Jonathan Chait believes that Congress forced Obama’s hand on climate:
There is a very fortunate irony about President Obama’s second term. He has to deal with a Congress barely capable of keeping the government’s lights on, let alone crafting rational laws, and totally unable to handle any number of policy crises. Yet, on the single most urgent issue facing the country (and the world), climate change, Obama doesn’t need Congress at all. …
It is true that, in the long run, Congress will have to act. Obama can meet environmentalists’ near-term goal of reducing carbon emissions 17 percent by 2020 on his own. In the decades afterward, deeper cuts will be needed — humans have simply pumped too much carbon into the atmosphere to sustain any continuation of the old practices. Perhaps a functional Congress will one day emerge. In the meantime, the only way to understand the issue is that Congress, for all intents and purposes, does not exist.
Yglesias sees “one right response to Obama’s climate plan” for Republicans:
The right solution here is still what it was when Obama was first elected. Republicans ought to suck it up and recognize that a real legislative framework for tackling climate change is better than an ad hoc, executive-branch response. All the interests, regions, and industries harmed by a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system are going to be harmed even more by an all-regulation effort—you get the costs of reduced fossil-fuel use without the revenue that can mitigate those costs. The upside to sticking with the Clean Air Act framework is that it gives Republicans an issue: People will feel pain if electricity becomes more expensive, and they can point the finger at Obama and the Democrats. But while this sort of partisan war may have made some sense in the president’s first term, by now it’s surely time to give up the ghost.
Brad Plumer is more optimistic about the regulatory approach:
A better approach, [economists will] typically say, would be for Congress to set a price on carbon that required polluters to pay for the damage caused by their emissions. People would then decide how best to adjust to the new price of fossil fuels on their own. That would be cheaper and more efficient. Again, that’s the conventional wisdom. But in an interesting recent paper (pdf) for Resources for the Future, Nathan Richardson and Arthur G. Fraas look at this comparison in much greater detail. Their conclusion? It actually depends how each is designed. EPA regulations might even be more effective than a carbon tax in a few cases.
McArdle, meanwhile, predicts that the costs of climate regulation will prevent any action, regulatory or legislative, without major changes in the energy landscape:
[T]his will not be painless for anyone. Unless we get really cheap solar, it will be painful for everyone–so painful, I submit, that it probably isn’t going to happen. Let’s return to Obama’s plan. Final standards will be released in 2015 and phased in slowly. (You will observe that the president has cleverly timed things so that he is out of office when the cuts begin to bite). If they are toothy enough to really hurt–produce a measurable increase in electric bills that really changes behavior, other than causing manufacturers to shift production to Chinese facilities where energy-efficiency is lower, but so are energy prices–then I predict that President Obama’s successor will roll the rules back even more swiftly than they were unrolled.
If said successor does not, but digs in and stands on environmental principle, then Congress will step in and amend the law to remove EPA oversight over carbon emissions. This will happen whether Democrats or Republicans control the House, for the same reason that European parliaments keep weaseling out of strengthening the EU carbon trading regime.
The Dish 