Radiative Forcing: Climate Policy to Break the Logjam in Environmental Law

Abstract

This article recommends the key design elements of US climate law. Much past environmental law has suffered from four design problems: fragmentation, insensitivity to tradeoffs, rigid prescriptive commands, and mismatched scale. These are problems with the design of regulatory systems, not a rejection of the overall objective of environmental law to protect ecosystems and human health. These four design defects raised the costs, reduced the benefits, and increased the countervailing risks of many past environmental laws. The principal environmental laws successfully enacted since the 1990s, such as the acid rain trading program in the 1990 Clean Air Act (CAA) Amendments and the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments, were consciously designed to overcome the prior design defects. New law for climate change should improve on the design of past environmental law, fostering four counterpart solutions to the prior design defects: cross-cutting integration instead of fragmentation, attention to tradeoffs instead of their neglect, flexible incentive-based policy instruments such as emissions trading in place of rigid prescriptive commands, and optimal instead of mismatched scale. This article advocates a design for U.S. climate policy that embodies these four design solutions. It proposes a policy that is comprehensive in its coverage of multiple pollutants (all GHGs), their sources and sinks; multiple sectors (indeed economy-wide); and multiple issues currently divided among separate agencies. It advocates explicit attention to tradeoffs, both benefit-cost and risk-risk (including both ancillary harms and ancillary benefits), in setting the goals and boundaries of climate policy. It advocates the use of flexible market-based incentives through an efficient cap-and-trade system, with most allowances auctioned along multi-year emissions reduction schedules that are reviewed periodically in light of new information. And it advocates matching the legal regime to the environmental and economic scale of the climate problem, starting at the global level, engaging all the major emitting countries (including the U.S. and China), and then implementing at the national and sub-national levels rather than a patchwork bottom-up approach. In so doing it addresses the roles of EPA regulation under the current CAA and of new legislation. It argues that among environmental issues, climate change is ideally suited to adopt these improved policy design features.