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History, Ideology, and U.S. Climate Policy: Beyond the Orthodoxies of Left and Right

History, Ideology, and U.S. Climate Policy: Beyond the Orthodoxies of Left and Right

Full Title: History, Ideology, and U.S. Climate Policy: Beyond the Orthodoxies of Left and Right
Author(s): Lee Lane
Publisher(s): Hudson Institute
Publication Date: December 1, 2011
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):

As this paper is being written, the United States  is almost certainly incurring higher costs from its climate policies than it is from climate change. Confused  nostrums dominate the public debate about how best  to reduce the threat of climate change.

Both climate policy and the way in which it is analyzed are in need of  change. The quest for a worldwide system of GHG limits has now gone on for over twenty years. The impact on global emissions has been negligible. Most measures that have been adopted in the name of GHG control are structured in ways that ensure that they achieve less and at higher cost than would the policies often posited. Finding better policies will require doing better analysis. Such analysis  would probe the forces that have defeated or, worse, perverted, GHG controls. Whether the IPCC can play a useful role in this process is an open  question.

One way to shakeup stagnant thinking would be to launch the equivalent of what national security studies sometimes call “red team” or  “red cell” analysis.

The real problem, though, is deeper. It is that few U.S. political leaders demand rigorous climate policy analysis. Instead, they have clung  to the dogmas of either the right or the left.

 

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