stringent goals, but when necessary be flexible on means. A third
design feature is to improve how government, business, and
investors collaborate on new technologies. Having government
agencies issue technology standards developed in complex
rulemaking processes may help diffuse technologies but rarely
stimulates invention of new ones. A sixth recommendation is to take
advantage of state policy innovation and ways to use federalism
better as is discussed in Chapter 2. US leaders in energy and
climate innovation recently include states like California, Hawaii, and
Virginia; experience in those states may diffuse horizontally to others
or become a national model. Indeed, systematic learning across
states is essential in creating a green economy.
THE GREEN ECONOMY POLICY AGENDA
The green economy concept is a way of reframing relationships
among environmental and economic goals, at both a societal
(macro) and a firm (micro) level. It is also a strategic framework for
designing and implementing policies in ways that reflect the
reframing of these relationships.35

This section of the chapter considers the principles and policy tools
making up this strategic framework, the green economy policy
agenda. The principles express the core ideas of and criteria for
evaluating tools and their applications. Policy tools are mechanisms
for changing behavior to achieve goals. These tools should reflect
the principles and link them with the desired outcomes.
Principles for a Green Economy Policy
Agenda
Public policy experts rely on many generic principles for evaluating
policy strategies and tools. These include, as examples, that they
should be effective in achieving goals; equitable in not harming or
benefitting particular groups unfairly; cost-effective in achieving
desired outcomes at the lowest or at minimal costs; scientifically
grounded; and feasible in gaining political support. All of these apply
to the green economy policy agenda, as well as to most other
environmental strategies.

A policy agenda for promoting a greener economy builds upon many

current strategies but emphasizes some more than others. This
agenda may be viewed in terms of the principles behind the policy
designs and the tools that are used to fulfill these principles. Here
are five principles for guiding decision-making toward a greener
economy:

1. Seek positive, even synergistic ways of linking environmental

and economic goals.
This is a defining feature as well as a core principle of the green
economy. Design policies that seek and implement positive-sum
outcomes: energy and water efficiency, green infrastructure,
investments in a smart grid or sustainable farming, to name a
few. At times, trade-offs are hard to avoid, but by reframing
choices and enlarging the scope of decision (how energy is
generated or how people and goods are moved more than how
pollution is controlled) positive-sums may be found.
2. Grant critical ecosystems and resources a principled priority in
decision processes.
A weakness in the brown economy is giving preference to short-
term economic gains that benefit short-term interests over the
long-term viability of critical ecosystems. This includes
ecosystems and resources that are irreplaceable, provide
 essential services, have major aesthetic or historical value, or
whose loss is irreversible. These should be granted a principled
priority in decision-making.36 This recognizes how essential they
are to human well-being. One mechanism for doing this is
ecosystem valuation, which aims to determine the actual
economic value of ecosystems to human well-being.
3. Create mechanisms for incorporating full cost/social pricing into
decision-making.
Most environmental problems are the result of failures in private
markets (see Chapter 10). Traditional market relationships do
not force people to account for their air and water pollution
(including greenhouse gases) or for damages to common pool
resources (such as fishing grounds or wetlands when not
privately owned). Government action is required to put a price
on these resources and correct the market failure. The most
obvious illustration of such a strategy is putting a price on
carbon, either with a tax or cap-and trade system.
4. Integrate institutions and policies across policy sectors.
The reality of modern political economy and governance is that
the ecological state usually takes a back seat to the prosperity
state. Yet ignoring the protection of ecosystems, health, and
natural resources eventually risks the foundations of prosperity.
In politics, the short term often dominates the long term, and
special interests prevail over general well-being. Only by
integrating environmental goals into economic, social, and
political decision-making and seeking positive relationships
among them may we establish the environment as a core
business of modern states. A green economy makes the
environment part of infrastructure investments, business
investments, development choices, and the design of regulatory
programs. In the green economy, nearly every economic
decision has environmental implications in the near or long term.
5. Seek outcomes that increase options for family-supporting,
career-oriented employment.
Investments in environmental and energy infrastructure,
innovation, and efficiency support what Van Jones calls the
green collar economy: money spent on environmental progress
may generate cobenefits of productive, family-supporting, and
career-enhancing jobs.37 For example, there is evidence that
investments in renewable energy and efficiency generate more
employment per dollar invested than do investments in
traditional fossil fuels. Clean energy is one of the fastest growing
sectors for jobs, not only in the United States but globally.
Infrastructure investments like building a smart grid (using
innovative technology, maximizing efficiency, integrating
renewable energy), expanding mass transit, and building green
water infrastructure would create millions of jobs. Indeed, the
Edison Electric Institute, a group representing utilities, estimates
that although the costs of a smart grid using advanced
technology are formidable ($338–476 billion over 20 years), the
benefits to society could amount to two trillion dollars over those
two decades.38
Policy Tools for a Green Economy Policy
Agenda
Policy tools are specific mechanisms for changing behavior to
achieve society’s goals. In environmental policy, the standard tool is
technology or performance-based regulation, but there is growing
use of others. Indeed, there has been a transition from an era relying
on prescriptive regulation to one using economic tools like emissions
(air) and effluent trading (water). Economic tools (trading and eco-
taxes) aim to leverage the positive economy–environmental
relationships defining the green economy. Still, mandatory
performance standards play a role. The policy tools reflect a mix of
the old and the new, but overall are designed to promote green
economy principles.
Mandatory Performance Standards
Having government define technology or performance standards and
ensuring that sources meet them is a mainstay of environmental
policy in the United States and most countries. A trend has been to
rely less on specific technology requirements and more on
performance goals.39 An example is Renewable Portfolio Standards
—legal requirements that utilities derive a specified minimum of their
electricity from renewable sources (largely wind and solar) by a
given date (see Chapter 8). Some states are aggressive in setting
these standards: By the end of 2019, thirteen states or similar
entities had committed to 100 percent renewable or clean energy
(the latter leaving the option of nuclear energy or hydropower) by the
middle of the century.40 More recently, Virginia became the first
southern state to commit to 100 percent renewable electricity
generation, with a target of 2050, as well as separate targets for
energy storage and offshore wind.41
Trading Mechanisms
Policy tools that account for the social costs of pollution—the effects
on health, the climate, and ecosystems—deserve a place on the
green economy agenda. In economics terms, pollution is an
externality: an effect for which unregulated markets do not hold
sources accountable. This is why air pollution became a major
problem in the 1950s and 1960s, leading to the Clean Air Act of
1970. Mandatory standards are one way to deal with externalities, of
course. Government defines the “best available” technology and
makes sources install and operate it.

Economic incentive tools are another option. Like mandatory

standards, they make sources account for the social costs of
pollution, but they do it differently. They put a price on releases into
air or water, then allow sources to decide what changes in behavior
make economic sense. With trading, government creates artificial
markets by setting a cap on air emissions or water effluents and
making sources purchase enough permits or allowances to cover
their emissions. The US EPA began using emissions trading in the
1970s and 1980s; a cap-and-trade program for acid rain was
incorporated into the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.42 Cap-
and-trade is used to cut carbon emissions in California, the
European Union, and elsewhere.43 Effluent trading may control
water pollution, although this is challenging and faces technical
issues.44
Eco-Taxes
Like trading, eco-taxes create economic incentives, but in different
ways. Instead of setting a cap and then allocating (through auctions
or another mechanism) permits to sources, eco-taxes assign a fee to
each unit of pollution released.45 Sources decide how much to
reduce emissions or effluents through technology controls, new
production processes, or other means to avoid paying the fee.
Trading and eco-taxes illustrate two leading economic incentive tools
for changing behavior. The difference is that trading caps and allows
certainty about the amount of pollution, but prices are uncertain;
taxes establish a clear price but resulting pollution levels are
uncertain.

Leading proposals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions nationally

in the United States focus on a carbon tax.46 A carbon tax opens up
many options for drawing political support. The revenue from the tax
could be distributed back to the public (a revenue-neutral tax), used
for green investments (energy efficiency, infrastructure, or research),
allocated to a just transition for dislocated workers or low-income
groups, or used to reduce deficits. The carbon tax thus may be used
to meet multiple goals: reducing emissions by increasing the costs of
carbon-based fuels; stimulating job creation; realigning public
spending; and promoting broader green economy goals, like green
infrastructure.
Payments for Ecosystem Services
A fourth policy tool further illustrates the application of green
economy principles. One of the premises of ecological economics,
discussed earlier, is that ecosystems perform vital services that
should be accounted for in economic decision-making. Ecosystems
filter water, buffer coastal areas from storms, preserve biodiversity,
conserve carbon sinks like tropical forests, detoxify waste in the
environment, preserve soils to enable food production, and serve
other purposes.47 The effective price for such services usually is
zero because they are not traded in economic markets. Putting
economic value on ecosystem services creates incentives for
protecting and restoring them.

The policy tool for making this happen is payments for ecosystem
services (PES). PES is a system in which beneficiaries of an
ecosystem service—a downstream town needing clean water or
protection from flooding, a government seeking to protect an estuary
—compensate those controlling the natural resources that provide
the ecosystem service. The providers of ecosystem service may only
have to preserve or not develop the land or resource. Or they may
have to do more, so long as “the payment causes the benefit to
occur where it would not have otherwise.”48

PES come in many forms. Often, private or nongovernment

organizations purchase land outright to preserve it and the services it
provides; examples are the World Wildlife Fund and Nature
Conservancy. The Natural Resource Conservation Service of the US
Department of Agriculture uses PES through the Agriculture
Conservation Easement Program, which pays landowners to
preserve land, wetlands, and habitat. Even governments have used
the PES; Norway recently committed to a 10-year payment of $150
million to Gabon to preserve rainforests as an ecosystem and carbon
sink through the UN’s Central African Forest Initiative.49
Why This Agenda Promotes a Green
Economy
The core idea of the green economy is to identify and carry out
positive-sum relationships among economic and environmental
goals while promoting social equity. The principles presented here
aim to deliver on this positive-sum framing—one with considerable
political appeal given the emphasis on the prosperity state—with
criteria that shape successful policy strategies and tools. Societies
should put the ecological state on a par with the prosperity, security,
and welfare states.

Among the green economy principles, the most central are that
environmental choices be integrated broadly with economic ones
and that critical ecosystems be given principled priority in decision-
making. The policy tools are designed to promote these ends.
Ecosystem valuation explicitly attaches economic value to sources of
critical ecosystem services—the climate system, wetlands, tropical
rainforests, and so on—and integrates them with economic
decisions. A carbon tax or cap-and-trade assign an economic cost to
pollution and account for its social costs. Carbon pricing and other
tools link public and private investments and other economic
decisions while also promoting environmental goals (less climate
impact, healthier air), generating economic benefits, stimulating job
creation through infrastructure investments, and promoting social
equity.
IS ANYONE ACTUALLY TRYING TO
CREATE A GREEN ECONOMY?
The idea of building a green economy recognizes that largely brown
growth is unsustainable. To take one illustration, some 80 percent of
the global energy system is powered by fossil fuel–based energy.
Even setting aside the health and ecological damage of this practice,
the accumulation of greenhouse gases from this energy system
poses a serious threat. Other issues discussed in this chapter make
the same point: continued, exponential growth has consequences. At
the same time, political, social, and economic factors driving this
growth are unlikely to abate.

Although mentions of the green economy date to the 1990s, the

concept gained currency in the wake of the financial crisis and
recession in 2008–2010. The crisis called for a reassessment of past
policies and major investment to stimulate the economy. The idea of
a Green New Deal emerged.50 Extensive public investment was
needed to stimulate economies around the world: why not focus on
green investments like renewable energy and efficiency, innovative
water infrastructure, smart farming, and ecosystem services? A
study of 20 countries in 2009 found they had authorized nearly three
trillion dollars in stimulus money, of which about 15 percent ($430
million) was aimed at “stabilizing and then cutting global emissions of
greenhouse gases” (including water and related investments).51

In the United States, the Barack Obama administration used green

economy arguments. In framing economy–environment linkages
positively, for example, it embraced the clean energy highway to
create jobs, promote durable growth, and expand business in
renewable energy and efficiency. In testimony before Congress in
2014, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy described climate action as
a “spark for business innovation, job creation, clean energy, and
broad economic growth.”52 Of course, these arguments were
rejected by the Donald Trump administration; it reverted to the old
mantra, unsupported by evidence, that economic and environmental
goals inevitably will conflict.

The concept of a Green New Deal was invoked in 2019 with

proposals from a group of US legislators for ambitious climate action
and social reform.53 This plan called for investment in clean energy,
green infrastructure, mass transit, and other green initiatives. It also
set out sweeping social goals: universal health care; guaranteed,
family-supporting jobs; affordable, safe housing; and higher
education available to all, among others. Although reflecting the
green economy goal of linking economic and environmental goals
and reorienting policies and investment, this framed the green
economy within a far bigger social agenda. Doing so raised a
strategic issue of how sweeping and aspirational the vision of a
green economy could be framed and still be feasible politically.
Green New Deal advocates want to link climate change to a broad
social agenda (guaranteed jobs, universal health care) as a means
of “mobilizing collective action through a utopian vision of the
progressive agenda….”54 Other climate advocates see a greater
chance of success in a strategy more specifically tailored to emission
cuts, renewable energy, and energy efficiency—one that is less likely
to provoke opposition to this much broader social agenda.

Signs of the green growth concept also are evident in the European
Green Deal, adopted by the European Commission in October
2019.55 Like the proposal for a Green New Deal in the United States,
this frames economy and environment linkages in positive ways
while building in equity. Although climate action is the centerpiece—
making Europe “the first climate neutral continent”—the plan
addresses other goals, like eliminating air and water pollution and
integrating investment and policy decisions with environmental
issues. The European Green Deal aims to raise living standards,
guarantee jobs, invest in the future, promote equity, empower
communities, support climate justice, and limit temperature
increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It also reflects a theme among
ecological ecologists for alternative measures of well-being beyond
GDP growth, including a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) that
accounts for environmental and social factors.56

Governments even are thinking more that well-being includes more

than growth rates. The OECD reports on a suite of measures in a
Better Life Initiative, focused on “understanding what drives well-
being of people and nations and what needs to be done to achieve
greater progress for all.”57 New Zealand recently decided to form
national budgets where spending “is dictated by the ‘well-being’ of
citizens.” It relies less on economic measures of growth and
productivity and more on “goals like community and cultural
connection and equity in well-being across generations.”58 Among
the goals is a “transition to a sustainable and low-emission economy”
and to outcomes that reflect not only the needs of the present
generation but also “long-term impacts for future generations.”59

Many organizations that promoted the green economy in the early

2010s created a resource to disseminate knowledge and support
green transitions. The UNEP, OECD, World Bank, and UN Industrial
Development Organization formed the Global Green Growth Institute
(GGGI), based in Seoul, South Korea. Recognizing the pressures
current growth places on planetary limits, the GGGI created the
Green Growth Knowledge Platform, a “network of experts and
organizations dedicated to providing the policy, business, and
finance communities with knowledge, guidance, data, and tools to
transition to an inclusive green economy.”60 Countries as diverse as
China, Kenya, Brazil, and India have used aspects of the Green
Growth Knowledge Platform in their planning, although it is likely that
countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Norway are closer to having a
green economy.
IS THE GREEN ECONOMY A VALID
CONCEPT?
The green economy is not without critics. From the left of the political
spectrum, critics see it as little more than a justification for continued
growth and the dominance of global corporate and financial
interests. That it is promoted by an organization like the World Bank,
with a history of promoting often environmentally harmful economic
growth, is evidence of the concept’s bias. At the same time, critics
from the right of the political spectrum view it as a means for stunting
growth, expanding government, and imposing unneeded constraints
on dynamic, productive economies. Some critics see the economy
part of the concept as a threat; others fear the emphasis on the
green.

Yet the critics from both sides are missing critical realities. The first is
that economies will grow. Expecting countries like China and India to
set aside their growth aspirations to make up for the planetary
pressures caused by rich countries of North America and Western
Europe is a fantasy. Although there is a strong case to be made for
rich countries to focus more on the quality than the mere quantity of
growth, it is unrealistic to expect them voluntarily to shrink their
economies. To deny the fact and likely persistence of economic
growth falls short in protecting planetary limits.

Clinging to the idea that countries around the world will at some point
recognize the harm from perpetual growth and act decisively to halt
and even reverse the historical patterns is a thin reed on which to
hang the future of the planet. Political leaders compete on their
ability to deliver prosperity. Economic success is a measure of
national status and influence. Economic growth has enabled huge
gains in the quality of life around the world and expanded access to
education, health care, meaningful work, and even more democratic
government (see Chapter 13). To put it bluntly, even a 20 percent
reduction in the size of the global economy, without changes in the
energy, agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing systems, will
be insufficient to escape the inevitable breaching of planetary limits.
Indeed, the pattern is that when the prosperity state falters, as it did
in the Great Recession, support for environmental values falls,
governance quality and capacities weaken, and shorter-term thinking
that favors the prosperity state over the ecological state takes
priority.61

This is not to say that a reconceptualization of the role of economic

well-being in the quality of life should not be on the table. Research
tells us that perceived happiness and well-being level off at some
level of income.62 In economics terms, the marginal benefits of
growth begin to decline and even become negative at higher levels
of income as the social and environmental costs of exponential
growth accumulate: pollution, lost ecosystem services, climate
change, economic and social inequality, and pursuit of positional
goods (valued for the status they confer, not their actual utility).
There is a social as well as an environmental case to be made
against too much growth.63

Nor is it at all consistent with the evidence to think that continued

economic growth along the current path will not, if it has not already,
push the scale and scope of human impacts on the environment past
planetary limits. The climate is changing; ecosystems and species
are being lost at alarming rates; water is less available in many parts
of the world; air pollution threatens human health. The facts cannot
be denied, no matter how inconvenient they are to advocates of
fossil fuels, deforestation, industrial farming, and other harmful
activities. These are not just environmental problems; they
undermine our well-being. Adapting to climate change will cost lots
of money, harm agriculture, threaten human health, and put parts of
many cities under water. Indeed, the UNEP estimates the annual
costs of adaptation alone may reach $500 billion by 2050.64 The
World Bank calculates that air pollution cost India over 8.5 percent of
GDP in 2013.65 Burying our heads in the sand and assuming we
may stay within planetary limits without changing how growth occurs
and economies operate is a recipe for disaster. With the 2020
coronavirus pandemic, of course, air quality is improving in countries
like India. The issue is whether or not this will lead to a greater
appreciation of the need for a green economy or if the old pattern of
largely brown economic growth will resume or even accelerate.

The concept of a green economy recognizes that growth will occur,

in some form, but that the form and trajectory of growth must
change. The solutions are there. Using technology for energy
efficiency or modernizing the electricity grid cuts energy costs,
improves health, is good for the climate, and spares ecosystems
from damages due to coal mining or natural gas fracking. It also
creates useful employment; as noted earlier, a dollar invested in
clean energy, efficiency, and infrastructure generates more
employment than the same investment in fossil fuel resources.66 An
equitable green economy also may respond better to demands for
environmental justice by reducing health risks, creating greener
infrastructure, and promoting cleaner energy.

Smart farming also illustrates the practical application of green

economy ideas. Agriculture is a source of environmental harm; done
unsustainably, it leads to water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions,
overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, and soil erosion.67 The goal of
smart farming is to think long-term and recognize the value of clean
water; the cost of inputs to production like energy, fertilizer, and
water; the need to maintain soil quality; and the benefits of clean
energy. In addition to reducing costs and maintaining natural capital,
farmers can earn income by cutting nonpoint source water pollution
and selling water quality credits and by leasing land to wind energy
projects.

Economic activity and growth were disrupted dramatically by the

coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020. Economic growth rates
will be lower than they might have been, although the length and
depth of the economic crisis is difficult to predict. As expected,
emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants fell with less
economic activity and growth. Although this reduces short-term
pressures on the environment, at some point the drivers of economic
growth and pressures on the planet will resume. What matters is not
the effects of this short-term respite but the impact of the pandemic
on the longer-term transformation of global economies along
environmentally sustainable lines.
THE NEED FOR INTERNATIONAL,
COLLECTIVE ACTION
The green economy will succeed if it is implemented globally (see
Chapter 12). Acting on their own, nations will give in to pressure to
gain short-term economic advantage by using fossil fuels,
consuming natural resources, and placing short-term growth over
longer-term well-being. Global collective action is necessary, or
countries will aim to be free riders and derive near-term benefit. As a
rich and influential country, the United States plays a role but also is
affected by this interdependence.

Rich countries like the United States must be engaged in creating a

global green economy. They have a moral obligation, to be sure, by
accounting for the most cumulative greenhouse gas emissions and
for many other impacts. Beyond this, it is in their self-interest.
Deploying clean energy in developing countries, protecting natural
capital like tropical forests, and improving air quality not only helps
both rich and developing countries environmentally, it promotes
political stability, expands access to green technology, enhances
national security, and creates paths to cooperation.

US leadership is crucial for global collective action toward a green

economy. Its financial, scientific, and diplomatic resources are
essential. The contrasting outcomes of the Copenhagen (2009) and
Paris (2015) Conferences of the Parties on climate action, the
second of which was more substantively successful, are partly due
to the large role the United States played in Paris and the Obama
administration’s commitments. At the same time, the United States
may need the rest of the world more, or enough of it to matter.68 If
other countries do not act, domestic opponents of environmental
action will argue that the United States is exposing itself to the costs
of a transition while others seek short-term advantages. Even
moderate critics of clean energy, climate action, and effective
regulation worry about production costs, consumer prices, and other
bad outcomes if the United States gets too far ahead. Although
studies find that environmental policy has minor impacts on the
economy, especially given its benefits, short-term impacts on specific
sectors are used to oppose action.69

What should the United States and other rich countries be doing?
They should share technologies and best practices. They should set
standards and policies countries at other levels of development may
use. They can provide capital for inventing and diffusing technology
for energy efficiency, green chemistry, renewable energy, sustainable
farming, and other initiatives. They should be helping poor countries
achieve a better quality of life—by supporting health, education, and
other programs—that focus more on human development than on
the sheer quantity of growth (an issue also stressed in Chapter 13 on
developing countries).

Rich countries also should be supporting democracy and democratic

transitions elsewhere. A range of research suggests that
democracies overall are more likely to give priority and respond to
environmental issues, including climate.70 Among the leaders in a
green economic transition are countries like Sweden, Denmark, and
Norway, which also rank high in measures of democracy. The depth
of experience also matters; established democracies tend to perform
better than new ones. Indeed, the leaders in global assessments like
the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) are established
democracies like Switzerland, France, Denmark, Sweden, and the
United Kingdom.71 Democracies also are more likely to engage in
international problem-solving and agreements. There are exceptions:
the United States and Australia, for example, have not been
impressive recently. Still, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 11, many
state and local governments are engaging vigorously in the green
economy.

Is the vision of a green economy an illusion, as many critics assert?

Is economic growth in any form inevitably and irreversibly bad for the
planet? In the long run, it is hard to say. The sheer scale of human
stress on ecological services, human health, and natural resources
may at some point overwhelm human ingenuity and technological
prowess, regardless of how green economies become. What is
beyond doubt is that the current global brown economy, with its
reliance on fossil fuels, inefficient resource use, input-intensive
agriculture, destruction of forests and biodiversity, high-volume
chemical use, and growing emissions is a road to disaster. The
green economy offers an alternative that accepts human aspirations
for a better quality of life within the biophysical limits of the planet. As
both a policy framing device and as an agenda for policy change, the
green economy may be the only politically and economically feasible
path to a more sustainable future.
SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Energy Transitions Commission (www.energy-transitions.org)

The Energy Transitions Commission is an international
organization focused on climate mitigation, access to affordable
and sustainable energy, and economic development. It takes a
green economy view of energy, with resources on the forms that
a global, clean energy transition should take.

Global Green Growth Institute (www.gggi.org) The Global

Green Growth Institute is an international, intergovernmental
organization dedicated to achieving strong, inclusive,
sustainable growth in developing and emerging economies. It
includes research, tools, case studies, and other resources on
water, clean energy, sustainable landscapes, and green cities.

International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)

(www.irena.org) IRENA is an international organization
dedicated to sustainable energy. Based in Abu Dhabi, it is a rich
source of resources on challenges of and opportunities to a
global transition to renewable energy.

Niskanen Center (www.niskanencenter.org) The Niskanen

Center is a Washington, DC-based think tank that reflects green
economy framing and principles, but it is founded on market-
based strategies. It offers a right-of-center but responsible
approach to green economy issues.

The New Economics Foundation (www.neweconomics.org)

The New Economics Foundation is a British think tank
advocating transformational change in economic systems
toward social and economic equity, political empowerment, and
a clean environment. It offers resources for redesigning the
relationships among social, economic, and environmental
factors.
NOTES
1. “Greening the State?” in Comparative Environmental Politics, ed.
Paul Steinberg and Stacy VanDeveer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2012), 63–88.

2. “The Birth of the Environment and the Evolution of Environmental

Governance,” in Conceptual Innovation in Environmental Policy, ed.
James Meadowcroft and Daniel J. Fiorino (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2017), 53–76.

3. “Greening the State?” 76.

4. This chapter draws from Daniel J. Fiorino, A Good Life on a Finite

Earth: The Political Economy of Green Growth (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2018).

5. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and

William H. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of
Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe
Books, 1972).

6. John S. Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: Environmental

Discourses, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 31.

7. Graham M. Turner, “A Comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30

Years of Reality,” Global Environmental Change 18 (2008), 397–411.

8. Johan Rockstrom et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe

Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14 (2009), 32.

9. World Health Organization (WHO). How Air Pollution Is Destroying

Our Health. https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/how-air-
pollution-is-destroying-our-
health#:~:text=The%20health%20effects%20of%20air,of%20eating
%20too%20much%20salt
10. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Living Beyond Our Means:
Natural Assets and Human Well-Being (22,005).
https://www.millenniumassessment.org/documents/document.356.as
px.pdf

11. Information on the IPBES is at https://ipbes.net/

12. Coral Davenport, “Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk

of Crisis as Early as 2040,” New York Times (October 7, 2018).

13. International Energy Agency, Capturing the Multiple Benefits of

Energy Efficiency (Paris, 2014). https://webstore.iea.org/capturing-
the-multiple-benefits-of-energy-efficiency

14. Green Economy Coalition, The Green Economy Pocketbook:

The Case for Acton (2012).
https://www.greeneconomycoalition.org/assets/reports/GEC-
Reports/Green-Economy-Pocketbook-the-case-for-action_0.pdf

15. United Nations Environment Program, Towards a Green

Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty
Reduction—A Synthesis for Policy Makers (2011).
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/126GER_
synthesis_en.pdf, 9.

16. Patrick ten Brink et al., Nature and Its Role in the Transition to a
Green Economy (2012). http://img.teebweb.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/04/Nature-Green-Economy-Full-Report.pdf,
34.

17. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

(OECD), Towards Green Growth (Paris: OECD, 2011).
https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/towards-green-
growth_9789264111318-en#page1

18. Samuel Alexander, “Planned Economic Contraction: The

Emerging Case for Degrowth,” Environmental Politics 21 (2012),
349–68.
19. Herman E. Daly, Steady State Economics, 2nd ed. (Washington,
DC: Island Press), 17.

20. Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth, 59.

21. Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh, “Ecological Economics: Themes,

Approaches, and Differences with Environmental Economics,”
Regional Environmental Change 2 (2001), 13.

22. Joshua Farley, “Ecosystem Services: The Economic Debate,”

Ecosystem Services 1 (2012), 43.

23. See Forest Reinhardt, Down to Earth: Applying Business

Principles to Environmental Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000) and Nigel Roome, ed. Sustainability
Strategies for Industry: The Future of Corporate Practice
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998).

24. Michael E. Porter and Claas van der Linde, “Toward a New
Conception of the Environment-Competitiveness Relationship,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (1995), 98.

25. Daniel C. Esty and Andrew Winston, Green to Gold: How Smart
Companies Use Environmental Strategies to Innovate, Create Value,
and Build Competitive Advantage (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons,
2009).

26. A case study on water efficiency reported by the World Business

Council for Sustainable Development.
https://www.wbcsd.org/Programs/Food-and-Nature/Water/Circular-
water-management/Resources/Case-studies/Recycling-and-reuse-
of-treated-industrial-wastewater-in-cosmetics-operations

27. On chemical leasing, see the United Nationals Industrial

Development Organization report, Chemical Leasing: A Global
Success Story (Vienna, 2011).
https://www.unido.org/sites/default/files/2014-
03/ChL_Publication_2011_0.pdf
28. Elizabeth Grossman, “More Companies Clean Up With Chemical
Leasing,” Greenbiz (October 3, 2014).
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/more-companies-clean-chemical-
leasing

29. A summary of WHO estimates is available at

https://www.who.int/gho/phe/chemical_safety/en/

30. Charles Riley, “The Great Electric Car Race Is Just Beginning,”
CNN Business (August 2019).
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/08/business/electric-cars-audi-
volkswagen-tesla/

31. Robert Walton, “Arizona Public Service Sets 100% Clean Energy
Target, But Doesn’t Rule Out Carbon Capture for Gas Plants,” Utility
Dive (January 23, 2020). https://www.utilitydive.com/news/arizona-
public-service-sets-100-clean-energy-target-but-doesnt-rule-
out/570870/. The other six utilities committing to 100% clean energy
include Public Service Company of New Mexico (by 2040); Avista
and Idaho Power (by 2045); and Duke Energy, Green Mountain
Power, and Xcel Energy (by 2050).

32. Daniel J. Fiorino, The New Environmental Regulation

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

33. Daniel J. Fiorino, “Streams of Environmental Innovation: Four

Decades of EPA Policy Reform,” Environmental Law 44 (2014), 723–
60.

34. Daniel A. Mazmanian and Michael E. Kraft, “The Three Epochs

of the Environmental Movement,” in Toward Sustainable
Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental
Policy, ed. Mazmanian and Kraft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 1–32.

35. Adapted from Chapter 6 of Fiorino, A Good Life on a Finite Earth.

36. William M. Lafferty and Eivind Hoven, “Environmental Policy

Integration: Towards an Analytical Framework,” Environmental
Politics 12 (2003), 11.

37. Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can
Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (New York: Harper Collins, 2008).

38. Edison Electric Institute, Estimating the Costs and Benefits of the
Smart Grid (Palo Alto, CA: Electric Power Research Institute, 2011),
1–4.

39. Daniel Fiorino and Manjyot Ahluwalia, “Regulating by

Performance, Not Prescription: The Use of Performance Standards
in Environmental Policy” in Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy,
ed. David M. Konisky (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2020), 217–
30.

40. For a status report, see Progress Toward 100% Clean Energy in
Cities and States Across the U.S. (UCLA Luskin Center for
Innovation, November 2019). https://innovation.luskin.ucla.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2019/11/100-Clean-Energy-Progress-Report-UCLA-
2.pdf

41. Matthew Bandyk, “Virginia Approves 100% Clean Energy

Legislation, Pushing State Toward 2.4 GW Storage, RGGI,” Utility
Dive (March 6, 2020). https://www.utilitydive.com/news/virginia-
clean-energy-legislation-pushes-state-toward-storage-rggi/572349/

42. Eric M. Patashnik, “The Clean Air Act’s Use of Market

Mechanisms,” in Lessons from the Clean Air Act: Building Durability
and Adaptability into U.S. Climate and Energy Policy, ed. Ann
Carlson and Dallas Burtraw (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2019), 201–24.

43. For a summary of uses around the world, see the World Bank’s
State and Trends of Carbon Pricing (2020).
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/33809
/9781464815867.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y.
44. Suzie Greenhalgh and Mindy Selman, “Comparing Water Quality
Trading Programs: What Lessons Are There to Learn?” Journal of
Regional Analysis and Policy 42 (2016) 104–25

45. Barry G. Rabe, Can We Price Carbon? (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2018).

46. For a recent summary, see Center for Climate and Energy
Solutions, “Carbon Pricing Proposals in the 116th Congress
(September 2019). https://www.c2es.org/document/carbon-pricing-
proposals-in-the-116th-congress/

47. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB),

Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature (2010).
http://www.teebweb.org/publication/mainstreaming-the-economics-
of-nature-a-synthesis-of-the-approach-conclusions-and-
recommendations-of-teeb/

48. United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Payments for

Ecosystem Services: Getting Started (2008).
http://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/9150/paymen
t_ecosystem.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

49. Abdi Latif Dahir, “Gabon Will Be Paid by Norway to Preserve Its
Forests,” Quartz Africa (September 23, 2019).
https://qz.com/africa/1714104/gabon-to-get-150-million-from-norway-
to-protect-its-forests/

50. Edward B. Barbier, A Global Green Deal: Rethinking the

Economic Recovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010).

51. HSBC Global Research, A Climate for Recovery: The Colour of

Stimulus Goes Green (2009). https://www.globaldashboard.org/wp-
content/uploads/2009/HSBC_Green_New_Deal.pdf

52. Statement before the Senate Committee on Environment and

Public Works (January 16, 2014).
https://archive.epa.gov/epapages/newsroom_archive/newsreleases/f
e40a46647a6007f85257c6200564c15.html

53. Lisa Friedman, “What Is the Green New Deal? A Climate

Proposal, Explained,” New York Times (February 21, 2019). The text
of the Green New Deal resolution is at
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/climate/green-new-deal-
questions-answers.html.

54. Lachlan Carey, “How to Think about the Green New Deal after Its
First Piece of Legislation,” Center for Strategic and International
Studies (December 18, 2019). https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-
think-about-green-new-deal-after-its-first-piece-legislation

55. European Commission, The European Green Deal.

https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/european-
green-deal_en.

56. Ida Kubiszewski et al. “Beyond GDP: Measuring and Achieving

Global Genuine Progress, Ecological Economics 93 (2013), 57–68.

57. More on the Better Life Initiative is at

https://www.oecd.org/statistics/better-life-initiative.htm

58. Charlotte Graham-McLay, “New Zealand’s Next Liberal

Milestone: A Budget Guided by Well-Being,” New York Times (May
22, 2019).

59. From The Wellbeing Budget at

https://www.treasury.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2019-05/b19-
wellbeing-budget.pdf

60. Information on the Global Green Growth Institute is available at

https://gggi.org/. On the Green Growth Knowledge Platform, see
https://www.greengrowthknowledge.org/

61. Dennis Chong, “Explaining Public Conflict and Consensus on the

Climate,” in Changing Climate Policies: US Policies and Civic Action,
ed. Yael Wolinsky-Nahmias (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2015),
110–45.

62. Carol Graham, The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-

Being (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2011).

63. For critiques of growth, see Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) and Tim Jackson,
Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (Abingdon,
UK: Earthscan, 2011).

64. “UNEP Report: Cost of Adapting to Climate Change Could Hit

$500B Per Year by 2050” (May 10, 2016).
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2016/05/unep-
report-cost-of-adapting-to-climate-change-could-hit-500b-per-year-
by-2050/

65. Bobins Abraham, Air Pollution Cost India 8.5% of Its Economy in
2013, Says World Bank,” India Times (June 5, 2019).
https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/air-pollution-cost-india-8-5-of-
its-economy-in-2013-says-world-bank-261455.html

66. Robert Pollin, James Heintz, and Heidi Garret-Peltier, The

Economic Benefits of Investing in Clean Energy (Washington, DC:
Center for American Progress, 2009). On clean energy globally, see
the report from the International Renewable Energy Agency,
Renewable Energy and Jobs: Annual Review 2019.
https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/Jun/Renewable-Energy-and-
Jobs-Annual-Review-2019

67. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Climate

Smart Agriculture Sourcebook. http://www.fao.org/climate-smart-
agriculture-sourcebook/en/

68. David Victor, “What to Expect from Trump on Energy Policy”

(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2016).
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2016/11/17/what-to-
expect-from-trump-on-energy-policy/
69. On the economic effects of environmental regulation see Chapter
3 of Fiorino, A Good Life on a Finite Earth.

70. On climate, see Daniel J. Fiorino, Can Democracy Handle

Climate Change? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Books, 2018). An
illustrative study is Kathryn Hochstetler, “Democracy and the
Environment in Latin American and Eastern Europe,” in Comparative
Environmental Politics, ed. Steinberg and VanDeveer, 199–230.

71. The EPI is a data-driven ranking of 180 countries, updated

biannually, on 24 environmental indicators. The most recent is at
https://epi.yale.edu/
PART V CONCLUSION
15 CONCLUSION :
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY IN
CRISIS
—Norman J. Vig, Michael E. Kraft, and Barry G. Rabe

Even our language has to adjust. What once was called

“climate change” is now truly a “climate crisis.”…We are
now seeing unprecedented temperatures, unrelenting
storms and undeniable science.
Antonio Guterres, United Nations Secretary General, September 24,
2019

On the day after New Year’s in 2020, Nobel Prize–winning

economist Paul Krugman published a column in the New York Times
entitled “Apocalypse Becomes the New Normal.” He was not
referring to the deadly coronavirus pandemic that would soon engulf
the world. Rather, he pointed to the recent string of extreme weather
events—including historic flooding in the American Midwest, massive
wildfires in Australia, and record heat waves from South Asia to
Europe—that had dominated headlines the previous year as
evidence that climate change was well underway and already
resulting in localized catastrophes. As it turned out, 2020 was indeed
a record year for temperatures, wildfires, Atlantic hurricanes, and
polar ice melting.

After a half-century of environmental policy development—and

decades of dire scientific warnings—no political consensus has
emerged in the United States on how to respond to climate change.
As noted in Chapter 1 and elsewhere in this volume, ideological and
partisan polarization since the mid-1990s has deeply split the
country over this issue, which in turn has widened partisan
differences over other environmental policies as well (Chapter 3).
Support for policies has thus begun to cycle wildly from one
presidential administration to the next while Congress remains
largely gridlocked (Chapters 4 and 5), threatening the ability of the
nation to carry out its environmental commitments from the past and
to cooperate with other countries in addressing what is increasingly
seen as a global climate crisis.

As during the COVID-19 pandemic, weak national leadership has

been partially offset by the initiatives of state and local governments,
which have enacted a patchwork of climate policies on their own
(Chapter 2). Nevertheless, many states have lagged behind or
worked at cross-purposes, and without a major breakthrough to
establish a comprehensive national policy it is doubtful that any
effective solution will be possible. Later in the chapter we discuss
various proposals for next-generation policies that could provide a
national climate agenda for the future—but they will require a degree
of public support and bipartisan cooperation not seen since the first
Earth Day in 1970 and the “environmental decade” which followed.

Despite a rapidly growing body of evidence attributing weather

catastrophes to global warming (see below), the Trump
administration refused to recognize climate science or to support any
measures to slow climate change, as documented throughout this
book. Indeed, almost everything the administration did during its first
three years in office was calculated to overturn the environmental
policies of the previous Obama administration (Chapter 4) and
American greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions rose 3.1 percent in
2018 after several years of stabilization or decline.1 Even after the
pandemic struck in early 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) and other agencies continued to push to finalize their
deregulatory agenda before the upcoming fall elections. Ironically,
the EPA attempted to eliminate or greatly reduce the influence of
epidemiological studies in assessing risks to public health and used
the crisis to relax other regulations that could affect the outcomes of
the virus.2

The broader impacts of the coronavirus epidemic on environmental

policy will play out for years to come. In the short term, the resulting
contraction of the US, Chinese, and world economies temporarily
reduced carbon emissions and other forms of pollution.3 The health
epidemic could also have longer-lasting benefits as living patterns
change and people recognize the need for greater preparedness if
we are to reverse the curve of climate change as well as the spread
of infectious diseases. Public opinion surveys indicated that people’s
concern about climate change remained high during the pandemic.4
And the critical importance of scientific expertise and governmental
competence should also be more obvious.

We discuss evidence calling for urgent action on climate change and

conflicts over policies to address it in the following section. We then
consider recent developments in energy policy and air and water
regulation in more detail. Recognizing strong opposition to traditional
forms of regulation in some quarters, we also discuss “market”
alternatives and other measures that might promote greater political
consensus in the future. Finally, we conclude with some preliminary
thoughts on lessons that might be learned for future environmental
governance from the global health apocalypse.
CLIMATE CHANGE: DIRE WARNINGS
The world’s leading authority on climate change, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has published
five comprehensive reports since 1990, each more urgent than the
last. The fifth assessment report, released in four installments in late
2013 and 2014, contained the direst warnings yet about current
climate trends and future risks throughout the world.5 The scientific
report concluded that it is “extremely likely” (a greater than 95
percent chance) that human activities are “the dominant cause” of
the observed global warming since the 1950s. It further documented
global changes already occurring, from rapidly melting sea and land
ice and rising sea levels to intense heat waves and heavy rains,
strains on food production and water supplies, the deterioration of
coral reefs, and threats to fish and other wildlife.6 The final report
recognized progress in limiting carbon emissions in some countries,
but stated that these gains are being overwhelmed by growing
emissions in rapidly developing countries such as China and India.

The report thus called for much greater commitments to both policies
to mitigate emissions growth and major investments to allow social
and economic adaptation to climate changes that are inevitable in
the coming decades. Unless new technologies are put in place by
2030, the report argued, it will probably be too late to avoid
catastrophic damage to human life on the planet. “Continued
emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-
lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing
the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for
people and ecosystems,” the report stated.7

The 2015 Paris Agreement called upon all nations to make voluntary
commitments sufficient to hold global warming to “well below” 2
degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 compared to
preindustrial levels, and set an even lower goal of 1.5 degrees C (2.7
degrees F) for the first time (Chapter 12). Ongoing research
indicated that warming was occurring more rapidly than scientists
had anticipated, and that even a 2-degree C increase could trigger
catastrophic climatic effects.8 The IPCC was thus asked to examine
the feasibility of the 1.5-degree goal. Its report, issued in October
2018, proved alarming. It concluded that the world was well on its
way to this limit and, without drastic reductions in carbon emissions,
could surpass it as early as 2040. It stated further that unless GHG
emissions were reduced by 45 percent by 2030, and totally
eliminated by 2050 or shortly thereafter, the planet could experience
uncontrollable climate changes.9 The recognition that drastic
emission cuts were required within a decade created an
unprecedented sense of pessimism and crisis by 2019. Other
scientific reports on potential threats to the global food chain, on
ocean warming and disruption of marine life, and on more rapidly
rising sea levels contributed to the new sense of urgency as the
decade ended.10

A wealth of sectoral data further confirms these trends. The year

2020 was predicted to be the warmest on record, and the 2010
decade as a whole was easily the warmest ever measured.11
Warming at higher latitudes was especially acute. Arctic sea ice and
permafrost were melting at an accelerating rate, as was the
Greenland ice cap; and large sheets of Antarctic ice were breaking
off in record temperatures there.12 On land, many areas of the
United States have already exceeded a 2-degree C rise, altering
seasonal patterns and economic life.13 The increasing strength and
duration of hurricanes in the southeastern United States and the
Atlantic have been attributed to warmer ocean waters.14 Heavy rain
events and flooding have also become more frequent, especially in
the Midwest.15 Massive wildfires in California, Europe, and Australia
in 2018, 2019, and 2020 were linked in part to extended heat waves
and drought conditions.16

As serious as these trends are for the United States and other
wealthy developed countries, they are potentially far more disastrous
for the majority of people living in the developing world. As pointed
out by Richard Tobin in Chapter 13, high population growth and
rising use of energy, as well as food and freshwater resources
threatened by climate change, are already stressing ecosystems to
the breaking point.17 Many of the poorest cities are in low-lying
coastal areas that may become uninhabitable by mid-century.
According to one recent study, one billion people will have to migrate
or adapt to severely changed conditions for every 1 degree C of
global average warming.18 The consequences of climate change will
thus affect every aspect of government policy, including foreign
policy and national security.

According to a 2019 UN report, global temperatures are on track to

rise as much as 3.2 degrees Celsius (5.8 degrees F) by the end of
the century, with catastrophic consequences. Another recent study
concluded that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)
levels could lead to even greater temperature increases.19 The UN
report estimated that to avoid such disastrous warming, GHG
emissions would have to begin falling by 7.6 percent each year
beginning in 2020.20 Instead, global CO2 and methane levels
continued to rise despite a temporary slowdown in 2020 due to the
coronavirus.21 It will thus take an unprecedented level of both
domestic and international policy action in coming years to mitigate
these trends.

President Obama made a historic commitment in his negotiations

with China and in the 2015 Paris Agreement to reduce US carbon
emissions by 26–28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 (Chapter
12). This national pledge was based heavily on implementation of
the Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon emissions from power plants
and on raising average fuel economy standards for cars and light
trucks to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, policies which Trump
rejected. It is debatable whether these and other Obama initiatives
would have enabled the United States to reach the 26–28 percent
target by 2025. US energy-related carbon emissions did, however,
decline about 14 percent between 2005 and 2017, primarily due to
the closure of coal-fired power plants and substitution of natural gas
and renewables in electrical generation and industry. However,
global CO2 emissions rose 21 percent during this same period.22

Despite overwhelming evidence, President Trump continued to

question climate science and filled his administration with climate
change skeptics and deniers, including many lawyers and lobbyists
from the oil and gas industry. Moreover, as detailed in Chapters 1, 4,
and 5, he repeatedly proposed deep budget cuts to virtually all
scientific research programs related to climate change, including
those of the EPA, the Department of Energy, National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Although Congress did not
enact most of these cuts, many career scientists, researchers, and
other experts left government and were not replaced. Both the EPA
and the Interior Department also eliminated numerous scientific
advisory committees and replaced academic scientists on many of
the remaining panels with members friendlier to business and
industry who often lacked scientific qualifications.

When the National Climate Assessment—compiled by thirteen

federal agencies as mandated by Congress—came out in 2017,
Trump dismissed it summarily and abolished the advisory committee
which oversees the assessment process.23 The president further
demonstrated his disdain for science by not appointing a senior
White House science advisor for 18 months. By that time, his
administration had also disbanded other scientific staffs including the
National Security Council’s directorate for global health and
biodefense, which President Obama had established to prepare for
future pandemic outbreaks such as the coronavirus. The damage
done to the research infrastructure throughout the federal
government could take years to repair.

If allowed to stand, the Trump rollbacks will have major

consequences for GHG emissions. For example, the revised fuel
economy standards for cars and trucks—now the largest source of
carbon emissions—would lower the mileage standards from 54 to 40
miles per gallon by 2026, reducing fleetwide fuel efficiency gains
from nearly 5 percent to 1.5 percent annually. The proposed rule
would consequently allow vehicles to emit a billion tons more CO2
over their lifetime than they would have under the Obama standards.
According to one analysis, this would be equivalent to emissions
from 68 coal power plants during that period.24 The new rule was
challenged in court by more than 20 states on grounds that it lacks
both a legal and a scientific basis, but it will encourage automakers
to build more large cars, SUVs, and trucks in coming years.25 In the
electricity sector, the deregulatory reversal of the Clean Power Plan
will wipe out anticipated reductions for GHGs and many air
contaminants. Its replacement by the Affordable Clean Energy rule
may actually lead to net increases during the 2020s in emissions
from power generation by incentivizing sustained use of coal and
natural gas.26

President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and failure

to participate in other international forums on climate change will
also have far-reaching effects. Other countries are now less likely to
meet their climate pledges (Chapter 12), and the administration’s
growing hostility toward China threatened previous collaboration on
such matters as banning hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). Trump’s
attempts to cut off foreign economic assistance to developing
countries for birth control and sustainable development projects were
also likely to be counterproductive (Chapter 13).

Despite the daunting projections of scientists, Trump’s opponents

struggled to unify around a common policy alternative. Progressives
in the Democratic Party first unveiled their proposal for a “Green
New Deal” in December 2018.27 The plan called for radical changes
in line with the recent IPCC warnings, including total reliance on
“clean and renewable” sources of energy for electricity generation by
2035, and “zero net emissions” from fossil fuels by 2050. The
proposal contained some flexibility in allowing, for example, nuclear
power to be considered a “clean” source and in allowing natural gas
and other fossil fuels to be used until mid-century with “carbon
capture” offsets (carbon capture and storage technology). The plan
also proposed net-zero emissions from cars and light duty vehicles
by 2030, followed by “a swift phase out of internal combustion
engines”; net-zero building standards by 2030; 100 percent fossil-
free transportation by 2050; a “green jobs guarantee” to employ
millions; and numerous other proposals to protect clean air and
water and to promote sustainable economic growth and
environmental justice. Many of these principles were embodied in a
nonbinding resolution introduced in Congress by Rep Alexandra
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) in
February 2019.28

Although the resolution had no chance of passage and was never

transformed into full legislative proposals, it did raise climate change
and environmental policy to the top tier of issues in the Democratic
presidential primary campaign. Almost all the candidates endorsed
the concept in principle, while taking different positions on specific
issues. For the first time, one candidate, Gov. Jay Inslee of
Washington, built his entire campaign around climate change, and
most of the other candidates also took strong stances.29 All
candidates pledged to rejoin the Paris Agreement promptly and to
reassert American leadership on the world stage. Former Vice
President Joseph Biden proposed spending $1.7 trillion to leverage
$5 trillion in addition private sector and state and local government
spending over 10 years, with a goal of achieving net-zero carbon
emissions by 2050. After becoming the presumptive nominee, he
adopted a more ambitious platform, including a larger economic
infrastructure and recovery package that would also give greater
protection to poor and minority communities disproportionately
exposed to environmental hazards and affected by the pandemic. He
also vowed to use executive powers to implement policies going well
beyond the Obama administration in which he served. His running
mate, California Senator Kamala Harris, endorsed the general
concept of the Green New Deal and would be expected to be a
strong advocate for environmental justice in a Biden
administration.30

Congressional Democrats have also introduced numerous climate

change bills in the House and Senate and have fought to increase
funding for environmental agencies (Chapter 5). At least eight
separate carbon pricing bills were introduced into the House or
Senate (or both) in the 116th Congress (2019–2020).31 House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) created the House Select
Committee on the Climate Crisis after assuming office in 2019 to
channel legislation. The committee recommended, and the House
passed, for example, a bill requiring the United States to remain in
the Paris Agreement and denying any funding for withdrawal. House
Democrats also proposed a large infrastructure plan in early 2020
that included provisions for making all federal buildings carbon
neutral and for various “green” transportation initiatives.32 In the
Senate, Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) and 33 cosponsors introduced
the “Clean Economy Act of 2020,” which would force the EPA to
adopt rules to eliminate US contributions to global warming by 2050,
and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proposed phasing out gas-
powered cars by 2040.33 Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and several
cosponsors who were then running for president also introduced a
bill in late 2019 that would require the Federal Reserve to conduct
“climate stress tests” of the largest banks and financial institutions to
ensure they gave sufficient assets to handle risks associated with
climate change.34 None of these bills had a chance to pass due to
Republican opposition in the Senate. Nonetheless, some Democrats
worked with Republicans to pass more limited bills, such as
legislation funding climate research and extending tax credits for
carbon capture and storage technologies.

Republicans have been much slower to offer alternative policies.

Although some polls indicate that a significant share of rank-and-file
party members are concerned about climate change and support
more vigorous government action, most Republican leaders have
accepted President Trump’s refusal to recognize the issue and have
remained silent in public.35 Nevertheless, some prominent
Republicans have advocated a national carbon tax (discussed later
in the chapter), and various proposals have been broached in
Congress favoring, among other things, increased energy research
and innovation, tax breaks for natural gas exports, revival of the
nuclear power industry, and large tree-planting programs to absorb
CO2. Twenty-three Republican representatives and seven senators
also belonged to the House and Senate Climate Solutions Caucuses
in 2020. These bipartisan caucuses have worked across the aisle on
legislation, including carbon tax and rebate proposals, as well as
with local organizations such as the nonpartisan Citizens’ Climate
Lobby.36

Many cities and states have continued to oppose the Trump

administration’s climate change rollbacks (see Chapters 2, 11, and
12). Cities account for up to two-thirds of GHG emissions. Leaders of
more than 500 cities, counties, and tribes from every state and 25
state governors joined the America’s Pledge movement by 2020,
vowing to support the Paris Agreement for emissions within their
boundaries. Collectively, these jurisdictions represented 65 percent
of the US population and 51 percent of total national GHG emissions
in 2019. Full implementation of these policies through 2025 without
new federal policies was projected to reduce American emissions 19
percent below the 2005 level, beginning to approach Obama-era
national emission pledges.37

Nearly thirty states already have climate change policies such as

renewable energy portfolio standards and several of them adopted
far more ambitious targets of between 50 and 100 percent
renewables during 2019 and 2020. Many states have already
reduced their carbon emissions from power plants by at least 40
percent compared to 2005 levels, and some states have reduced
emissions even more. They include northeastern and mid-Atlantic
states that are members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative
(RGGI), which began implementing a cap-and-trade system in 2009
(see Chapters 2 and 10). After reducing CO2 emissions by 45
percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the RGGI states committed to
reduce their power plant emissions by an additional 30 percent by
2030 while expanding their collaborative network to include New
Jersey and Virginia.38 California is also a model for the nation and in
2017 extended its landmark climate change legislation to require a
40 percent reduction in total GHG emissions from 1990 levels. In
2020 it adopted new rules requiring that all heavy trucks sold in the
state must have zero emissions by 2045. Governor Gavin Newsom
also issued an executive order to develop a plan for phasing out the
sale of new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks in the state by
2035.39

Numerous private companies, colleges and universities, churches,

and other institutions have also adopted their own sustainability
plans to achieve carbon neutrality. Many large corporations, such as
Apple, Google, Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Anheuser Bush, have
pledged to cut their carbon emissions substantially and/or to obtain
all or most of their electricity from renewable sources. Apple is now
extending these commitments to its supply chains in China and
elsewhere. Some companies and financial institutions, such as
Microsoft and the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, have
already made decarbonization a central goal in their investment
strategies.40 Large banks and insurance companies are under
increasing pressure to follow suit: for example, JPMorgan Chase,
Wells Fargo and Citigroup have all said they will decline funding for
Arctic oil and gas drilling projects.41 According to one business
survey, 84 percent of business decision-makers said they were
aware of the IPCC reports issued in late 2018, and two-thirds of
those said they had reviewed or changed their management
strategies in response to the reports.42

Despite these pledges, much stronger nationwide policies are likely

to be necessary in the future. As the coronavirus pandemic has
demonstrated, state and local governments play critical frontline
roles, but the country as a whole needs far greater leadership and
direction to maximize the effectiveness of our response. Because the
climate crisis is becoming more obvious, and because we have more
scientific data on which to act, most experts believe there is still time
to avert its most devastating consequences if we adopt
comprehensive policies in the coming years. Such policies are likely
to require a broad range of tools affecting every sector of the
economy.43 We look more closely at energy policies in the following
section and other options in later sections.
National Energy Policy
Congress has never been able to agree on a comprehensive
national energy policy. It has, however, passed a handful of energy
bills since the 1970s to encourage certain types of energy
production, as well as numerous other pieces of legislation that
impact energy development and use (see Chapter 5 and Appendix
1). The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 created a
National Petroleum Reserve and a Corporate Average Fuel
Economy (CAFE) standard, the latter requiring US auto
manufacturers to meet an average mileage requirement for its new
cars for the first time. Many of these bills reflected the oil shocks of
the 1970s which have led all presidents since Richard Nixon to
pursue “energy independence” in one form or another. For example,
the Energy Policy Act of 2005 provided massive tax incentives and
loan guarantees for energy production, especially oil, natural gas,
and nuclear power; while the Energy Independence and Security Act
of 2007 raised CAFE standards for the first time in decades and
provided subsidies to alternative fuels, especially biofuels such as
ethanol. The result was a huge increase in oil and gas production as
well as of ethanol for use in gasoline. By 2018, the United States had
become the world’s largest oil and gas producer and began to export
some fuels such as liquid natural gas (LNG) to other countries.44

Although the George W. Bush administration was instrumental in this

expansion, President Obama also followed an “all-of-the-above”
energy strategy that encouraged the development of oil and gas
production as well as of energy from renewable sources.45 Domestic
oil and gas production increased rapidly during Obama’s tenure,
primarily due to a dramatic refinement and expansion of fracking
techniques used to unlock massive oil and gas reserves from shale
deposits; oil imports dropped from 60 percent of national
consumption in 2008 to 17 percent by 2017 and earlier concerns
about gas scarcity disappeared amid massive production upswings.
President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of
2009 also included some $80 billion in spending, tax incentives, and
loan guarantees for renewable energy projects. Energy production
from new sources such as wind and solar increased dramatically in
subsequent years as costs declined. By 2020 renewable energy
accounted for nearly 20 percent of total national electricity
production, up from 10 percent in 2010, and was economically
competitive with fossil fuels in many energy markets, including Texas
and California.46 Collectively, natural gas and renewables would
combine to dramatically reduce coal use for electricity, and wind,
solar, and biofuel production employed far more workers than the
coal mining industry in 2020.47

While presiding over this energy boom, President Obama also

placed increasing restrictions on certain kinds of energy production.
In addition to the climate change measures noted in the previous
section, he tightened rules for offshore oil drilling (in the wake of the
Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico) and placed
more areas of the Atlantic and Alaskan coasts off limits to new oil
leasing through 2022. The Interior Department declared a
moratorium on all new coal leases on public lands; issued new
regulations on oil and gas fracking, including restrictions on methane
flaring and emissions on public lands; and imposed a new rule to
stop coal companies from dumping mining wastes into nearby
streams and rivers. After years of delay, Obama also blocked
construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. In
one of the last acts of his administration, he invoked the 1953 Outer
Continental Shelf Lands Act to ban offshore oil drilling permanently
along wide swaths of Alaska’s coast and the Atlantic seaboard from
Maine to Virginia.48

The other thrust of President Obama’s energy policy was a strong

push for energy conservation and efficiency. In addition to raising
mileage standards for cars and light trucks, new regulations
established fuel economy standards for large trucks and other heavy
vehicles. Standards for building construction and appliance efficiency
were also tightened significantly. Consumers became more aware of
energy use through programs such as Energy Star ratings for
appliances and electronics. Through executive orders and
memoranda, Obama also required all federal agencies, including the
Department of Defense, to assess their carbon footprints and to
reduce energy consumption.

President Trump’s “America First” energy strategy, which was largely

shaped by executives and lobbyists from the fossil fuel industries, as
well as by conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation
and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, called for the elimination of
these and other restrictions and for opening vast new areas to
energy production in order to achieve “energy dominance.”49 Trump
made no effort to advance any of these efforts through legislation,
even during his first two years when Republicans controlled both
chambers of Congress, instead relying exclusively on a range of
executive branch tools. His executive order on “Promoting Energy
Independence and Economic Growth” of March 28, 2017, directed all
executive departments and agencies to “immediately review existing
regulations that potentially burden the development or use of
domestically produced energy resources and appropriately suspend,
revise, or rescind those that unduly burden the development of
domestic energy resources beyond the degree necessary to protect
the public interest or otherwise comply with the law.” The order also
directed agencies to revoke Obama’s climate change plans, to
review fracking and methane regulations, and to end the moratorium
on coal leasing on public lands. This executive order was
complemented by others, often leading to protracted administrative
review processes designed to weaken or eliminate Obama-era
provisions.

These efforts included provisions designed to open up large areas of

the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans to oil and gas leasing and roll back
many of the safety rules for offshore drilling adopted after the
Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.50 Millions of acres of public
land were leased by the Department of Interior throughout the West
as rules governing methane releases and fracking were relaxed,
including areas previously protected under the Endangered Species
Act or near national parks and wilderness areas.51 The Bears Ears
and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments in Utah were
drastically reduced in size and potentially opened for mining and
energy development (Chapter 9). The administration also inserted a
provision into its 2017 tax reform bill that would open the remote
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to commercial oil and gas
drilling for the first time.52

The Department of Energy (DOE) also attempted to invoke national

security powers to prolong the life of aging coal and nuclear plants in
order to bail these industries out, though largely without success.53
In 2018 DOE officially proclaimed that it was no longer necessary to
conserve oil, and the next year even announced plans to roll back a
rule dating from the Bush administration that set energy efficiency
standards for light bulbs.54 President Trump also placed a 25
percent tariff on imported solar panels, which cost the US solar
industry an estimated 62,000 jobs.55 Finally, under the 2020
appropriations bill tax credits for solar energy will be phased out by
2022 unless restored by a future Congress, unlike tax benefits for
fossil fuel production that retained protection.56

As noted in the previous section, and in Chapters 2, 8, 9, and 12,

states also play important roles in regulating energy development
and the implementation of federal policies. Most states have their
own renewable portfolio standards which require utilities to produce
a growing share of energy from renewable sources, and many have
their own energy efficiency standards and offer incentives to promote
sales of electric vehicles and solar systems, as detailed in Chapter 8.
Although there has been some backsliding, most states with clean
energy requirements have maintained them and many have acted
unilaterally or in concert to oppose many of Trump’s initiatives. For
example, Florida and numerous other coastal states immediately
demanded exemptions from proposed offshore drilling expansion,
resulting in the renewal of drilling bans off several of them as
mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 4. Other states, such as
those dependent on tourism or which have already invested heavily
in solar and wind energy, also oppose preferential treatment for fossil
fuels. “Red” states such as Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Iowa
have been leaders in wind energy production and have generally
remained committed to these industries through various tax and
regulatory provisions. Other states, such as California and the 14
“bandwagon” states which embraced its rigorous vehicle emission
standards, launched an aggressive legal battle led by their attorneys
general to retain them, as discussed in Chapter 2. Whether Trump’s
unprecedented attempt to rescind California’s waiver to set higher
standards for emissions under the Clean Air Act (CAA) is upheld in
the courts will thus have major consequences for the nation.

National and global market forces also play a large, and often
dominant, role in energy production. The rapid decline of coal mining
and coal power generation in favor of cheaper natural gas was
primarily driven by market forces which continued under Trump. In
2020, more electricity was expected to be produced from renewable
sources than from coal in the United States for the first time.57 The
world oil glut and collapse of crude oil prices and stock market
values during the pandemic crisis discouraged investment in new oil
and gas production, at least temporarily.58 However, low gasoline
prices will also encourage consumers to buy less-efficient vehicles
and undermine efforts to achieve a low-carbon future. States will be
under increased economic pressure to relax their environmental
standards and compete for business and resources during the
coronavirus pandemic. Additional national intervention, such as a
federal carbon tax or renewable energy standard, as well as revised
“command and control” regulations, will thus be necessary if the
clean energy transition is to accelerate to meet climate change
imperatives. We discuss some of these alternatives later in the
chapter.
Air and Water Pollution
Our current focus on energy and climate change should not blind us
to more traditional environmental problems such as air and water
pollution which affect most people directly. These forms of pollution
are regulated by the EPA under statutes written largely in the 1970s
and, in some cases, revised in the 1980s and 1990s (see Chapters 5
and 7). As pointed out in Chapter 1, air quality has improved greatly
over the decades, with aggregate emissions of the six “criteria”
pollutants controlled by the CAA falling by 74 percent between 1970
and 2018—despite the fact that our economy increased by more
than 241 percent over that period. Emissions of other pollutants such
as hazardous chemicals and toxic metals have also declined
markedly. Nevertheless, air quality varies greatly in different localities
and among different population groups, with many urban areas still
suffering high concentrations of ozone, particulates, heavy metals,
and chemicals that can cause severe health effects and even death.
In 2018, 41 percent of Americans still lived in counties that had at
least one major type of air pollution that exceeds EPA standards.
Many poor urban neighborhoods are especially polluted, raising
environmental justice concerns.

Among the most controversial policies of the George W. Bush

administration were efforts to weaken the CAA by exempting power
plants from the New Source Review (NSR) provisions of the law
which require technological updates when plants increase production
or expand capacity. Although the federal courts eventually struck
down the rule in 2007, it slowed progress toward controlling the
largest sources of conventional air pollutants as well as GHGs during
the Bush years. Two other rules required by the CAA—the Clean Air
Interstate Rule (CAIR) to limit emissions from power plants that
pollute neighboring states in the eastern half of the country and the
Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR) to regulate mercury and other
hazardous air emissions—were proposed by the Bush
administration, but both were also found inadequate by the courts.
Under Obama, the EPA issued a new Mercury and Air Toxics
Standard (MATS) in 2011, which further tightened emission
standards for mercury, lead, asbestos, and other hazardous air
pollutants from coal- and oil-fired electric utility plants. The EPA also
issued a new Cross-State Air Pollution Rule in 2011 to replace the
Bush CAIR. The new rule required power plants in twenty-seven
eastern states to limit emissions of pollutants such as sulfur dioxide,
nitrogen oxides, and fine particulates that affect downwind states. If
implemented, the Obama regulations limiting carbon emissions from
new and existing power plants would have cut emissions of all of the
conventional air pollutants as well. In proposing the Clean Power
Plan in June 2014, for example, the EPA stated that it would have
major “co-benefits” by reducing emissions of conventional pollutants
by more than 25 percent, which would avoid up to 6,600 premature
deaths and 150,000 asthma attacks in children.

The Trump administration chose not to count such co-benefits in its

cost–benefit calculations and drastically reduced its estimates of
future pollution control benefits generally, as explained in Chapter
7.59 And although President Trump defined “clean air and water” as
the “core mission” of the EPA, his administration attempted to relax
many of the Obama-era regulations and celebrated these steps in its
annual reports as economic achievements, overcoming
environmental extremism.60 Its proposed Affordable Clean Energy
rule for power plants intended to allow them to release more
conventional pollutants such as fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and
nitrogen oxides as well as more CO2; by the EPA’s own analysis, this
could result in up to 1,400 additional premature deaths and 15,000
new cases of upper respiratory disease annually by 2030.61 The
EPA also proposed revising the MATS rule to allow higher limits on
mercury and other toxic air emissions from power plants.62

In rewriting these rules, the EPA altered its own methods for
calculating health benefits in order to justify additional rollbacks,
often ignoring its own scientific advisers.63 In addition, it also
attempted to severely limit the kinds of public health research that
can be utilized in rulemaking by excluding epidemiological studies
that do not publish their raw data due to privacy concerns. If
approved, the new “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory
Science” rule could eliminate consideration of the scientific data
underpinning most of EPA’s air and water regulations, including
those controlling chemical releases to the environment.64 Finally,
administration enforcement of New Source Review and other
reporting requirements under the CAA declined sharply to allow
older, dirtier plants to continue operating with minimal federal
oversight.65 Although full data are not yet available, it appears that
ambient air concentrations of at least some air pollutants, such as
PM2.5, increased after 2016.66

Much the same can be said for water pollution. During the campaign
Donald Trump repeatedly promised to rescind the Waters of the
United States (WOTUS) rule, which was issued by the Obama
administration in 2015 to clarify which streams, smaller tributaries,
and wetlands are covered by the Clean Water Act (CWA) in the
wake of the Supreme Court’s confusing Rapanos decision of 2006
(see Chapters 6 and 9). This revised rule was strongly opposed by
farmers and ranchers, construction companies, oil and gas drillers,
and other business interests as government “overreach” that violated
local land use laws, and it was temporarily enjoined in most states by
lower federal courts.67 The EPA announced formal plans to repeal
and replace the rule in late 2018, withdrew it and reinstated the old
rule in 2019, and issued its replacement rule in January 2020.68 The
new rule, issued by the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers which
jointly administer the law, could exclude millions of miles of smaller
seasonal streams and, by some calculations, more than half of the
nation’s wetlands, from protection under the CWA even if they have
periodic surface or subsurface hydrological connections to navigable
waters. Individual permits for discharges or draining into these
excluded bodies of water will no longer be required, raising public
health concerns among many scientists who opposed the change.69
However, in April 2020 the Supreme Court cast doubt on whether
this provision of the rule would stand.70
These changes could affect drinking water quality in many areas of
the country. As noted in Chapter 1, the Safe Drinking Water Act is
largely implemented by state and local governments which often lack
resources to detect and control contaminants, especially runoff from
sources such as agricultural fields, feedlots, golf courses, and
construction sites. Although data on groundwater pollution are
sketchy, it appears that millions of wells and other drinking water
sources across the country are contaminated with unsafe levels of
nitrates and pesticides, especially in poor rural areas.71 Many other
toxic substances are also being found in urban and suburban water
supplies, in some cases worsened by increased flooding from major
storms.72 Coal ash from power plants is another potential source of
water pollution. Despite the fact that these wastes contain arsenic,
lead, mercury and other contaminants that have leaked into both
groundwater and watersheds, in 2019 the Trump administration
moved to scale back President Obama’s 2015 ash disposal
regulations and exempt many power plants from them.73

High levels of other hazardous industrial toxins, including PFAS

“forever” chemicals such as PFOA that have been linked to cancer,
birth defects, and other health issues, have also been detected in
many areas. After long delays, EPA launched a nationwide “action
plan” to deal with these chemicals in 2019, but it is unclear how
much priority it will have, how chemical risks will be assessed, and
how local water authorities will benefit.74 In May 2020 the EPA
refused to set a safe drinking water standard for perchlorate, a
chemical used in rocket fuel that has long been detected in drinking
water and which is known to cause brain damage in fetuses and
newborns and thyroid problems in adults.75

However, in a rare act of bipartisanship Congress passed an

omnibus water development act in 2018 (America’s Water
Infrastructure Act of 2018), which strengthened provisions of the
Safe Drinking Water Act for the first time since 1996 and provided
funding to assist public water systems in poor and disadvantaged
communities (including lead removal).76 Congress has also
continued funding some large watershed programs such as the
Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, and voted in 2019 to permanently
fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses money
collected from oil and gas drilling to protect public lands and
waters.77
ALTERNATIVE POLICY APPROACHES
Traditional “command-and-control” regulation has been generally
successful in improving environmental quality since the 1960s
(Chapter 1). Nevertheless, critics of the EPA have long argued that
its “one size fits all” regulations are economically inefficient and often
inappropriate for specific local circumstances. Legal mandates under
these rules have also resulted in endless litigation and have tended
to discourage innovation and voluntary advancements that could
improve outcomes (though most laws allow states to set higher
standards if they choose to). Many environmental policy scholars
have thus advocated new forms of “smart regulation” that utilize
more flexible, less intrusive, and more cost-effective methods for
reducing pollution and addressing other environmental problems.78
Economists from across the ideological spectrum have advocated
market-based regimes that provide price signals which discourage
polluting activities while maximizing economic efficiency, as
explained in Chapter 10.79 These proposals have taken two primary
forms.

Cap-and-trade systems set overall limits on the quantity of pollution

emissions allowed and lower the number of allowances or permits
available for use over time to meet reduction goals. After initial
allocations, affected entities can buy and sell emission allowances,
with the price being determined by the trading market. As the cap is
tightened, the price of allowances should go up, encouraging
companies to cut their emissions or incur higher costs for
allowances. Theoretically, this form of market pricing and trading
gives regulated parties freedom to make their own decisions and
should result in the most cost-effective way of lowering pollution,
starting with sources with the lowest reduction costs. The first large-
scale cap-and-trade program was launched by the G. H. W. Bush
administration in 1990, focusing on sulfur dioxide emissions for
electric power plants under the CAA, where it received far-reaching
recognition as a cost-effective source of environmental protection.80
The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which passed
in the House of Representatives but died in the Senate in 2010,
would have established an economy-wide system of this kind to
control GHGs.

Despite the act’s failure, two large GHG emissions trading systems
are operating today in the United States and a growing number
operate around the world.81 The RGGI market, now including 11
states, began operations in 2009 and the California system launched
in 2012 with a foreign partner in the Canadian province of Québec.
RGGI focuses exclusively on the electricity sector and has
completed several multistate reviews leading to ongoing tightening of
its emissions cap. It also pioneered the use of auctions to allocate
emission allowances rather than free distribution, thereby producing
more than three billion dollars for participating states in its first
decade that facilitated energy efficiency and renewable energy
development in many of them.82 The California-Québec system is
much broader in scope, cutting across numerous emission sectors
and generating a consistently higher auction price during its initial
years of operation, while also exploring possible expansion with
other states such as Oregon and Washington. As a result of these
dual systems, more than 100 million people, or nearly one-third of
the American population, are now covered by such systems, which
have already contributed to substantial carbon emission reductions.
In 2019–2020 New Jersey and Virginia took formal steps to join
RGGI, and Pennsylvania Governor Thomas Wolf launched plans to
follow their lead. In 2020 a dozen northeastern American states
actively explored creation of a transportation-focused sequel to
RGGI, through a “cap-and-invest” program intended to implement a
pricing system for vehicle transportation in the region and return
revenue to participating states for development of more carbon-
friendly transit alternatives. The European Union has struggled
mightily in its extended attempts to launch a continental cap-and-
trade system for carbon but has implemented recent reforms that
appear to make it considerably more effective and a centerpiece of
its ambitious climate plans for the future.83 China experimented for
nearly a decade with a suite of locally based emission trading
programs and transitioned in 2020 toward implementation of a
national version. Other Asian nations were exploring possible cap-
and-trade development in 2020.84

Cap-and-trade has registered some genuine successes but has

proven more administratively complex and politically contentious
than many of its proponents anticipated. As a result, a number of
economists, business leaders, and politicians of different political
persuasions have instead embraced carbon taxes as an alternative
system for pricing carbon emissions.85 In principle, taxing CO2 or
other forms of pollution via taxes or fees could achieve cost-effective
outcomes similar to those of emission trading systems, as explained
in Chapter 10. Taxes are also easier to administer and more
transparent, thus conveying clearer signals to consumers; and the
proceeds can be rebated to taxpayers as a credit or dividend to
offset higher fuel prices or invested in energy transition. Five Nordic
nations (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden)
pioneered this concept in the early 1990s, all adopting carbon taxes
with high rates that proved durable and demonstrated an ability to
reduce demand for fossil fuels and GHGs. Many other European
nations maintain some form of a carbon tax alongside their
continental cap-and-trade program and there has been expanding
development of such taxes among nations in Asia and South
America.86

In its landmark climate report of October 2018, the IPCC stated that
putting a price on CO2 emissions must become a central strategy if
we are to limit global warming. The report drew heavily on the work
of Yale economist William D. Nordhaus, who was awarded a share
of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics for his decades-long advocacy
of carbon taxes as the most efficient method for reducing GHG
emissions.87 In January 2019, a group of 45 prominent economists,
including 27 Nobel laureates and almost all former chairs of the
Federal Reserve Board and of the Council of Economic Advisers in
both Democratic and Republican administrations, signed a letter in
the Wall Street Journal endorsing a US carbon tax as “the most cost-
effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed
that is necessary.”88 In late 2019 the International Monetary Fund
came out for a global tax of $75 per ton of CO2 by 2030.89

On the other hand, taxes do not guarantee any given level of

emissions reduction and could face even greater political opposition.
Some of these obstacles might be overcome if these taxes were
revenue neutral—that is, part of a larger tax reform in which other
taxes such as corporate, income, or payroll taxes were
simultaneously reduced to offset the carbon tax—or if the tax
revenues were returned to citizens or taxpayers in the form of
dividend checks or tax credits. Such a system has been used
successfully in British Columbia for more than a decade and is a
model for a national system now being implemented across Canada
(see Chapter 2).

The latter approach has been gaining support among some

prominent Republicans, corporate executives, and conservatives. In
2017 former Treasury Secretaries James A. Baker III, George P.
Shultz, and Henry M. Paulson Jr. proposed a tax beginning at $40
per ton of CO2, which would raise an estimated $200–$300 billion a
year. The money would be returned to consumers as a “carbon
dividend” estimated at $2,000 annually for an average family of
four.90 A revised version of this proposal was reintroduced in early
2020 on behalf of the Climate Leadership Council, a bipartisan group
which includes many economists, corporate executives, and former
high government officials. The new plan would impose a “carbon fee”
of $43 per ton beginning in 2021 that would increase every year by
five percent above inflation, while simultaneously streamlining
related regulations to reduce compliance costs. Proponents claimed
that this approach would lower carbon emissions more rapidly than
Obama’s policies and more than meet his pledge for emission
reductions under the Paris Agreement.91 All proceeds would be
returned to taxpayers in quarterly dividend checks.

These proposals face an uphill fight, especially following the

economic recession and massive deficit spending resulting from the
coronavirus pandemic. Many have noted the failure of carbon tax
initiatives in Washington State and the “yellow jacket” protests
against gas tax increases in France in 2016 and 2018.92 Critics have
long noted the challenges of achieving fairness in imposing costs
across various income groups and then determining how to allocate
revenues. David Leonhardt has also argued that carbon taxes will
remain unpopular because they emphasize the means rather than
the ends of policy and imply a negative need for sacrifice, whereas
positive proposals for clean energy performance standards and
subsidies for green job creation are far more popular among
voters.93 Actual costs per unit of emission reduction may be
considerably higher in these nonpricing options, but it is harder for
citizens to see this in their daily lives. Several Democratic candidates
for president in 2020 endorsed carbon taxes, although the final two
contenders, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, were more equivocal
about their commitment to this tool than in prior campaigns.94
Instead they advanced their alternative versions of a Green New
Deal that emphasized major new federal spending on green energy
and regulation rather than pricing carbon. The idea of a carbon tax or
cap-and-trade thus remained one option among many in the early
2020s in the United States but its economic advantages were offset
by its political challenges.

Voluntary collaboration and self-policing programs are another

alternative to traditional regulation. In this approach, regulated
parties such as corporations or industrial sectors voluntarily agree to
meet higher performance standards than required by law, in return
for greater regulatory flexibility. Most of these programs were created
during the Clinton administration as part of its “reinventing
government” initiative.95 Although many of these experiments failed
to produce measurably better results than traditional regulation and
have been discontinued, they did help some sectors of business and
industry to improve their environmental management and reporting,
and in some cases their operations. But stronger organization and
governmental supervision, or effective oversight by independent
bodies, appear necessary if a genuine “greening”—defined as a
transformation to sustainable production—is to occur (Chapter 14).
One key to stronger environmental performance is public disclosure
of information. The leading example of such information disclosure is
the federal Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), which has operated since
the late 1980s. Over twenty thousand industrial facilities a year
report on their release of some 650 toxic chemicals to the air, water,
or land. The information is made available to the public in a variety of
ways, including through the EPA’s own TRI website.

The key assumption of such policies is that an informed public may

bring some pressure to bear on poorly performing industrial facilities
and their parent companies, what some have called regulation by
embarrassment. It is just as likely that companies will seek to avoid
such public censure by proactively altering their production
processes to reduce chemical releases even if they are not subject
to any regulatory requirements to do so. Although the disclosed
information is often quite technical and difficult to translate into
meaningful risks to the public’s health, the program has led to
significant decreases in the release of toxic chemicals over time, as
well as to improved environmental performance on the part of
industry.96

The success of some information disclosure programs such as the

TRI led the federal government to try much the same approach with
GHG releases. The EPA maintained a Greenhouse Gas Reporting
Program (GHGRP) that collected and released emissions data from
facilities in forty-one different source categories and that was easily
accessible by the public. Much like the TRI, the GHGRP was created
under the assumption that facilities would seek to reduce their
emissions precisely because the data are available to the public.
However, the Trump administration terminated this program and no
longer provides this information. Nonprofit organizations, of course,
can play a very similar role, as demonstrated by the Carbon
Disclosure Project. Since 2007, it has ranked companies on their
carbon emissions. Other GHGs such as methane could also be
folded into a climate-focused information disclosure system,
particularly as increasingly sophisticated technologies including
satellite and drone surveillance add new precision to traditional
voluntary reporting of estimated releases. However, no such federal
system has ever been attempted, and only a handful of states have
taken any steps to explore this option on their own.

Another promising policy approach, local and regional sustainability

planning, has been used with impressive results in many cities and
regions in the United States as well as in other nations. The concept
of sustainability or sustainable development came into wide use
following the 1987 Brundtland Commission report and later at the
Earth Summit of 1992. It also was promoted heavily during the
Clinton administration by the President’s Council on Sustainable
Development (PCSD), which focused on how communities might
develop “bold, new approaches to achieve economic, environmental,
and equity goals.”97

As Chapter 11 showed, both large and small cities in the nation have
embarked on intriguing programs to pursue economic development
in a way that seeks to integrate environmental and equity
considerations into the equation. Although some of the cities, such
as Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, are well known and
often celebrated for their remarkable sustainability achievements and
their highly supportive local citizenry, they are by no means the only
examples of successful sustainability planning. New efforts to
promote sustainability are found in large cities such as New York,
Chicago, and Los Angeles; midsized cities such as San Francisco,
Austin, and Boston; and smaller cities such as Boulder, Colorado,
and Chattanooga, Tennessee. These often include innovative
programs to improve air quality, water quality, building efficiency and
energy use, local transportation planning, land use, water
conservation, and more. Some cities also are moving ahead in
planning for adaptation to climate change. Two other critical needs
are a committed investment in scientific research and development
and the improvement of public education in science. As evident
throughout the book, little progress is possible on environmental
challenges without strong scientific evidence to document the
problems the nation faces and to identify potential solutions. The role
of science is particularly important today when public trust in science
and scientists appears to be in decline and political ideology often
distorts scientific findings.98 The United States historically has been
highly supportive of investment in scientific research and technology
development, and both Democratic and Republican administrations
have given such research a high priority. Yet the Trump
administration consistently proposed massive cuts to both basic and
applied research programs throughout the federal government. Its
fiscal 2021 budget request to Congress continued the pattern. The
EPA’s science and technology programs were slated for a cut of 37
percent.99
ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE FOR
THE FUTURE
The environmental policies adopted following Earth Day in 1970
have served the nation well but have also become matters of deep
political disagreement. Over the past quarter-century the regulatory
systems established by the CAA, CWA, and other founding statutes
have come under increasing attack by political and economic
interests determined to undermine or destroy them. The Trump
administration represented the culmination of these pressures as the
EPA and other environmental agencies were largely captured by
industries that have long opposed federal regulation. If the resulting
policy changes survive judicial scrutiny and electoral turnovers, they
could set our national system of environmental protection back at
least a generation.

A post-Trump presidency could quickly reverse many of these

changes through executive action, continuing the policy cycling of
recent administrations (Chapter 4). But the task for the future will
require more fundamental alterations in how policy is made and
implemented. Without public and congressional involvement to
legitimize policies, they are not likely to prove effective for long.
Many of the older laws require updating and revision to eliminate
loopholes and reduce bureaucratic rigidities and other inefficiencies.
Most importantly, Congress must come to grips with the most
challenging problem of climate change by enacting a national
strategy and series of policies to sharply limit US carbon emissions
in the coming decades. Congress must also provide adequate
funding and support for the agencies and personnel in the forefront
of this battle, especially the scientific and technical staffs that have
the expertise to assess evidence and design responses that will best
help to mitigate climate change.

Many alternatives have been discussed in this chapter and

throughout this volume. In addition to restoring traditional regulatory
standards where necessary, we could draw on the experience of
many states within the United States, as well as from numerous
other countries mentioned above, in creating new, more
economically efficient, regimes for encouraging the transition already
underway from reliance on fossil fuels to alternative energy sources.
Nearly one-third of Americans already live within cap-and-trade
regimes that have proved effective in driving down carbon emissions
through market incentives. Congress could once again attempt to
enact a national carbon pricing system, perhaps drawing on the new
Canadian system established in 2019. This system requires
provinces to put a price on carbon emissions either through a cap-
and-trade system or via carbon taxes such as British Columbia has
had for more than a decade. Many countries throughout the world
have different forms of carbon pricing, and it is encouraging that
influential figures in both American political parties, as well as many
distinguished economists and business leaders, have expressed
support for a national carbon tax or “fee” that could be returned to
citizens as a carbon “dividend” which could more than offset higher
fuel costs. Alternatively, some or all of these tax revenues could be
used to fund sustainable energy investments, following the RGGI
model in the northeast. Another possibility—especially given the high
level of unemployment created by the pandemic—is creation of a
new federal jobs program for modernizing our national energy
infrastructure, as recommended by former energy secretary Ernest
Moniz.100

There are many other encouraging signs. Most of the states, cities,
corporations, colleges and universities, and other institutions that
have made commitments to reduce and eliminate their carbon
footprints are making progress toward these goals regardless of the
administration in Washington. A strong case can be made for this
kind of “bottom up” approach in coming years.101 The experience of
the COVID-19 epidemic has forced state and local governments to
take on much greater responsibility for public health and has made
people more aware of their own lifestyles. If they can be maintained
and strengthened, state and local programs and private actions can
have a large impact even when Washington is unable to act. Indeed,
alliances among strong states and other institutions with high
performance standards may be the most effective drivers of
technological innovation in the near term.

In any case, it is increasingly apparent that green economy initiatives

are not incompatible with economic growth and prosperity, but rather
can be combined in positive-sum strategies, as Daniel Fiorino
explains in Chapter 14. Many investments that reduce dependence
on fossil fuels and polluting chemicals save companies money,
improve their reputation, and create millions of jobs that improve
human health and welfare. More and more corporations and financial
institutions recognize that future limits to growth are more likely to
come from negative ecosystem feedbacks such as climate change
and disease vectors than from shortage of capital or opportunities to
invest in new technologies.102 Private, nonprofit, and public alliances
began to expand creative efforts to pool financial resources to
support these transitions through instruments such as green banks
and bonds.103 Indeed, several states began to consider ways to
promote expanded green investment through these types of
instruments and cover bond repayment through carbon price
revenues, viewing them as environmentally sound initiatives that
might also promote economic development.104

The United States cannot resolve the climate crisis alone—it must
rejoin the other nations of the world in the Paris Agreement and
increase support for other international bodies that are collaborating
to bring about the global energy transition necessary to avoid the
most damaging effects of climate change. The Trump
administration’s attempt to isolate the United States from global
environmental diplomacy was unsustainable for many reasons, not
least because whatever happens in the rest of the world will directly
affect us. A strong argument can be made on national security as
well as economic grounds that the United States must exert
leadership in this area if the world is to avoid recurring natural
catastrophes, economic disruptions, and political conflicts.105 The
United States has led strong international coalitions in the past, and
must do so again. It must reengage with developing countries as
well.

Times of national crisis have often created opportunities for new

policy agendas in the past, as occurred during the 1960s and 1970s
when new environmental policy cycles were launched in the United
States and internationally. The COVID-19 catastrophe and
associated global economic decline created new conditions that, with
sufficient public concern and business leadership, could stimulate
new rebuilding programs that include measures to prepare for and
mitigate the parallel climate crisis.106 A number of nations lauded for
taking effective steps during the pandemic to minimize public health
risk and find ways to sustain economic activity were among those
that have been leaders on environmental and climate protection,
both historically and in more recent years. Policies for less
burdensome environmental regulation, crash research and
development programs such as those begun during the coronavirus
epidemic, and strong market incentives for technological innovation
could be combined and gain greater bipartisan backing in these
circumstances. The political obstacles are still formidable, but we
believe that the next decade may provide such opportunities, built
upon knowledgeable and passionate citizen action at all levels.
POSTSCRIPT
This book was completed before the 2020 presidential and
congressional elections of November 3, 2020. However, we received
preliminary results of those elections during the final stages of the
production process, and thus we can venture some tentative
conclusions on the likely implications of the elections for
environmental policy in coming years.

During his campaign, Democratic candidate Joseph Biden proposed

the most far-reaching climate change plan to date. He pledged to
spend some $2 trillion over four years to rapidly cut carbon
emissions and build green infrastructure. He espoused national
goals of eliminating fossil fuels from electric power generation by
2035 and of achieving “net zero” carbon emissions no later than
2050. In 2020, about 38 percent of U.S. electricity generation came
from clean sources, such as wind, solar, hydropower, and nuclear
power. Polls continue to tell us that broad swaths of the American
public would back such policies.

However, it remains to be seen if Biden’s victory over Donald Trump

will allow major policy breakthroughs where congressional approval
is essential, for example, in the passage of new legislation or
appropriation measures. Although the final Senate election results
are not available at this writing, it is doubtful that Biden will have a
working majority in Congress sufficient to enact major climate
legislation in the near term. Nevertheless, with the nation suffering
through an historic pandemic crisis and related economic recession,
it is probable that further economic recovery measures will be
approved. Those measures are likely to include spending and
incentives for alternative energy and other “green” infrastructure.
Some legislated version of Biden’s “Build Back Better” program
could thus fulfill some of the critical steps necessary to deal with
climate change.
We can also expect a reversion to the “administrative presidency”
described in Chapter 4 and elsewhere in this volume. That is, a
president can do much on his own without congressional action.
Biden will employ the powers of appointment, budgeting,
reorganization, and executive orders to reverse numerous Trump
policies, most of which also were established in much the same way.
Biden indicated that he will rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate
change, reversing President Trump’s withdrawal from it. Biden also
said the nation once again will play an active role in international
environmental diplomacy beyond that agreement. He could revoke
as many of President Trump’s executive orders and directives as
possible, and also begin the often-lengthy process of rewriting
affected rules and regulations.

In many cases Biden is likely to take unilateral actions that go

beyond those of the Obama administration in which he served. He is
also expected to restore the original boundaries of national
monuments that President Trump had shrunk and limit development
in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in other wild areas such as
the Tongass National Forest. Biden is also very likely to appoint
environmental scientists and other experts to top White House and
Cabinet positions and to advisory posts throughout government, and
to propose budget and staff increases for the EPA and other
agencies to restore their capabilities to what they were prior to the
Trump presidency. Early statements by Biden make clear that
climate change is likely to regain top priority in his White House and
in all relevant agencies, including those of the Departments of
Defense, State, Agriculture, Transportation, and Treasury.

President Biden, like other presidents, will face stiff opposition in

addressing matters such as fracking and methane releases and on
oil and gas leasing on public lands. It will also be difficult to restore
major policies such as the Clean Power Plan and the vehicle fuel
economy standards that were the centerpieces of Obama’s climate
change agenda. It will take lengthy administrative procedures to
replace rules that were finalized before the election, and any new
rules will have to withstand judicial review by a more conservative
judiciary than Obama faced. Still, as explained in Chapter 6, courts
are more likely to slow down policy changes than to reverse them.

Perhaps more significantly, many states and cities will continue to

strengthen and enforce environmental rules and regulations and to
tighten energy portfolio requirements and other performance
standards, even though the 2020 elections did not produce major
shifts in partisan control of state and local governments; these cities
and states will no longer face the prospect of presidential
counteraction. In addition, California and the enlarged RGGI states
are cutting power plant emissions at a significant rate, and California
itself plans to eliminate the sale of gas-powered cars in the state by
2035 as well as to require zero-emission trucks by 2045. Large
corporations and financial institutions also are moving toward clean
energy commitments, and many have set “net zero” emission goals.
Both national and international investment markets are likely to
further these trends regardless of government policies. The policies
of the Trump administration are unlikely to have altered this
fundamental trajectory.

Environmental policy appears to have played a significant role in the

presidential election for the first time, and we are confident that it will
remain near the top of the national political agenda. The
interrelationships of climate change, public health, racial justice, and
economic growth also are likely to become more apparent in the
2020s. We thus believe that continuing progress is likely at all levels
of government and in the private sector in coming years.
NOTES
1. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Inventory of U.S.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2018 (Washington,
DC: EPA, 2020).

2. Lisa Friedman, “Coronavirus Doesn’t Slow Trump’s Deregulatory

Rollbacks,” New York Times, March 25, 2020; Friedman, “E.P.A.,
Citing Coronavirus, Drastically Relaxes Rules for Polluters,” New
York Times, March 26, 2020; Michael R. Bloomberg and Gina
McCarthy, “How Trump’s EPA Is Making Covid-19 More Deadly,”
May 4, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-
04/how-trump-s-epa-is-making-covid-19-more-deadly.

3. Brad Plumer, “Emission Declines Will Set Records This Year. But
It’s Not Good News,” New York Times, April 30, 2020. “Global
carbon dioxide emissions declined 17 percent in April 2020 and were
expected to fall 4–7 percent for the year.” Chris Mooney, Brady
Dennis and John Muyskens, “Global Emissions Plunged an
Unprecedented 17 Percent During the Coronavirus Pandemic,”
Washington Post, May 19, 2020.

4. John Schwartz, “Americans See Climate as Concern, Even Amid

Coronavirus Crisis,” New York Times, May 19, 2020.

5. This and other IPCC reports are available at www.ipcc.ch.

6. Justin Gillis, “Climate Panel Cites Near Certainty on Warming,”

New York Times, August 20, 2013; Gillis, “U.N. Climate Panel Seeks
Ceiling on Global Carbon Emissions,” New York Times, September
28, 2013; Gillis, “Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worst Is Yet to
Come,” New York Times, March 30, 2014.

7. Quoted in Justin Gillis, “U.N. Panel Warns of Dire Effects from

Lack of Action Over Global Warming,” New York Times, November
2, 2014.
8. See Yagyang Xu, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, and David G.
Victor, “Global Warming Will Happen Faster Than We Think,”
Science 564 (2018): 30–2; Naomi Oreskes, Michael Oppenheimer,
and Dale Jamieson, “Scientists Have Been Underestimating the
Pace of Climate Change,” Scientific American, August 19, 2019;
Henry Fountain, “Climate Change Is Accelerating: ‘Things Are
Getting Worse,’” New York Times, December 4, 2019.

9. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Global Warming of

1.5°C, October 6, 2018; Coral Davenport, “Major Climate Report
Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040,” New York
Times, October 7, 2018. For an excellent summary and perspective,
see Nathan Hultman, “We’re Almost Out of Time: The Alarming
IPCC Climate Report and What to Do Next,” Brookings, October 16,
2018.

10. Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, “New U.N. Climate Report:
Monumental Change Already Here for World’s Oceans and Frozen
Regions,” Washington Post, September 25, 2019; Dennis, Steven
Mufson, and Scott Clement, “Americans Increasingly See Climate
Change as a Crisis, Poll Shows,” Washington Post, September 13,
2019.

11. Andrew Freedman, “This Year Is on Track to Be Earth’s Warmest

on Record, Beating 2016, NOAA Says,” Washington Post, April 21,
2020; Brady Dennis, Freedman, and John Muyskens, “2019 Capped
Off the World’s Hottest Decade in Recorded History,” Washington
Post, January 15, 2020.

12. Andrew Freedman, “The Arctic May Have Crossed Key

Threshold, Emitting Billions of Tons of Carbon into the Air, in a Long-
Dreaded Climate Feedback,” Washington Post, December 10, 2019;
Jason Samenow and Freedman, “The Greenland Ice Sheet Is in the
Throes of One of Its Greatest Melting Events Ever Recorded,”
Washington Post, July 31, 2019; Freedman, “Siberian Heat Streak
and Arctic Temperature Record Virtually ‘Impossible’ Without Global
Warming, Study Says,” Washington Post, July 15, 2020; Carolyn
Kormann, “A Disastrous Summer in the Arctic,” New Yorker, June
27, 2020; Henry Fountain, “Loss of Greenland Ice Sheet Reached a
Record Last Year,” New York Times, August 20, 2020.

13. Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin, and John

Muyskens, “Extreme Climate Change Has Arrived in America,”
Washington Post, August 13, 2019; Eilperin, Carolyn Van Houten
and Muyskens, “This Giant Climate Hot Spot Is Robbing the West of
Its Water,” Washington Post, August 7, 2020.

14. Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, “Hurricanes Are Strengthening

Faster in the Atlantic, and Climate Change Is a Big Reason Why,
Scientists Say,” Washington Post, February 7, 2019; Andrew
Freedman and Jason Samenow, “The Strongest, Most Dangerous
Hurricanes Are Now Far More Likely Because of Climate Change,
Study Shows,” Washington Post, May 18, 2020; Henry Fountain and
John Schwartz, “Hurricane Sally’s Fierce Rain Shows How Climate
Change Raises Storm Risks,” New York Times, September 16,
2020; and Tristram Korten, “Hurricanes Near U.S. Coast Forecast to
Worsen and Multiply Due to Global Warming,” Washington Post,
September 27, 2020.

15. Mitch Smith and John Schwartz, “‘Breaches Everywhere’:

Flooding Bursts Midwest Levees, and Tough Questions Follow,” New
York Times, March 31, 2019; Sarah Almukhtar, Blacki Migliozzi, John
Schwartz, and Josh Williams, “The Great Flood of 2019: A Complete
Picture of a Slow-Motion Disaster,” New York Times, September 11,
2019.

16. Carolyn Korman, “How Climate Change Contributed to This

Summer’s Wildfires,” The New Yorker, August 1, 2018; Kendra
Pierre-Louis, “The Amazon, Siberia, Indonesia: A World of Fire,”
New York Times, August 28, 2019; Darryl Fears, “On Land,
Australia’s Rising Heat Is ‘Apocalyptic.’ In the Ocean, It’s Worse,”
Washington Post, December 27, 2019; and Fears, Faiz Siddiqui,
Sarah Kaplan and Juliet Eilperin, “Heat Is Turbocharging Fires,
Drought and Tropical Storms This Summer,” Washington Post,
August 21, 2020.
17. Somini Sengupta and Weiyi Cai, “A Quarter of Humanity Faces
Looming Water Crises,” New York Times, August 6, 2019;
Christopher Flavelle, “Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food
Supply, United Nations Warns,” New York Times, August 8, 2019;
Chris Mooney, “Scientists Triple Their Estimates of the Number of
People Threatened by Rising Seas,” Washington Post, October 29,
2019.

18. Andrew Freedman, “Global Warming to Push Billions Outside

Climate Range That Has Sustained Society for 6,000 Years, Study
Finds,” Washington Post, May 4, 2020.

19. Andrew Friedman and Chris Mooney, “Major New Climate Study
Rules Out Less Severe Global Warming Scenarios,” Washington
Post, July 22, 2020; John Schwartz, “How Much Will the Planet
Warm if Carbon Dioxide Levels Double?,” New York Times, July 22,
2020.

20. Brady Dennis, “In Bleak Report, U.N. Says Drastic Action Is Only
Way to Avoid Worst Effects of Climate Change,” Washington Post,
November 26, 2019.

21. Andrew Friedman and Chris Mooney, “Earth’s Carbon Dioxide

Levels Hit Record High, Despite Coronavirus-Related Emissions
Drop,” Washington Post, June 4, 2020; Brad Plumer and Nadja
Popovich, “Emissions Are Surging Back as Countries and States
Reopen,” New York Times, June 17, 2020; and Hiroko Tabuchi,
“Global Methane Emissions Reach a Record High,” New York Times,
July 14, 2020.

22. Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, “The World Has Just Over a
Decade to Get Climate Change Under Control, U.N. Scientists Say,”
Washington Post, October 7, 2018.

23. Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “EPA Dismisses Half of Its
Scientific Advisers on Key Board, Interior Suspends More Than 200
Advisory Panels in Sweeping Review,” Washington Post, May 8,
2017; Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney, “Major Trump Administration
Climate Report Says Damages Are ‘Intensifying Across the
Country’,” Washington Post, November 23, 2017.

24. Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “Trump Administration to

Finalize Weaker Mileage Standards, Dealing a Blow to Obama-Era
Climate Policy,” Washington Post, March 30, 2020; Coral Davenport,
“Trump Administration, in Biggest Environmental Rollback, to
Announce Auto Pollution Rules,” New York Times, March 30, 2020;
and Nadja Popovich and Brad Plumer, “What Trump’s Environmental
Rollbacks Mean for Global Warming,” New York Times, September
17, 2020.

25. See Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “EPA Staff Warned that
Mileage Rollbacks Had Flaws. Trump Officials Ignored Them,”
Washington Post, May 19, 2020.

26. Amelia T. Keyes, Kathleen F. Lambert, Dallas Burtraw, Jonathan

J. Buonocore, Jonathan I. Levy, and Charles T. Driscoll, “The
Affordable Clean Energy Rule and the Impact of Emissions Rebound
on Carbon Dioxide and Criteria Air Pollutant Emissions,”
Environmental Research Letters 14 (April 2019): 1–14.

27. The text of the full Green New Deal proposal can be found at
www.dataforprogress.org/green-new-deal. See also Elise Viebeck
and David Weigel, “Green ‘New Deal’ Divides Democrats Intent on
Addressing Climate Change,” Washington Post, December 28, 2018.

28. Lisa Friedman and Glenn Thrush, “Liberal Democrats Formally

Call for a ‘Green New Deal,’ Giving Substance to a Rallying Cry,”
New York Times, February 7, 2019; Friedman and Trip Gabriel, “A
Green New Deal is Technologically Possible. Its Political Prospects
Are Another Question.” New York Times, February 21, 2019.

29. For a more nuanced look at different issues, see John Muyskens
and Kevin Urhmacher, “Where 2020 Democrats Stand on Climate
Change,” Washington Post, January 13, 2020.
30. Matt Viser, “Biden’s Vision Comes Into View, and It’s Much More
Liberal Than It Was,” Washington Post, July 12, 2020; Brady Dennis
and Dino Grandoni, “How Joe Biden’s Surprisingly Ambitious
Climate Plan Came Together,” Washington Post, July 31, 2020;
Christopher Flavelle, “Democrats Detail a Climate Agenda Tying
Environment to Racial Justice,” New York Times, June 29, 2020;
Dino Grandoni, “The Energy 202: This Is How Biden’s Climate Plan
Stacks Up to the Green New Deal,” Washington Post, October 9,
2020; and Grandoni, “The Energy 202: Kamala Harris Brings Record
on Climate Change and Environmental Justice to Biden Ticket,”
Washington Post, August 12, 2020.

31. Jason Ye, Carbon Pricing Proposals in the 116th Congress

(Arlington, VA: Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, 2019).

32. Kathryn A. Wolfe, “House Democrats Unveil $760B Infrastructure

Plan with an Ambitious Climate Agenda,” Politico, January 29, 2020.

33. Chuck Schumer, “Chuck Schumer: A Bold Plan for Clean Cars,”
New York Times, October 29, 2019.

34. Dino Grandoni, “2020 Candidates Back Bill to Test Whether Big
Banks Can Withstand Climate Risk,” Washington Post, November
20, 2019.

35. See Arlie Hochschild and David Hochschild, “Republicans Care

About the Climate,” New York Times, December 30, 2018; Justin
Gillis, “The Republican Climate Closet,” New York Times, August 12,
2019.

36. See https://citizensclimatelobby.org/climate-solutions-caucus/ for

the membership of the caucuses.

37. Nathan Hultman et al. Accelerating America’s Pledge: Going All-

In to Build a Prosperous, Low-Carbon Economy for the United States
(New York, NY: Bloomberg Philanthropies, 2020).
38. Lucas Bifera, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI)
(Arlington, VA: Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, 2013),
www.c2es.org/us-states-regions/regional-climate-initiatives/rggi;
“States Dare to Think Big on Climate Change,” editorial, New York
Times, August 28, 2017.

39. Hiroko Tabuchi, “California Set to Require Zero-Emission

Trucks,” New York Times, June 25, 2020; Brad Plumer and Jill
Cowan, “California Plans to Ban Sales of New Gas-Powered Cars in
15 Years,” New York Times, September 23, 2020.

40. Dino Grandoni, “Here’s How Apple Is Trying to Curb Greenhouse

Gas Emissions,” Washington Post, April 11, 2019; David McCabe
and Karen Weise, “Amazon Pledges to Be Carbon Neutral by 2040,”
New York Times, September 18, 2019; Steven Mufson, “More U.S.
Businesses Making Changes in Response to Climate Concerns,”
Washington Post, June 11, 2019; Kara Swisher, “When Will
Companies Finally Step Up to Fight Climate Change?” New York
Times, January 23, 2020; and Rachel Siegel, “BlackRock Makes
Climate Change Central to Its Investment Strategy,” Washington
Post, January 14, 2020.

41. Zack Colman, “Climate Groups Turn Up the Heat on Big Banks,
Insurance Companies,” Politico, January 13, 2020; Bill McKibben,
“Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns,”
New Yorker, September 17, 2019.

42. Steven Mufson, “More U.S. Businesses Making Changes in

Response to Climate Concerns,” Washington Post, June 11, 2019.

43. For examples of some large-scale plans from nongovernmental

organizations, see Elliot Diringer et al., “Getting to Zero: A U.S.
Climate Agenda,” Center for Climate and Energy Solutions,
November 2019, https://indd.adobe.com/view/6a1d2b29-5251-4c23-
8aba-2b02901bd863; Foundation for Climate Restoration, “Climate
Restoration: Solutions to the Greatest Threats Facing Humanity and
Nature Today,” September 2019,
https://foundationforclimaterestoration.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/09/20190916b_f4cr4_white-paper.pdf.

44. Department of Energy, “U.S. Becomes World’s Largest Crude Oil

Producer and Department of Energy Authorizes Short Term Natural
Gas Exports,” September 13, 2018, www.energy.gov/articles/us-
becomes-world-s-largest-crude-oil-producer-and-department-energy-
authorizes-short-term/.

45. White House, Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future (Washington,

DC: White House, March 30, 2011).

46. Ivan Penn, “Oil Companies Are Collapsing, but Wind and Solar
Energy Keep Growing,” New York Times, April 7, 2020.

47. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted that solar voltaic
installers and wind turbine service technicians would be the fastest
growing occupations in the U.S. between 2018 and 2028,
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm.

48. Darryl Fears and Juliet Eilperin, “President Obama Bans Oil
Drilling in Large Areas of Atlantic and Arctic Oceans,” Washington
Post, December 20, 2016.

49. Rick Perry, Ryan Zinke, and Scott Pruitt, “Paving the Way to U.S.
Energy Dominance,” Washington Times, June 27, 2017.

50. Daniel Jacobs, BP Blowout: Inside the Gulf Oil Disaster

(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2016); Kellie Lunney,
Timothy Cana, and Nick Sobcyzk, “Congressional Acton Still Lags a
Decade After Gulf Spill,” E&E News, April 20, 2020.

51. Eric Lipton and Hiroko Tabuchi, “Driven by Trump Policy

Changes, Fracking Booms on Public Lands,” New York Times,
October 28, 2018; Juliet Eilperin, “More Methane: Interior Eases
Rules Curbing Leaks From Oil and Gas Leases on Federal Land,”
Washington Post, September 18, 2018; Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A. to
Roll Back Regulations on Methane, a Potent Greenhouse Gas,” New
York Times, August 29, 2019.

52. Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin, “Trump Administration Opens

Huge Reserve in Alaska to Drilling,” Washington Post, September
13, 2019.

53. Steven Mufson, “Trump-Appointed Regulators Reject Plan to

Rescue Coal and Nuclear Plants,” Washington Post, January 8,
2018; Scott DiSavino, “President Trump Can’t Stop U.S. Coal Plants
From Retiring,” Reuters, January 13, 2019.

54. Ellen Knickmeyer, “US Says Conserving Oil Is No Longer an

Economic Imperative,” Associated Press, August 18, 2018; John
Schwartz, “Trump Administration Blocks Energy Efficiency Rule for
Light Bulbs,” New York Times, December 20, 2019.

55. Miranda Green, “Analysis: Trump Solar Tariffs Cost 62k US

Jobs,” The Hill, December 3, 2019.

56. Dino Grandoni, “Clean Energy Loses Big in Year-End Spending

Bill,” Washington Post, December 18, 2019; Bernard Avishai, “A Lost
Chance to Bring the Green New Deal Home,” The New Yorker,
February 18, 2020.

57. Brad Plumer, “In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse

Coal in U.S.,” New York Times, May 13, 2020. In 2019 almost 8,000
jobs were lost in coal-generated electricity, whereas over 9,100 were
added in natural gas generation and 10,900 jobs were created in
renewable technologies. See National Association of State Energy
Offices and Energy Futures Initiative, 2020 U.S. Energy &
Employment Report, www.usenergyjobs.org.

58. Dino Grandoni, “Oil Glut on Coronavirus May Sink Trump’s 2020
Message on ‘Energy Dominance,’” Washington Post, March 10,
2020; Steven Mufson, “Trump Faces Big Decisions on Energy
Industry Rescue as U.S. Runs Out of Places to Store Abundance of
Oil,” Washington Post, April 27, 2020. Crude oil prices briefly
dropped to negative territory in April 2020 and remained at
historically low levels.

59. Brad Plumer, “Trump Put a Low Cost on Carbon Emissions.

Here’s Why It Matters,” New York Times, August 23, 2018. Trump’s
EPA set the social cost of carbon dioxide emissions at $1–7 per ton,
compared to about $40 per ton under the Obama administration.

60. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Working Together: FY

2018-2022 U.S. E.P.A. Strategic Plan (September 2019); U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Year in Review 2017–2018.

61. Lisa Friedman, “Cost of New E.P.A. Rules: Up to 1,400 More

Deaths a Year,” New York Times, August 21, 2018; Juliet Eilperin,
“EPA’s Scientific Advisers Warn Its Regulatory Rollbacks Clash With
Established Science,” Washington Post, December 31, 2019.

62. Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A. Proposes Rule Change That Would Let
Power Plants Release More Toxic Pollution,” New York Times,
December 28, 2018; Friedman and Coral Davenport, “E.P.A.,
Tweaking Its Math, Weakens Control on Mercury,” New York Times,
April 16, 2020.

63. Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A. Plans to Get Thousands of Deaths Off the
Books by Changing Its Math,” New York Times, May 20, 2019;
Jennifer A. Dlouhy, “EPA Plans to Rewrite Costs and Benefits of
Anti-Pollution Rules,” May 21, 2019,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-21/epa-plans-to-
rewrite-costs-and-benefits-of-anti-pollution-rules.

64. Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A. to Limit Science Used to Write Public

Health Rules,” New York Times, November 11, 2019.

65. Eric Lipton, “E.P.A. Rule Change Could Let Dirtiest Coal Plants
Keep Running (and Stay Dirty),” New York Times, August 24, 2018;
Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “Civil Penalties for Polluters
Dropped Dramatically in Trump’s First Two Years, Analysis Shows,”
Washington Post, January 24, 2019; Friedman, “E.P.A., Citing
Coronavirus, Drastically Relaxes Rules for Polluters” (note 2).

66. Nadia Popovich, “America’s Air Quality Worsens, Ending Years

of Gains, Study Says,” New York Times, October 24, 2019. Wildfires
may also have contributed to this increase.

67. See Sharon Zhang, “Rolling Back Water Rules Doesn’t Help
Most Farmers—It’s for Big Polluters,” Truthout, January 26, 2020, for
numerous references to interests supporting the repeal.

68. Coral Davenport, “Trump Prepares to Unveil a Vast Reworking of

Clean Water Protections,” December 10, 2018; Juliet Eilperin and
Brady Dennis, “Administration Finalizes Repeal of 2015 Water Rule
Called ‘Destructive and Horrible,’” Washington Post, September 11,
2019; Davenport, “Trump Removes Pollution Controls on Streams
and Wetlands,” New York Times, January 22, 2020.

69. See, for example, S. Mazeika, P. Sullivan, Mark C. Rains, and

Amanda D. Rodewald, “Opinion: The Proposed Change to the
Definition of ‘Waters of the United States’ Flouts Sound Science,”
PNAS, July 5, 2019, https://www.pnas.org/content/116/24/11558.

70. Robert Barnes, “Supreme Court Rejects Trump Administration’s

View on Key Aspect of Clean Water Act,” Washington Post, April 23,
2020.

71. Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich, “Poor Americans Exposed to

Unsafe Water, Study Shows,” New York Times, February 13, 2018;
Maura Allaire, Haowei Wu, and Upmanu Lall, “National Trends in
Drinking Water Quality Violations,” PNAS, February 27, 2018,
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/9/2078; Jack Healey, “Rural
America’s Own Private Flint: Well Water Too Polluted to Drink,” New
York Times, November 4, 2018.

72. Hiroko Tabuchi, Nadja Popovich, Blacki Migliozzi, and Andrew W.

Lehren, “Mixing Water and Poison: Thousands of Chemical Sites at
Risk in Floods’ Path,” New York Times, February 7, 2018.
73. Steven Mufson and Brady Dennis, “Report Finds Wide-Spread
Contamination at Nation’s Coal Ash Sites,” Washington Post, March
4, 2019; Juliet Eilperin and Dennis, “EPA to Scale Back Federal
Rules Restricting Waste from Coal-Fired Power Plants,” Washington
Post, November 3, 2019; and Dennis and Eilperin, “Trump
Administration Rolls Back Obama-Era Rule Aimed at Limiting Toxic
Wastewater From Coal Plants,” Washington Post, August 31, 2020.

74. Brady Dennis, “EPA Vows National Action on Toxic ‘Forever’

Chemicals,” Washington Post, February 4, 2019; Coral Davenport,
“E.P.A. Will Study Limits on Cancer-Linked Chemicals. Critics Say
the Plan Delays Action,” New York Times, February 14, 2019. In
April 2020, the White House intervened to weaken the rule under
consideration; see Ellen Knickmeyer, “White House Moves to
Weaken EPA Rule on Toxic Compounds,” Associated Press, April
18, 2020.

75. Rachel Van Dongen, “EPA Backs Away From Regulating

Controversial Chemical in Drinking Water,” Washington Post, May
15, 2020.

76. John Barrasso and Tom Carper, “Water Infrastructure Act Is a

Bipartisan Win for All Americans, From Farms to Cities,” USA Today,
October 23, 2018.

77. See EPA, “Great Lakes Restoration Initiative,” Action Plan III,”
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2019-10/documents/glri-
action-plan-3-201910-30pp.pdf. However, EPA was threatened with
law suits for failure to carry out its Chesapeake Bay plan; see Darryl
Fears and Brady Dennis, “Two States, D.C. Plan to Sue EPA for
Failing to Enforce Chesapeake Bay Cleanup Plan,” Washington
Post, May 18, 2020.

78. See, for example, Robert F. Durant, Daniel J. Fiorino, and

Rosemary O’Leary, eds., Environmental Governance Reconsidered,
2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
79. Gilbert E. Metcalf, Paying for Pollution: Why a Carbon Tax Is
Good for America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019);
Lawrence Goulder and Mark Hafstead, Confronting the Climate
Challenge: U.S. Policy Options (New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, 2018).

80. Eric M. Patashnik, “The Clean Air Acts’ Use of Market

Mechanisms,” in Lessons from the Clean Air Act, eds. Ann Carlson
and Dallas Burtraw (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press,
2019).

81. Barry G. Rabe, Can We Price Carbon? (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2018).

82. Leigh Raymond, “Policy Perspective: Building Political Support

for Carbon Pricing—Lessons from Cap-and-Trade Policies,” Energy
Policy 134 (2019): 1–7.

83. Jörgen Wettestad and Torbjörg Jevnaker, Rescuing EU

Emissions Trading: The Climate Policy Flagship (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016).

84. Lawrence Goulder, Xianling Long, Jieyi Lu, Richard D.

Morgenstern, China’s Unconventional Nationwide CO2 Emissions
Trading System, Resources for the Future Working Paper 20-02
(January 2020); Harvard Project on Climate Agreements,
Subnational Climate Change Policy in China (2020).

85. Heather Long, “‘This Is Not Controversial’: Bipartisan Group of

Economists Calls for Carbon Tax,” Washington Post, January 16,
2019.

86. Rabe, Can We Price Carbon?, Chapter 8.

87. Brad Plumer, “New U.N. Climate Report Says Put a High Price
on Carbon,” New York Times, October 18, 2018; Coral Davenport,
“After Nobel in Economics, William Nordhaus Talks About Who’s
Getting His Pollution-Tax Ideas Right,” New York Times, October 13,
2018.

88. “Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends,” Wall Street

Journal, January 17, 2019.

89. Chris Mooney and Andrew Freedman, “The World Needs a

Massive Carbon Tax in Just 10 Years to Limit Climate Change, IMF
Says,” Washington Post, October 10, 2019.

90. John Schwartz, “‘A Conservative Climate Solution’: Republican

Group Calls for a Carbon Tax,” New York Times, February 7, 2017;
George P. Shultz and Lawrence H. Summers, “This Is One Climate
Solution That’s Best for the Environment—and for Business,”
Washington Post, June 19, 2017; Schwartz, “Exxon Mobil Lends Its
Support to a Carbon Tax Proposal,” New York Times, June 20, 2017.

91. George P. Shultz and Ted Halstead, “The Winning Conservative

Climate Solution,” Washington Post, January 16, 2020; and, for a
more detailed version, James A. Baker, Shultz and Halstead, “The
Strategic Case for U.S. Climate Leadership: How Americans Can
Win With a Pro-Market Solution,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2020;
See also Climate Leadership Council, “The Pricing Advantage,”
January 2020, https://clcouncil.org/pricing-advantage.pdf.

92. See, for example, Justin Gillis, “Forget the Carbon Tax for Now,”
New York Times, December 27, 2018.

93. David Leonhardt, “The Problem with Putting a Price on the End
of the World,” New York Times, April 9, 2019.

94. Emma Newburger, “‘Hit Them Where It Hurts’: Several 2020

Democrats Want a Carbon Tax on Corporations,” CNBC, September
20, 2019, www.cnbc.com/2019/09/20/buttigieg-warren-harris-yang-
and-others-embrace-carbon-tax.html.

95. Daniel J. Fiorino, The New Environmental Regulation

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), Chapter 5; Fiorino, “Regulatory
Innovation and Change,” in Environmental Governance
Reconsidered, eds. Durant, Fiorino, and O’Leary, 307–36.

96. See Michael E. Kraft, Mark Stephan, and Troy D. Abel, Coming
Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Robert F. Durant, “Regulation-
by-Revelation,” in Environmental Governance Reconsidered, eds.
Durant, Fiorino, and O’Leary, 337–69.

97. The quotation is taken from the archives of the PCSD, at

https://clintonwhitehouse2.archives.gov/PCSD/Overview/index.html.
For a fuller history of sustainability concepts and actions, see Daniel
A. Mazmanian and Michael E. Kraft, eds., Toward Sustainable
Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental
Policy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Kraft,
“Sustainability and Environmental Policy,” in Environmental
Governance Reconsidered, eds. Durant, Fiorino, and O’Leary, 75–
100; Kent E. Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: Economic
Development, the Environment, and Quality of Life in American
Cities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

98. See, for example, Aaron M. McCright, Katherine Dentzman,

Meghan Charters, and Thomas Dietz, “The Influence of Political
Ideology on Trust in Science,” Environmental Research Letters 8
(2013), http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/4/044029; Riley E.
Dunlap, ed., “Climate Change Skepticism and Denial,” special issue,
American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 6 (June 2013): 691–837.

99. Jeffrey Mervis, “Trump’s New Budget Cuts All but a Favored Few
Science Programs,” Science 367 (February 14, 2020): 723–724.
According to the EPA website, this represented a 32 percent cut
from their estimated 2020 expenditure.

100. Ernest J. Moniz, “How an Energy Jobs Coalition Could Help the
US Economy Bounce Back,” The Hill, April 3, 2020.

101. See Nathan Hultman, “Building an Ambitious US Climate Policy

From the Bottom Up,” Brookings, December 9, 2019.
102. For a list of major companies in the Science Based Targets
Initiative that are committed to the 1.5 degree C UN campaign, see
https://ungc-communications-
assets.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/publications/recover-better-
statement.pdf.

103. Coalition for Green Capital, Green Banks in the United States
(Washington, DC: Coalition for Green Capital, 2019).

104. Dirk Heine, Willi Semmler, Mariana Mazzucato, João Paulo

Braga, Michael Flaherty, Arkady Gevorkyan, Erin Hayde, and
Siavash Radpour, Financing Low-Carbon Transitions through
Carbon Pricing and Green Bonds, Policy Research Working Paper
8991 (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2019); Cameron
Hepburn, Brian O’Callaghan, Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz, and
Dimitri Zenghelis, “Will COVID-19 Fiscal Recovery Packages
Accelerate or Retard Progress on Climate Change?” Oxford Review
of Economic Policy 36 (2020).

105. Baker, Shultz and Halstead, “The Strategic Case for U.S.
Climate Leadership.” See also “National Defense Strategy: Climate
Change in the Age of Great Power Competition,”
https://www.americansecurityproject.org/climate-change-in-the-age-
of-great-power-competition; Michael T. Klare, All Hell Breaking
Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (New York,
NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2019).

106. Implications of COVID-19 for the climate crisis are discussed in

John F. Kerry, “The Parallels Between the Coronavirus and the
Climate Crisis,” Boston Globe, April 21, 2020; Ishaan Tharoor, “The
Pandemic Could Be a Call to Action on Climate Change,”
Washington Post, April 23, 2020; Marina Pitofsky, “Dozens of
Corporations Call for Climate Change Considerations in Coronavirus
Recovery Effort,” The Hill, May 19, 2020.
APPENDIX 1 MAJOR FEDERAL LAWS ON THE
ENVIRONMENT, 1969–2020
Note: As of 2020, no other major laws had been approved by Congress and signed by President Trump. As always, for an update on
legislative developments, consult CQ Magazine or other professional news sources, or Congressional Quarterly’s annual Almanac,
which summarizes key legislation enacted by Congress and describes the major issues and leading policy actors.
APPENDIX 2 BUDGETS OF
SELECTED ENVIRONMENTAL AND
NATURAL RESOURCE AGENCIES,
1980–2020 (IN BILLIONS OF
NOMINAL AND CONSTANT
DOLLARS)
2020
Agency 1980 1990 2000 2010
(Est.)
Environmental 1.269 1.901 2.465 3.889 4.703
Protection Agency
(EPA) Operating
Budgeta
(Constant 2020 3.635 3.833 3.193 4.613 4.703
dollars)
Interior Department 4.674 6.669 8.363 12.843 15.272
Total Budget
(Constant 2020 13.393 13.446 10.833 15.235 15.272
dollars)
Selected Natural Resource Agencies
Bureau of Land 0.919 1.226 1.616 1.074 1.682
Management
(Constant 2020 2.632 2.472 2.093 1.274 1.682
dollars)
Fish and Wildlife 0.435 1.133 1.498 1.588 2.932
Service
(Constant 2020 1.247 2.284 1.940 1.884 2.932
dollars)
 2020
Agency 1980 1990 2000 2010
(Est.)
National Park 0.531 1.275 2.071 2.289 4.115
Service
(Constant 2020 1.522 2.570 2.683 2.715 4.115
dollars)
Forest Service 2.250 3.473 3.728 5.297 7.586
(Constant 2020 6.446 7.003 4.829 6.284 7.586
dollars)
Source: Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government,
fiscal years 1982, 1992, 2002, 2012, 2021 (Washington, DC: Government Publishing
Office, 1981, 1991, 2001, 2011, and 2021), and agency websites.
Note: The upper figure for each agency represents budget authority in nominal dollars,
that is, the real amount for the year in which the budget was authorized. The lower figure
represents budget authority in constant 2020 dollars to permit comparisons over time.
These adjustments use the implicit price deflator for nondefense federal expenditures as
calculated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Department of Commerce.
For consistency, all figures in the table are taken from the president’s proposed budget
for the respective years, and all represent final budget authority.
a
The EPA operating budget, which supplies funds for most of the agency’s research,
regulation, and enforcement programs, is the most meaningful figure. The other two
major elements of the total EPA budget historically have been Superfund allocations and
sewage treatment construction or water infrastructure grants (now called state and tribal
assistance grants). We subtract both items from the total EPA budget to calculate the
agency’s operating budget. The EPA and the White House define the agency’s operating
budget differently. They do not exclude all of these amounts and arrive at a slightly
different figure. President Trump’s proposed change in the fiscal 2021 budget called for a
26 percent cut in the EPA’s total budget.
APPENDIX 3 EMPLOYEES IN
SELECTED FEDERAL AGENCIES
AND DEPARTMENTS, 1980, 1990,
2000, 2010, AND 2020
Personnela
Agency/Department 2020
1980 1990 2000 2010
(Est.)
Environmental 12,891 16,513 17,416 17,417 14,172
Protection Agency
Bureau of Land 9,655 8,753 9,328 12,741 9,847
Management
Fish and Wildlife 7,672 7,124 7,011 9,252 8,269
Service
National Park 13,934 17,781 18,418 22,211 17,615
Service
Office of Surface 1,014 1,145 622 521 398
Mining Reclamation
and Enforcement
Forest Service 40,606 40,991 33,426 35,639 30,372
Army Corps of 32,757 28,272 22,624 23,608 32,000
Engineers (civil
functions)
US Geological 14,416 10,451 9,417 8,600 6,779
Survey
 Personnela
Agency/Department 2020
1980 1990 2000 2010
(Est.)
Natural Resources 15,856 15,482 9,628 11,446 12,000
Conservation
Service (formerly
Soil Conservation
Service)
Source: U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, “Organization of Federal
Executive Departments and Agencies,” January 1, 1980, and January 1, 1990; and
Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government, fiscal years
1982, 1992, 2002, and 2012 (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 1981,
1991, 2001, 2011, and 2021), and agency websites.
a
Personnel totals represent full-time equivalent employment, reflecting both permanent
and temporary employees. Data for 2000 are based on the fiscal 2002 proposed budget
submitted to Congress by the Bush administration in early 2001, and data for 2010 are
taken from agency sources as well as the administration’s proposed fiscal 2012 budget
submitted to Congress in early 2011, and the fiscal 2021 budget submitted to Congress
in early 2020. Because of organizational changes within departments and agencies, the
data presented here are not necessarily an accurate record of agency personnel growth
or decline over time. The information is presented chiefly to provide an indicator of
approximate agency size during different periods.
APPENDIX 4 FEDERAL SPENDING
ON NATURAL RESOURCES AND
THE ENVIRONMENT, SELECTED
FISCAL YEARS, 1980–2020 (IN
BILLIONS OF NOMINAL AND
CONSTANT DOLLARS)
2020
Budget Item 1980 1990 2000 2010
(Est.)
Water resources 4.085 4.332 4.800 6.813 9.761
(Constant 2020 11.705 8.734 6.218 8.082 9.761
dollars)
Conservation and 1.572 4.362 6.604 11.933 16.881
land management
(Constant 2020 4.504 8.794 8.554 14.155 16.881
dollars)
Recreational 1.373 1.804 2.719 3.809 4.665
resources
(Constant 2020 3.934 3.637 3.522 4.518 4.665
dollars)
Pollution control and 4.672 5.545 7.483 10.473 9.062
abatement
(Constant 2020 13.387 11.179 9.693 12.423 9.062
dollars)
Other natural 1.395 2.077 3.397 6.629 7.326
resources
(Constant 2020 3.997 4.188 4.400 7.864 7.326
dollars)
 2020
Budget Item 1980 1990 2000 2010
(Est.)
Total 13.097 18.121 25.003 39.657 47.695
(Constant 2020 37.527 36.534 32.387 47.043 47.695
dollars)
Source: Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, Budget of the United
States Government Fiscal Year 2020 (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office,
2020).
Note: The upper figure for each budget category represents budget authority in nominal
dollars, that is, the real budget for the given year. Figures for 1980 are provided to
indicate pre–Reagan administration spending bases. The lower figure for each category
represents budget authority in constant 2020 dollars. These adjustments are made using
the implicit price deflator for the federal nondefense expenditures as calculated by the
Bureau of Economic Analysis, Department of Commerce. The natural resources and
environment function in the federal budget reported in this table does not include
environmental cleanup programs within the Departments of Defense and Energy, which
are substantial.
INDEX
Pages followed by b, f, n, or t indicate box, figure, note, or table
respectively.

AB 32 (Global Warming Solutions Act), 240

Abortion, 301, 305, 306

Acid rain. See also Sulfur dioxide, 66, 92, 162, 228

Adding Green to Urban Design, 260

Administrative presidencies. See Presidential powers

Africa. See also Developing world; Sustainable development,

301, 303, 307–311

Agenda 21 programs, 269

Agenda setting, 12

Aggregate-level determinants, 71–73

Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry committee (Senate), 8t

Agriculture committee (House), 8t

AIDS/HIV, 314, 315

Air pollution

Clear Skies bill and, 95–96

history of, 14–15

 market principles and, 239–240

overview, 356–357

Air quality, 21–23, 37, 47, 51, 158, 356

ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), 54

American Clean Energy and Security Act (2009), 96, 128,

247n34, 359

The American Commonwealth (Bryce), 35

American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, 39

American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), 54

American public opinion

age, 73, 74t

aggregate-level determinants, 71–73

awareness and concern, 65–67

demographics, 73

education, 75–76

environmental policy relationship, 63–71

environmental protection versus economic growth, 65f

ethnicity and gender, 74–75

experience, 72–73
 geography, 72

ideology and partisanship, 76

individual-level determinants, 73–74

new era of, 78

overview, 63

party affiliation, 77f

policy preferences, 69–71

political divisions, 76

saliency, 67–69, 68f

websites, 79–80

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 97, 181, 185, 197,

354, 384t

Americans for Prosperity, 134n41

Animal waste, 308

Antiquities Act (1906). See also National monuments, 89, 94,

99, 103, 213b

ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), 93, 95, 102, 112, 221,
355

Appeals, 140

Appellate courts, 11, 99, 138, 140, 144, 151, 160, 167

Appropriations committee (House), 8t

Appropriations committee (Senate), 9t

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), 93, 95, 102, 112, 221,
355

Army Corps of Engineers, 14, 147, 242, 358, 389t

Arrhenius, Svante, 276

Arrow, Kenneth, 230

Arsenic in drinking water rules, 94

Austin, TX, 253t, 264-265

Australia, 239, 275, 347

Babbitt, Bruce, 93

Baker, James A., 361

Balance of trade, 50–52

Bannon, Stephen, 103

Bears Ears National Monument, 99, 103

Becerra, Xavier, 45

Benefit-cost analysis, 91, 95, 102, 121, 194, 228–230, 243

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 315

Biofuels, 354

Bipartisanship, 11, 118, 126, 128, 130

Birthrates, 303
Bisphenol A, 41

Bottom-up versus top-down approach. See also Command-and-

control, 38

Brazil, 242, 293, 310, 337

BRICS, 276, 292–293

British Columbia, 57, 239, 290, 361, 364

Browner, Carol, 93, 94, 160

Brownfields, 125–126

Bryce, James, 35, 58

BTU tax, 93, 94

Bubble concept, 145

Budgets/funding

climate change and, 294–295

Congressional authority and, 113–114, 124–125

EPA budget and, 20, 91, 95, 97, 171

institutional capacity and, 19–20

Obama administration and, 97

pollution abatement spending, 229

riders and, 123–124

Sierra Club, 130

 state role and, 37

Bureau of Land Management, 114, 123, 142, 205, 211–212,

211t

Burford, Anne (Gorsuch), 17

Bush administration (George H. W.)

environmental policy, 17–18

gridlock and, 119

hazardous air pollutants and, 22

New Source Review and, 160

population growth, 305

presidential powers and, 92–93

Task Force on Regulatory Relief, 91

Bush administration (George W.)

arsenic in drinking water rules and, 94

budgets and, 123

coal-fired power plants and, 160

energy policy and, 127, 181, 197

environmental policy, 5, 354

 EPA and, 124, 167, 171

intergovernmental collaboration and, 54

Kyoto Protocol and, 18, 96, 164

PEPFAR and, 315

population growth, 305

presidential powers and, 94–96

regulatory reform and, 101, 120

state role and, 37

Business Strategy and the Environment, 329

CAFE standards. See Vehicle fuel economy standards

CAIR (Clean Air Interstate Rule), 96, 357

California

climate change and, 39, 290

emissions trading, 290

Global Warming Solutions Act and, 240

innovation and, 36

Renewable Portfolio Standards and, 188

tax incentives, 43
 Trump and, 55–56

water and energy use, 330

Western Climate Initiative, 290

California Air Resources Board (CARB), 44, 191

Callendar, Guy Stewart, 276

CAMR (Clean Air Mercury Rule), 357

Canada

climate change and, 280–281, 285, 286

innovation and, 38

Kyoto Protocol and, 239

NDCs, 282

Cantwell, Maria, 127, 218

Cap-and-trade policies

California and, 44

coal-fired power plants and, 166

Congressional failure to pass, 55

as market based, 238

overview, 359
 sulfur dioxide, 70, 92, 238

taxes compared, 238

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, 166

Carbon dioxide. See also Climate change; Greenhouse gas

emissions, 23, 38, 44, 47, 69, 98, 140–141, 288f, 289f

Carbon Disclosure Project, 362

Carbon monoxide, 22

Carbon taxes, 7, 189, 244, 360, 361, 364

Carter administration, 16, 20

CCP. See Clean Power Plan (CCP)

CCS (carbon capture and storage) technologies, 166

CDM (Clean Development Mechanism), 281

Center for Biological Diversity, 216

CEQ (White House Council on Environmental Quality), 91

CERCLA. See Comprehensive Environmental Response,

Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA); Superfund

Cheney, Dick, 94, 95, 127

Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council,

145–147

Chicago, IL, 48, 137, 252t, 259–260

Childbirth, 301
China

climate change and, 277, 278t, 293, 316–317

executive agreement with, 98

food production and, 308

population programs, 305

Citizens’ Climate Lobby, 117, 352

City sustainability

Austin, TX, 264–265

Chicago, IL, 259–260

future of, 268–269

Los Angeles, CA, 258–259

New York City, 256–258

overview, 249–250

Philadelphia, PA, 260–262

resilience policies and programs, 262

San Francisco, CA, 263–264

Seattle, WA, 265–267

types of policies and programs for, 251–255, 252t–254t

 Washington, DC, 267–268

websites, 268–269

Civic environmentalism, 38

Clean Air Act (1963) and Amendments

air quality and, 22

bipartisanship and, 11

Congress and, 16, 119

greenhouse gas emissions and, 96

New Source Review, 357, 358

states and, 14–15

sulfur dioxide andf, 228–230, 229

See also Clean Power Plan (CCP)

Clean Air Action Plan, 258

Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), 96, 357

Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR), 357

Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), 281

Clean Power Plan (CCP)

effects of, 357

 intergovernmental collaboration and, 54

Minnesota and, 41

Obama administration and, 98, 166–167

passage, 24, 137

Clean Smokestacks Act, 173

Clean Water Act (1972) and amendments

amendments, 16

conflict with ESA, 137

Congress passing of, 119

Reagan administration and, 91–92

water quality reports required by, 24

Clear Skies, 95

Climate Action Plan, 260

Climate change

agenda setting and, 12

BRICS and, 276

California and, 39, 290

Clinton administration and, 94

 cost/benefit assessments, 95

developing world, 292–293

EU leadership and, 283–285

evidence for, 348–353

global treaty on, 98

gridlock and, 128

human activity and, 278

impacts of, 276, 349

international law and negotiations about, 279–283

leadership needed on, 294–295

North American policy and, 276, 285–292, 288f–289f

Obama administration and, 98

science on, 276

state role and, 37

Trump on, 37

2016 election and, 88

websites, 104

See also Greenhouse gas emissions

Climate Change Newsroom (UN), 295

Climate Solutions Caucus, 118, 352

Clinton, Hillary, 55

Clinton administration

checks and balances on, 11

coal-fired power plants and, 160

environmental policy, 17–18

EPA and, 167

Kyoto Protocol and, 164, 285

National Environmental Performance Partnership System,

52

population growth, 305

presidential powers and, 93–94

state role and, 37

Clinton Foundation—Climate Change, 269

Coal-fired power plants

carbon dioxide and, 23, 165

EPA and, 159–161

greenhouse gas emissions, 23

Obama administration and, 98

Collective action problems, 339–340

Colorado, 38, 39, 40t, 41, 47, 192

Colorado River, 220

Command-and-control, limitations of, 359

Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee (Senate), 9t

Common-pool resources, 38, 332

Compensatory federalism, 37

Competitive Enterprise Institute, 120, 223, 355

Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and

Liability Act (CERCLA). See also Superfund, 16

Comprehensive Plan (Toward a Sustainable Seattle), 251, 255,

256, 260, 261, 266

Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit),

4

Conferences of the Parties (COPs), 280, 339

Congress

appropriations politics, 123

authority of, 113–116

committees, 7, 8–9t

Contract with America and, 120

Green New Deal, 111

 legislation by, 125

Muskie and, 15

opposition to environmental policy in, 4

overview, 129

partisanship versus bipartisanship, 112–113

presidential powers and, 89

public input in, 116–117

public ratings of, 129–130

regulatory reform and, 121–123

websites, 130

See also Governmental gridlock

Congressional Review Act, 122

Consumption, 313

Contract with America, 120

Cooperative federalism, 35

Copenhagen Accord, 276, 279, 281, 282, 284, 285, 287

Copenhagen climate change conference, 98

COPs (Conferences of the Parties), 280, 339

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. See

Vehicle fuel economy standards
Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental
Management, 28

Cost/benefit assessments

arsenic in drinking water rules and, 94

critiques of, 230

marginal benefits and, 229

measurement of, 23

overview, 243

See also Market principles

Council of the European Union, 283

Council on Environmental Quality, 15, 91

Courts

constitutional review, 146–150

delaying policy action, 142–143

EPA and, 161

forcing policy action, 140–142

judicial review, 139, 142, 148

judicial system, 138–140, 139f

overview, 137–138
 remedies, 141, 232

shaping policy, 143–146

standing and, 141, 147

websites, 151–152

Cross-boundary transfers, 50–51

Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (EPA), 51

Dairy production, 221

Dakota Access pipeline, 99, 354

Daley, Richard M., 259

Daly, Herman, 327

Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency,

199

Data Quality Act (2000), 124

Dead zones in ocean, 308

Death rates, 303, 305

Debt service, 310

Defeat devices by Volkswagen, 329

Deference by courts, 145–146

Deforestation, 242, 277, 311–313, 323, 328

Deland, Michael, 92

Democrats, 16

Demographic transition theory, 303

Denvert, 251, 252, 255, 268

Department of Energy

budgets, 97

city sustainability, 269

nuclear waste disposal and, 52

Department of the Interior (DOI), 210–211

Deterrence. See Command-and-control

Developing world. See also Sustainable development; specific

countries, 292–293, 302, 315

Diesel engines in Volkswagens, 329

Direct democracy, 36, 38, 42

Directional drilling. See also Fracking, 202

Disclosure of information, 362

Distributive justice, 292

Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, 281

Earth Day, 15
Earth in the Balance (Gore), 18

Earth Summit, 4, 92, 362

Eat Local, Live Healthy, 260

Eco-efficiency index, 39

Ecological state, 323

Economic efficiency, 228–230, 359

Economic impact of regulations. See also Cost/benefit

assessments, 149

Economic incentives, 42–43, 69, 312, 333, 334

Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981), 91

Economics. See also Cost/benefit assessments; Market

principles, 227

The Economist, 314

Eco-taxes, 334

EDF. See Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)

Efficiency, 243

EIA (United States Energy Information Administration), 184

Elections, 64

Electric companies, 117, 148

Emanuel, Rahm, 259

Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act
(EPCRA), 119

Emissions trading

California, 290

EU Emissions Trading System, 284

Kyoto Protocol and, 239

See also Cap-and-trade policies

EMSs (environmental management systems), 148

Endangered Species Act (1973)

conflict with CWA, 137

impacts of, 24

partisan politics and, 128

Energy and Commerce committee (House), 8t

Energy and Natural Resources committee (Senate), 8t

Energy consumption, 22, 198, 261, 268

Energy Independence and Security Act (2007), 96, 127, 189

Energy policy

energy sector planning, 195–197

 federal fuel economy standards, 189–191

grid modernization efforts, 195–197

NEM policies, 198

new policies, 193–195

overview, 181–183

state renewable portfolio standards, 186–189, 187f

US energy transition, 183–186, 183f

websites, 199

zero-emissions vehicle policy, 191–193, 192f

Energy Policy Act (1992), 119

Energy Policy Act (2005), 126, 354

Energy Policy Modernization Act (2016), 127

Energy sector planning, 195–197

Energy Star, 355

Energy taxes, 42

Environmental advocacy, 140, 161, 231, 279

Environmental Council of the States, 38, 58

Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), 236

Environmental impact statements, 15, 206

Environmental justice, 338, 351, 352, 357

Environmental Law Institute, 151

Environmental policy. See also American public opinion

assessment of, 26–27

budgets and, 19–20

challenges of contemporary problems and, 4–5

government role, 5–7

need for, 5

overview, 3–5

political institutions and public policy, 7, 8–9t, 9, 10f, 11

theoretical processes for, 12

See also Government role in policy

Environmental policy history

before 1970, 14–15

1970s, 15–16

1980s, 16–17

1990s and later, 17–19

overview, 13–14

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

achievements of, 170

air pollution from electric power plants, 159–161

arsenic in drinking water rules, 94

background of, 156–158

bubble concept, 145

budgets, 20, 91, 95, 97, 171

climate change and. See also Greenhouse gas emissions

Clinton administration and, 167

coal-fired power plants and, 159–161

Congressional authority and, 113–116

creation of, 155

Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, 51

economic benefits and regulation costs, 168–169

future of, 171–172

greenhouse gas emissions and, 164–168

limitations of, 170–171

Obama administration and, 97

overview, 155

rays of hope, 172–173

rulemaking, 357
 science and politics, 161–164

staffing, 19

state role and, 37

Trump administration and, 159–169

voluntary programs, 286

websites, 173–174

See also Clean Power Plan (CCP); Superfund

Environmental quality, measurement of, 20–26

Environment and Public Works committee (Senate), 9t

EPA. See Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

ESA. See Endangered Species Act (1973)

Ethanol, 181, 290, 354

EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), 284

European Commission, 283, 295, 336

European Parliament, 283

European Union (EU)

agriculture and, 309

climate change and, 276

Executive agreement with China, 98

Executive Directive 10, 258

Executive orders

12291 on Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

(Reagan), 91

13771 order (Trump), 101

13777 on regulatory reform officers (Trump), 101

13783 “Promoting Energy Independence and Economic

Growth” (Trump), 101, 143

Obama administration, 97

roadless areas (Clinton), 94

Trump administration and, 101

Exports/imports, 309

Externalities

economic incentives and, 42

free market system and, 6

as market failure, 236

positive externalities, 245n18

Exxon Mobil, 184

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), 307

Federal court system, 137–138, 140, 142, 150, 151

Federal fuel economy standards, 189–191

Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA),

119

Federalism. See also State role, 7, 36–39, 52–54, 56, 69, 158

Fertility rates, 303, 305, 315

Fertilizers, 309, 338

FIFRA (Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act),

119

Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC), 292

Fish and Wildlife Service, 26, 114, 144, 216

Fishing quotas, 241

Flint, Michigan water supply, 48

Food aid, 316

Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 307

Food consumption, 314

Food production, 306, 307, 323, 334, 348

Food Quality Protection Act (1996), 25, 93, 125

Food security, 307, 316, 325

Foote, Eunice, 276

Foreign aid, 315, 316

Fossil fuels. See Greenhouse gas emissions; specific fuels

Fracking, 24, 25, 222

Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992, UN), 164,

276, 280

Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act

(2016), 26, 128

Free market system, 6

Free riding, 237

Funding. See Budgets/funding

G-77 (Group of 77), 292, 293

Game-theoretic analysis, 38

Garcetti, Eric, 258

Gasoline, 190, 197, 238, 239, 313

Genetically modified (GM), 170

GHGRP (Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program), 362

Gingrich, Newt, 120

Global warming. See Climate change

Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), 240

Gold Butte National Monument, 99

Good neighbor rule, 51

Gore, Al, 17

Gormley, William T., Jr., 50

Gorsuch, Anne (Burford), 17, 91, 100, 141, 145

Gorsuch, Neil, 141, 145

Governmental gridlock

causes and consequences of, 116–118

defined, 7

energy policy and, 119

partisan politics and, 113

Government role in policy

checks and balances on, 11

division of political power, 8–9t, 10f

individual efforts and, 6

overview, 5–7

political institutions and, 7, 11–12

Gray wolves, 217

Grazing fees, 93, 212

Great Lakes Commission, 38

Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, 359

Green building, 252, 256, 258

Green Climate Fund, 281, 287, 293, 316

Green economy

climate change, 325

concepts of, 326, 338

creation, 335–337

critics of, 337

definitions, 326–327

ecological state, 323

ecosystem service payments, 334

eco-taxes, 334

emergence of, 327

global collective action, 339–340

Limits to Growth thesis, 324

mandatory performance standards, 333

microlevel, 328–331

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 325

 overview, 323–324

policy agenda principles, 331–332

policy tools, 333

promotion, 335

prosperity state, 323

security state, 323

smart farming, 338

trading mechanisms, 333

websites, 340

welfare state, 323

Greenhouse gas emissions

Clean Air Act and, 96

data on, 23

mitigation and adaptation efforts, 275

overview, 23

science on, 276–279

U.S. as leading emitter of, 23

See also Climate change; Paris Agreement on climate

change
Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), 362

Greening of Industry, 328

Green LA, 258

Greenprint Denver program, 251

Green taxes, 42

Greenworks Philadelphia, 261

Gridlock. See Governmental gridlock

Grid modernization efforts, 195–197

Grijalva, Raúl M., 126

Griles, J. Steven, 95

Groundwater contamination, 24

Group of 77 (G-77), 292, 293

Hansen, James, V., 128

Hazardous air pollutants, 22, 357

Hazardous waste. See Toxic chemicals/hazardous wastes

Healthy Forests Initiative, 126

Herbicides. See Toxic chemicals/hazardous wastes

Heritage Foundation, 104, 120, 130, 223, 355

HFCs (hydroflurocarbons), 44
Hickenlooper, John, 41

Higher Education Opportunity Act (2008), 136n72

HIV/AIDS, 315

Holdren, John, 97

House. See Congress

House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, 118

Hydroflurocarbons (HFCs), 44

Hydropower, 275, 333

ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability USA, 269

IFQs (individual fishing quotas), 241

Impaired water, 24

Imports/exports, 312

Income, 266, 301

India, 293, 305–307, 316–317, 338

Individual fishing quotas (IFQs), 241

Individual-level determinants, 73–74

Infrared radiation, 276

Inhofe, James, 100, 116

Initiatives, 38, 45
Institutional capacity, 19, 27, 46

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 100, 276,

313, 325, 348

International City County Management Association— Resilient

and Sustainable Communities, 269

International Civil Aviation Organization, 283

International Energy Agency (IEA), 23, 295

International Food Policy Research Institute, 308

International Maritime Organization, 283

Interstate transfer, 51

Iowa, 40t, 44

IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), 100, 276,

313, 325, 348

Jackson, Lisa, 97

Jewell, Sally, 97, 205, 211

Jobs, incentives for, 50

Johnson, Lyndon B., 14, 90

Judicial review, 139, 142, 148

Judicial system, 138–140

Kansas, 39, 54, 194, 255

Keeling, Charles David, 276

Keystone Bituminous Coal Ass’n v. DeBenedictis, 149

Keystone XL pipeline, 99, 112, 150, 286, 291

Kingdon, John, 12

Klyza, Christopher McGrory, 37

Koch Network, 134n41

Kraft, Michael E., 249

Kyoto Protocol

Bush II administration, 18, 96, 164

Canada and, 239

Clinton administration and, 164, 285

emissions trading and, 239

Land and Water Conservation Fund, 16, 126, 209

Land and Water Conservation Fund Act (1965), 14

Landfills, 157, 170, 241

Lands legacy initiatives, 18

Land use changes, 277

Lead
 changes over time, 19

Flint, Michigan water supply, 48

in gasoline, 232

League of Conservation Voters (LCV), 93, 118, 130

Legitimacy, 11, 151

Leonard, Annie, 195

Life expectancy, 330350

Litigation, 45

Local Action Plan for Climate Change, 261

Logging, 311, 312

Los Angeles, CA, 191, 253t, 258–259

Lowry, William R., 46

Lucas, David H., 149–150

MacDonald, Julie, 95

Malnutrition, 316

Marginal abatement costs, 235

Marginal benefits, 229, 337

Marginal costs, 229, 231f, 234, 235

Marginal gains, 27
Market failure, 6, 236, 237

Market principles

air and water pollution and, 239–240

cost-effective environmental policy, 233–236, 234f

economic concepts for, 228–230, 229f

fishing quotas and, 240

land management and, 242–243

measurement of cost/benefit assessments, 230–233, 231f

overview, 227–228

principles of policy, 236–239

waste management and, 241–242

websites, 244

Marriage, 190, 301, 305

Massachusetts, 39, 193

Maternal mortality, 301

MATS (Mercury and Air Toxics Standards), 357

Mauna Loa Observatory, 23

McCarthy, Gina, 35, 97, 335

McGovern–Dole International Food for Education and Child
Nutrition Program, 316

Meadowcroft, James, 323

Mercury, 357

Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), 357

Methane, 47, 286

Mexico, 285, 286, 287

Michigan, 42, 48, 192

Microlevel green economy

public policy, 329–331

trends in, 328–329

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 318, 325

Minnesota, 41

Mitchell, George, 120

Mitigation banking, 242

Moniz, Ernest J., 97, 364

Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer,

88, 283

Multiple use doctrine, 14

Mulvaney, Mick, 101

Murkowski, Lisa, 126, 127, 218

Muskie, Edmund, 15

NAAQS (National Ambient Air Quality Standards), 157, 161,

163, 243

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 114,

350

National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), 157, 161,

163, 243

National Association of Clean Air Agencies, 38

National Association of Manufacturers, 130

National Association of State Energy Officials, 38

National Center for Environmental Economics, 244

National Climate Assessment, 100, 350

National Conference of State Legislatures, 58

National Environmental Performance Partnership System

(NEPPS), 52

National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 15, 64, 102, 118, 206

National Governors Association, 58

Nationally determined contributions (NDCs), 282

National monuments, 99

Clinton administration and, 103

 Obama administration and, 103

Trump administration and, 213

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 101,

114, 350

National Park Service (NPS), 212–213, 213–214b

National Surveys on Energy and Environment (NSEE), 69, 79

National wilderness, 26

National wildlife refuge system, 26

Natural Resources committee (House), 8t

Natural resource policies

agencies and, 210, 211t

Bureau of Land Management, 211–212

climate change and energy, 221–223

collaboration and compromise, 220

Department of the Interior, 210–211

devolution and privatization, 219–220

Fish and Wildlife Service, 216, 217b

Forest Service, 218

historical development, 207–208

 increasingly contentious, 208–210

National Park Service, 212–213, 213–214b

overview, 205–206

Sage-grouse habitat, 205, 206f

trends in, 219–223

websites, 223–224

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), 145

riders and, 124

website, 130, 152

Natural resource use, data on, 26

Nature, 64

NDCs (nationally determined contributions), 282

NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act), 15, 64, 102, 118, 206

NEPPS (National Environmental Performance Partnership

System), 52

Net benefits, 196, 228, 229f, 233

Networks, 37, 38

Nevada, nuclear waste disposal in, 39, 40, 52, 194

New Source Review (NSR), 174, 357, 358

New York City, 251, 253t, 256–258

New Zealand, 241, 281, 336

Nitrogen dioxide, 22

Nitrogen oxide, 41, 51, 98, 159, 284, 357

Nixon, Richard, 15, 88, 90, 156

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), 101,

114, 350

Nonuse value, 231, 232

North Carolina, 40t, 46, 49, 87

North Dakota, 40t, 222

Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, 38

Norton, Gale, 95

NRDC. See Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)

NSR (New Source Review), 174, 357, 358

Nuclear waste. See Toxic chemicals/hazardous wastes

Nutter, Michael, 260

Obama administration

air pollution, 357

cabinet, 97

checks and balances on, 11

 climate change and, 98

coal-fired power plants and, 98

economic stimulus measure, 127

environmental policy, 359

EPA and, 97

executive agreement with China, 98

greenhouse gas emissions and, 23

intergovernmental collaboration and, 54

population growth, 305

presidential powers and, 96–99

regulatory reform and, 121–123

Trump administration compared, 13

Obesity, 317

ODA (official development assistance), 315

OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and

Development), 318

Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), 91

Official development assistance (ODA), 315

OIRA (Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs), 91

Omnibus Public Land Management Act (2009), 126

One-child policy, 305

100 Resilient Cities, 266

OneNYC plan, 251, 256, 257

Opportunity costs, 228

Oregon, 38–39, 208

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

(OECD), 318

Ostrom, Elinor, 38

“Our Resilient City”, 257

Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (1953), 9, 99, 354

Ozone concentration, 22

Pacific Coast Collaborative, 38

Paris Agreement on climate change, 88, 260

Obama administration and, 88

Trump administration and, 286–287

Particulate matter, 22, 161–164

Partnership for Sustainable Communities, 269

Paul, Brian, 257

Paulson, Henry, Jr., 361

Pay-as-you-throw systems, 241

PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), 315

Perdue, Sonny, 100

Performance Partnership Grants, 52

Perry, Rick, 100

Pesticides. See Toxic chemicals/hazardous wastes

Philadelphia, PA, 251, 252t, 255, 260–262

Pine Tree Wind Power Project, 258

PlaNYC, 256

Plass, Gilbert, 276

Policy change, 13

Policy cycle, 12, 13, 90

Policy evaluation, 13

Policy formulation, 12–13

Policy implementation, 13, 19–20

Policy legitimation, 13

Pombo, Richard, 126

Population growth, 305

Population Reference Bureau, 27

Portland, ORt, 252, 255, 262

Power plants, 142

Power Shift, 36

Precedent, 141

Pregnancy, 301

Presidential Memorandum on Scientific Integrity (Obama), 97

Presidential powers

Bush administration, 92–93

Bush II administration, 94–96

Clinton administration, 93–94

comparisons of, 89–90

Constraints, 88–89

Obama administration, 96–99

overview, 87–88

Reagan administration and, 90–92

Trump administration, 99–103

websites, 104

President’s Council on Sustainable Development, 18

President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), 315

Preventative strategies, 39
Procedural justice, 292

“Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth”

(Trump), 101, 355

Property rights, 216

Prosperity state, 323

Pruitt, Scott, 35, 100, 115, 122

Public goods, 220, 236, 237

Public land management, 14

Rabe, Barry G., 11, 69

Radioactive waste. See Toxic chemicals/hazardous wastes

Rahall, Nick J., 126

Rain forests, 66, 311, 334

Rapanos v. United States (2006), 147

Raymond, Leigh, 42

RDRs (tradable development rights), 242

Reagan administration

budgets and, 123

checks and balances on, 11

Montreal Protocol, 88
 presidential powers during, 90–92

RealClimate, 295

Recycling, 47, 241, 252

REDD (United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing

Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) in
Developing Countries, 313

REDD+, 313

Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act (2017), 122

Referendums, 38

Refuse Act (1899), 14

Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), 42, 69, 173, 240,

290, 353

Regulation by embarrassment, 362

Regulatory Accountability Act, 122

Regulatory impact assessments, 190

Regulatory reform, gridlock and. See Governmental gridlock

Regulatory takings, 149, 150

Reilly, William, 92, 93

Reinventing environmental regulation initiative of Clinton, 93

Remedies, 141, 232

Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), 43, 186–189

Republicans, 16, 54, 90

Resilience, in cities, 250–251

Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976), 17, 112, 118,

119

Resources for the Future, 80, 199

Revealed preference models, 232

Rey, Mark, 95

RGGI (Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative), 42, 69, 173, 240,

290, 353

Riders, 123–124

Risk assessment, 121, 155, 158

Roosevelt, Franklin, 88, 326

Roosevelt, Teddy, 87, 88, 90, 92

Roosevelt, Theodore, 14, 94, 118, 218, 222

“Routine maintenance” of power plants, 160

RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standards), 43, 186–189

Ruckelshaus, William, 91, 168

Rulemaking, 89, 148

Runoff, 170

Safe Drinking Water Act (1986) and amendments

 amendments, 17

bipartisanship and, 17

Clinton administration and, 93

Congressional authority and, 125

Congress passing of, 119

maximum contaminant levels and, 156

Reagan administration and, 92

Salazar, Ken, 97, 211

Sanders, Bernie, 111, 195, 361

San Francisco, CAt, 252, 255, 259, 263–264

Scalia, Antonin, 147, 148, 149

Schatz, Brian, 352

Science, 276–279

Science, Space, and Technology committee (House), 8t

SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), 315

Seattle, WA, 251, 252t, 255, 265–267

Senate. See Congress

Sierra Club, 130, 220

SIPs (state implementation plans), 157

Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (1996),
122

Smart farming, 338

Smith, Lamar, 114

Snake River dams, 227

Snyder, Rick, 48

Solar power, 23, 293

Sousa, David, 37

Spillover effects. See Externalities

Standing, 141, 147

STAR Communities, 270

State court system, 139, 139f

State implementation plans (SIPs), 157, 166

State-of-the-environment reports, 21

State role

American federalism, 36–39

balance of trade and, 50–52

economic incentives, 42–43

environmental challenges and, 39, 41

federal dependency and, 48–50

 federal government and, 45

federalism and, 52–54

in future, 54–58

greenhouse gas emissions and, 43–45

innovation, 39–45, 40t

limitations, 45–52

overview, 7, 35–36

uneven performance among, 46–48

websites, 58

See also Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI);

specific statutes

Steady-state economy, 327

Stream protection rule, 123

Subsidies, 329

Sulfur dioxide

amount of, 22

market principles and, 228–230, 229f

Superfund, 16, 25, 92, 93, 128

Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (1986), 17,
119

Supreme Court, 139f

Sustainability indicators, 252, 256

Sustainability Plan, 258

Sustainable Airport Initiatives, 260

Sustainable Chicago Action Plan, 260

Sustainable cities. See City sustainability

Sustainable City, 259

Sustainable community, 28

Sustainable development

capacity to support population and, 306–311

defined, 302

improvements for, 314–318

population growth and, 303–306, 304t

richer nations and, 302

tropical forest destruction and, 311–313

websites, 318

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 315

Sustainable Seattle, 251

Sustained yield doctrine, 14

TAC (total allowable catch), 241

Tailpipe emission standards, 44, 157

Tailpipe Rule, 165

Task Force on Regulatory Relief, 91

Taxes

BTU tax, 93

cap-and-trade policies compared, 238

carbon taxes, 360, 361, 364

on gasoline, 238

green taxes, 42

market principles and, 238

state role and, 38

TDRs (tradable development rights), 242

Tea Party, 117, 129

Texas, 262

Theory of demographic transition, 303

Timing rule (PSD Triggering Rule), 176n31

Top-down versus bottom-up approach. See also Command-and-

control, 38

Total allowable catch (TAC), 241

Total Energy, 284

Toward a Sustainable Seattle (Comprehensive Plan), 251

Toxic chemicals/hazardous wastes, 25–26, 155, 158, 362

Toxic pollution prevention plans (Minnesota), 41

Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), 17, 49, 119, 155, 362

Toxic Substances Control Act (1976). See also Frank R.

Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (2016), 12,
26

Tradable development rights (TDRs), 242

Tragedy of the commons, 236–237

Transportation and Infrastructure committee (House), 8t

Travel-cost models, 232

Trial courts, 138

Tropical forest destruction, 311–313

Tropical hardwood demand, 311–312

Trudeau, Justin, 57, 285, 287, 290

Trump, Donald, 3, 35, 55, 56, 88, 99, 129, 159, 306
Trump administration

checks and balances on, 11

climate change and, 37

EPA budget and, 159–169

foreign aid, 315

Obama administration compared, 13

Paris Agreement on climate change, 286–287

population growth, 305

presidential powers and, 99–103

regulatory reform and, 101

science and, 276

20-20-20 by 2020 goals, 284

2016 election, 12, 88, 120, 129, 168

Tyndall, John, 276

UN Development Programme, 318

UN Division for Sustainable Development, 318

UN Environment Programme, 278

UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 318

UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund), 305

Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (1995), 122

Uniform pollution control standards, 234, 234g

United Haulers Assn., Inc. v. Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste

Mgmt. Authority, 148, 151

United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing

Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD)
in Developing Countries, 313

United Nations Conference on Environment and Development

(Earth Summit), 4

United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 305

United Nations World Commission on Environment and

Development, 249

United States

carbon dioxide and, 313

climate change and, 277, 278t, 285–287, 288f, 289f, 290–

292

coal and, 159–160

consumption and, 313

energy transition, 183–186, 183f

foreign aid, 316

greenhouse gas emissions, 23

United States Climate Alliance, 291

United States Energy Information Administration (EIA), 184

United Nations Population Fund, 305

US Agency for International Development, 316

US Chamber of Commerce, 130

US Conference of Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement, 291

US Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Center, 270

US Department of Agriculture, 205, 334

US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), 205, 216, 217b

U.S. Forest Service, 205, 218

Vehicle emissions, 55–56, 290

Vehicle fuel economy standards, 23, 102

Vehicle miles traveled, 22, 261

Vermont, 182, 290

Villaraigosa, Antonio, 258

Volkswagen, 329

Washington State, 127, 218, 361

Waste management, market principles and, 241–242

Water pollution, 14–15, 239–240, 356–359

Water Pollution Control Act (1948), 156, 157

Water quality

data on, 24

state issues with, 47

Waters of the United States (Clean Water Rule), 102, 146, 147,
148, 168, 358

Watt, James, 17, 91, 95, 100, 212

Waxman-Markey bill. See American Clean Energy and Security

Act (2009)

Welfare state, 323

Western Climate Initiative, 290

Westlaw, 152

Wetlands, 147, 242

Wet scrubbers, 157

WG I, 278, 279

WG II, 278, 279

WG III, 278, 279

White House, 91, 97, 104

White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), 91

Whitman, Christine Todd, 94

Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968), 14

Wilderness Act (1964), 14, 26, 207, 208

Wildlife, 26, 216, 217b

William J. Clinton Foundation, 315

Wind power, 258

World Bank, 281, 295, 319

World Commission on Environment and Development, 249

World Resources Institute, 308

World Summit on Sustainable Development, 4

World Trade Organization, 310

World Wildlife Fund, 92, 314, 334

Zero-emissions vehicle policy, 191–193, 192f

Zinke, Ryan, 100, 211