2012 Articles
Climate Change 2011: A Status Report on US Policy
A growing partisan divide in Congress stalled almost all new federal climate policy in 2011. The divide frustrated efforts to pass a cap-and-trade carbon permitting system, spawned a battle between the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Congress, pushed most substantive climate change policy down to the municipal level and hindered US ability to effectively negotiate an international climate agreement. Amid the federal partisan wrangling, US cities have enacted far-sighted climate policy initiatives, and the growing cost of fossil fuels has stimulated investment in renewable energy, edging the country closer to commercially viable alternatives to fossil fuels. These trends could help provide an alternate route to climate mitigation, even without international treaties or national legislation. But the inevitable shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources would be greatly hastened by federal action to tax carbon dioxide emissions and use the revenue generate! d to support alternative energy technologies. That action is extremely unlikely to occur unless climate change comes to be seen in the United States as a practical, rather than ideological, issue.
Subjects
Files
- Bulletin_of_the_Atomic_Scientists-2012-Cohen-39-49.pdf application/pdf 124 KB Download File
Also Published In
- Title
- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0096340211433007
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- International and Public Affairs
- Earth Institute
- Publisher
- SAGE
- Published Here
- October 10, 2014