The only thing worse than an economist who misapplies climate science to economics [redundant?] and misapplies cost-benefit analysis to climate [redundant!] is a non-economist who does both. Our guest blogger on Obama’s choice for regulatory czar is Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. This post was first published in Wonk Room.
How would progressives respond if President Bush nominated as “regulatory czar” a person who:
– Once called for changing the Clean Air Act to require a balancing of costs and benefits in setting national clean air standards — a fundamental weakening long sought by big polluters who believe it would help them resist cleanup;
– Urged the federal government to devalue senior citizens in calculating the benefits of federal regulations because “A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.” This is a concept dubbed the “senior death discount,” and that environmentalists forced EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman to renounce in 2003;
– Argued that it “might be better” to help future generations deal with global warming by “including approaches that make posterity richer and better able to adapt” than by “reducing emissions.”
[This paper, "Climate Change and Discounting the Future: A Guide for the Perplexed," is itself so perplexing, I'll write about it in a separate post.]
– Even raised questions about the value of cleaning up Love Canal, reducing arsenic in drinking water and using child restraints in automobiles?
Progressives would’ve screamed, of course.
But what will they do now that President-elect Obama appears poised to nominate Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein to head the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)? For it’s actually Sunstein who has articulated the views noted above regarding clean air and the other issues involving costs, benefits and risk.
When President Bush nominated someone with similar anti-regulatory views, John Graham, to head OIRA, progressives and environmentalists strongly opposed his nomination.
Thirty-seven progressives, led by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and including Harry Reid (D-NV), unsuccessfully opposed the nomination of Graham, who was also opposed by the League of Conservation Voters because Graham “has a perspective on the use of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis that would greatly jeopardize the future of regulatory policies meant to protect average Americans. He advocates an analytical framework that systematically reinforces the worst tendencies of cost-benefit analysis to understate benefits and overstate costs.”
LCV even deemed the vote on the Graham nomination one of the eight most critical environmental votes of 2001.
The OMB position is obscure to people outside the Beltway, but it wields enormous power. The office oversees regulations throughout the government, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Draft rules must be approved by OIRA before promulgation. Under Bush, OIRA often used its power to reduce the size and scope of the safeguards to reduce compliance costs to companies causing the health or safety threat. And the Sunstein choice is raising some eyebrows among those wonks who closely scrutinize federal regulatory policy. Robert Shull, former director of regulatory policy at OMB Watch, told E&E News:
It’s difficult to square the choice of an anti-regulatory scholar for the chief regulatory officer with Obama’s many, many promises for a new direction and moving forward from eight years of anti-regulatory, deregulatory misbehavior.
It’s unfair, of course, to paint the 54-year-old Sunstein as a complete clone of Graham and the other Bush anti-regulatory zealots. Indeed, Sunstein has earned a reputation as a genuine progressive on some issues, arguing in 2004 for the implementation of a “Second Bill of Rights” promoted in January 1944 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, to guarantee the “right of every American to a job, a home, and medical care.”
But as co-chair of the American Enterprise Institute Center for Regulatory and Market Studies advisory board, Sunstein works for one of the nation’s most influential right-wing corporate anti-regulatory think tanks. In an interview last year with the Wall Street Journal, Sunstein said of Obama, “He’s a University of Chicago Democrat, so he’s very attuned to the virtue of free markets and the risks of free-market regulation. He’s not an old-style Democrat who’s excited about regulations for their own sake.”
Sunstein will likely be confirmed by the Senate. After all, he is a long-time friend of the President-elect from their faculty days at the University of Chicago law school. Even so, it would seem vital for senators to quiz Sunstein closely at upcoming confirmation hearings and meetings. Does he still hold those views on pollution and risk? (And could he become part of a White House faction — along with Larry Summers, incoming director of the National Economic Council, and incoming national security adviser James Jones — opposing aggressive action on global warming?)
He shouldn’t get a pass just because he was nominated by Obama.
Especially given his other terrific nominations:
- Obama: “The science is beyond dispute… Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”
- Why Biden is such an important pick for those who care about the climate
- SOS trumps NSA (Hillary Clinton trumps Gen. Jones)
- Carol Browner to oversee energy and climate at the White House
- Top 5 reasons Chu is a great energy pick — #1: “It’s not guaranteed we have a solution for coal”
- Obama picks a green jobs leader for Labor Secretary: Hilda Solis
- For NOAA head, Obama appoints yet another scientist who gets climate
- Obama’s strongest message on climate yet: John Holdren to be named Science Adviser
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Dear Joe–
There’s something ugly about this Rovian us against them attitude. You’ve been in the regulatory wilderness to long that you don’t know how to cooperate, or the value of consensus. Economists are a needed in anything but a fantasy world, to weigh the costs and the benefits.
Duncan Brown
[JR: Except that don't know -- or want to know -- the true costs, and don't care about the true benefits.]
Duncan Brown — Economists are not any better, and can easily be worse, at weighing costs and benefits than, say, biologists.
Economic theory has rather little to do with reality. This nomination provides a good example.
What Atrios said. There seems to be some sort of promotion going on, methinks.
Best,
D
There’s nothing “Rovian” about telling the truth about people’s credentials and pointing out where they’ve been historically wrong before.
And you could take all the wisdom and insight economists have provided us to date, stuff them both in a gnat’s navel and still have plenty of room for Alan Greenspan’s ego.
There’s something ugly about this Rovian us against them attitude.
Actually, I think there’s something ugly, disgusting, and extremely naive about the whole kumbaya appeasement ideology I see gathering steam everywhere.
There’s nothing new about it, of course – it’s been going on throughout the Bush years, but has especially accelerated since the 06 election (aince which the Appeasers have nominally had majorities in both houses, yet have acted as the minority party), and now in this transition.
Thus we have Daschle assuring the republicans that his first priority will be appeasement. Thus we have Obama telling the republicans ahead of time that where it comes negotiations over the stimulus, he will be tilted toward appeasement as his preliminary baseline, that he concedes massive tax cuts as an appeasement-minded preconditon. Needless to say the republicans will fight just as hard to get all they can; the difference is that they were on their own 5-yard line, but Obama gratuitiously moved the ball to the 50.
That’s why as far as I’m concerned we have the Republican Party and the Appeasement Party.
As for Sunstein, the first thing I always think of is how, in a book on the internet, he said advocacy websites should be required to link to enemy sites. So, for example, if it were up to him Climate Progress would have to link to places like CEI, George Marshall, Inhofe’s site, etc.
Given Mr. Sunstein’s views on cost-benefit analysis, progressives concerned about regulatory policy should want to hear assurances that under Mr. Sunstein’s leadership OIRA will stop serving as a roadblock to much needed environmental, health, and safety protections.
Rena Steinzor, President of the Center for Progressive Reform, a think-tank of legal scholars, blogs about Mr. Sunstein’s appointment here:
http://www.progressivereform.org/ CPRblog.cfm?idBlog=BCC5AF38-1E0B-E803-CA9222BEA379D45D
The Center for Progressive Reform plans to produce a full analysis of Mr. Sunstein’s views shortly.
Dano — What did Atrios say?
It is absolutely correct to be skeptical or wary of this nomination, and if he gets the job, to watch his every move.
And he does seem to be ill-educated on some of the costs and benefits that he wants to balance. In addition to your examples, he apparently believes the canard that DDT was over-regulated, leading to many deaths from malaria in Africa. (This was debunked by Tim Lambert at Deltoid many times.)
But is he educable? I believe and hope so. Will he be open to policies that lead to improvements? That is actually his main claim. His recent book, “Nudge”, is all about crafting policies that guide people (rather than command them) to do the right thing. Can it work? That’s what he claims, so that’s how to “frame” things for him.
I heard him suggest to Amy Goodman, at Democracy Now, that Congress should demand that companies simply inventory and report their GHG emissions publicly. That would “nudge” them to reducing them. That’s his shtick, anyhow.
The Santa Fe Institute did a wonderful colloquium on economics — They invited several well-credentialed economists including luminaries and Nobel prize winners such as Ken Arrow to familiarize a set of equally credentialed physicists on economic theory.
At the completion of the economist’s presentations, Physics Nobel prize winner Murray Gell-Mann said something to effect of “Very interesting. But aren’t you constrained by reality in your field?”
Or, as Joan Robertson said, “Economists have run off to hide in thickets of Algebra, leaving the real problems to journalists.”
The discipline is riddled with what Whitehead called, the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
In a desperate attempt to make a social science as quantitative as a physical science, they severed the link between results that are meaningful in the real world, and embraced abstract unrealities which appear intellectually elegant but offer no insight.
As a discipline, it should largely be ignored when it comes to setting policy.
Take care, Obama is a politician.
White can turn to black and vice versa.
Oh my god! Obama is a politician!
Here’s some more breaking news for you.
All our politicians are politicians.
Difference is, this time, we got one into the White House who is intellectually curious, a careful decision maker, and more interested in the welfare of people than in the welfare of corporations.
Another nice thing about Obama, as opposed to what we’ve suffered with during the last eight years, is that he is capable of “turning”. Obama lacks that characteristic of the insane.
Obama doesn’t keep doing the same old thing time and time again when it doesn’t work. He looks for new ways. He takes in new knowledge and adapts.
Won’t it be refreshing to be led by a politician who “turns”?
Joe
I also think your little bracketed mini retorts–like this, after my comment
JR: Except that don’t know — or want to know — the true costs, and don’t care about the true benefits.]
are not conducive to debate or discussion. Don’t you know that you have to convince other people and eventually reach compromise?
Duncan
[JR: Given how extensive my posts have been, your comment didn't strike me as part of a debate or discussion. You can't convince everybody, and after a quarter-century doing this, I've realized it's not productive to try. I try to persuade the persuadable. Who exactly are you asking me to compromise with? Deniers? Economists who don't understand climate science and who misapply cost-benefit analysis? You -- who have no stated opinion that I can see?
The primary purpose of this blog is to explain the state of climate science and what its implications are across the board, but especially with a focus on energy and politics. We have been compromising the climate for decades. Any more such compromising and 5°C to 7°C warming will be all but unstoppable.]
If you are talking about influencing governent it’s better to be polite.
So what kind of climate science are you trained in? And what kind of “implications” are you qualified to opine on?.
john — Well and truely written.
Duncan:
“Reach a copmpromise”? Between what and amongst whom? No-nothing ideologues vs, the entire universe of drideible climate scientists?
Economists with no training in climate science using the discredited tools of neoclassical theory vs. climatologists?
Fact vs. Fiction?
Sorry, dude, but compromise is appropriate only when the subject at hand is a matter of opinion or preference. The world will continue to warm, regardless of opinions or preferences.
‘Climate Progress’ serves its purpose well.
So, this is just a quick note to say ‘thanks.’
Please keep things on their present course.