Category Archives: 2008 presidential campaign

Anti-Shirking Import Penalties in US Climate Change Bills Could Backfire

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 So both the Democratic and Republican parties have officially nominated their candidates.  Remarkably — from the vantage point of just a few years ago – both Senators McCain and Obama are on record as supporting strong action for aggressive cuts in US emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs).   In June 2008, the floor manager’s version of the Lieberman-Warner bill  — S. 2192: America’s Climate Security Act of 2007, which would cut emissions more than 50% by 2050 — came close to passing the Senate.   Some think that with the likely Democratic gain in Senate seats in November, and a more supportive White House, a form of the bill may well pass next year.    

(Incidentally, the July Snowmass presentations regarding Integrated Assessment models of the effects of such emission-reduction policy plans, which I plugged in my preceding blog post, are now accessible to the public.)

 

But issues of competitiveness and how to address it have risen to the top in the climate change policy debate among politicians.      The Lieberman-Warner bill – would have required the president to determine what countries have taken comparable action to limit GHG emissions;  for imports of covered goods from covered countries, the importer would then have had to buy international reserve allowances – equivalent to a tariff.  (The same with some of the bill’s competitors such as the Bingaman-Specter “Low Carbon Economy Act” of 2007.)  read more

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Serious Research Balances Economic Costs & Environmental Benefits of Climate Policy

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Ten years ago this summer, President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, of which I was a Member, responded to requests from the Congress, which was then under Republican control, to explain in analytical terms what would be the economic effects of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change that had just been negotiated among the members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.  Our response was a document called the Administration Economic Analysis.   It relied on some of the leading Integrated Assessment Models, and showed that the costs of Kyoto could be relatively low provided international trading of emission permits were freely allowed, and provided developing countries participated in the system.    Not zero costs, as wishful thinking by some techno-optimists would have it.  Not prohibitive costs, as some skeptics would have it.   But moderate costs — relatively low if measures could be implemented sensibly. read more

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Good International Exposure for Obama and McCain

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Senator Obama is on a vist to the Middle East and Europe.   Senator McCain went to visit Colombia earlier in July.   These trips suggest a seriousness of purpose that American presidential candidates often lack.    They offer us hope that the candidates want to learn how to do the job well.   Furthermore, they offer a hyper-attentive world grounds for hope that the next president will have a higher level of interest in other countries than did his predecessor.

 

So far as I know, it is unprecedented for the two party candidates to do foreign policy trips before the election.    I can think of three reasons why we are seeing this now.    First, because the primary elections started early this year, there is a hiatus between the end of the primaries and the party conventions.   Thus the candidates can spare the time to go abroad.   Second, foreign policy has risen much higher on the agenda of concerns of typical American voters, since September 11, 2001, and since the invasion of Iraq.   (And of course Obama wants to put to rest McCain’s past jibes about not having visited Afghanistan and Iraq.)   Third, Barack Obama and John McCain are not the usual inward-looking, domestically-oriented parochial governors that we all too often get as presidential candidates.    Both are US Senators, and both in their youths had very formative adventures in foreign countries (both in Southeast Asia, as it happens).    Thus both, if nothing else, have the cosmopolitan outlook that a world leader needs. read more

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