A Taste of Things to Come
Welcome to 2023. It’s going to be a wild ride.
Up to now week, we’ve gotten a glimpse of what the following two years will seem like. On the one hand, chaos in Congress. Alternatively, quiet progress toward environmental goals by the Biden Administration. Each trends are more likely to proceed throughout this Congress and the second half of the presidential term.
The chaos is common knowledge. Much as Netanyahu’s desperate quest to develop into prime minister led to unprecedented power for a small band extreme right-wingers in Israel, Kevin McCarthy’s campaign to develop into speaker led to a flood of concessions to his far-right wing. That wing of the party is devoted to gutting government spending, for domestic agencies like EPA but in addition for defense and social security.
We’ll must see how that plays out, but we all know that among the battles might be over EPA’s budget and more broadly over spending on clean energy. It’s hard to imagine that we are going to escape having a number of government shutdowns, perhaps lengthy ones.
While all of the drama within the House was occurring, the Biden Administration announced two recent actions. First, EPA proposed cutting levels of dangerous advantageous particulates (PM2.5) by 16-25%, with the precise level to be set later. Cutting particulates by 25% percent, EPA estimates, could save as much as 4,200 lives per yr and lead to as much as $43 billion in net health advantages by 2032. The prices of decreasing emissions are dwarfed by the advantages. Depending on the extent of stringency of the annual PM2.5 ceiling, there are no less than fifty times the annual advantages as annualized costs and possibly rather more. (Table 2 of the EO 12866 discussion).
Second, the Administration issued recent guidance on consideration of climate change in environmental impact statements. Notably, the guidance advises use of the social cost of carbon as a approach to give the general public a greater sense of the meaningfulness of emission changes. It also requires consideration of the indirect emission impacts of a project, resembling the final word burning of fossil fuels obtained from federal lands. As well as, there are detailed guidelines about considering the impact of climate change on a project –- as an illustration, how sea level rise might affect a coastal infrastructure project.
Besides the various implications for the environment, what’s happening in Congress and what the Administration is doing have remarkably different tones. House Republicans were engaged in frenzied negotiations with tempers fraying; the top of the Armed Services Committee needed to be restrained from physically assaulting a holdout voter. The Administration documents reflect calm, a measured tone, and careful evaluation. This difference in tone is more likely to thread through the remaining of the two-year congressional term.
