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Showing posts from June, 2013

Taking action on climate change

Update:  Krugman expanded on the job creation point in his column . The Obama administration is side stepping congress and finally doing something about climate change.  The " action plan " has a nice outline of strategies, but no specifics.  It will be interesting to see what kinds of rules the EPA and DOE roll out in response to this initiative and how they will be justified under existing laws like the Clear Air Act. Precedent for this kind of action was established by the Supreme Court awhile back .  If the Obama administration didn't take action soon, agencies would be sued by environmental groups and forced to do something.  So this kind of thing was bound to happen, one way or another. In response, Paul Krugman makes an interesting and surely controversial point .  The new rules, whatever they turn out to be, will make energy more costly.  That's not to say action shouldn't be taken, but that there are tradeoffs involved with curbing climate change.