Policy Drift: Shared Powers and the Making of U.S. Law and Policy by Norma M. Riccucci

Author:Norma M. Riccucci
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL000000 Political Science / General, Public Policy, American Government, Political Science, General
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2018-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

Why has it been so difficult to forge national laws to curb the pollutants that are responsible for global warming? The short answer to this question, as we will see in the following section, is—not surprisingly—politics.

Efforts to Stall Climate Change Policy in the United States

There has been an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence in recent years showing the harmful effects of global warming on the environment and human health.13 In April 2016 the White House released a study, The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment, that points to the health effects of climate change.14 It provides evidence that global warming could negatively affect the human respiratory and cardiovascular systems, and could lead to an increase in allergies, asthma, and deaths by the proliferation of insect-borne diseases. Such claims are not new, but the report, reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, provides the strongest evidence to date on the effects of climate change on human health.

But as noted earlier, there continues to be a good deal of skepticism about this evidence, which has thwarted the ability of policy makers to regulate climate change. “Climategate,” for example, was a contributing factor to the questioning of scientism around climate change.15 In 2009 a university server at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom was hacked, exposing thousands of emails between prominent American and British climate researchers. Skeptics of climate change interpreted the text of the emails as evidence that global warming itself is a hoax perpetrated by a scientific conspiracy. Based on the emails, they claimed that scientists were manipulating climate data. In one email exchange, for example, a scientist wrote of “using a statistical ‘trick’ in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend.” In another email, a climatologist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research writes, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” A climatologist at NASA stated, “Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice.”16 These scientists maintained, however, that the emails were taken out of context and amounted to nothing more than a smear campaign, particularly since the disclosure of the hacked emails was timed to occur several weeks before the 2009 Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change.17 It is uncertain as to whether the email breach propagated by the skeptics had a negative effect on the summit.18 Nonetheless, the Copenhagen Summit resulted in nothing more than an agreement among the participating countries that the problem of global warming continues to be a threat and must be addressed accordingly.19

Richard Lazarus observed that

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