The Political Economy of Expertise by Esterling Kevin;

Author:Esterling, Kevin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Congress Embraces Emissions Trading Approach

The central question for this book is whether this sort of separating equilibrium in debate helps to inform the committee members regarding the likely efficacy of the environmental policy that is so appealing in concept. Viewed from above, the debate as summarized in table 12 is informative in the sense that the committee heard a coherent and informed message regarding the policy's instrumental effectiveness. On normative questions regarding the desirability of the outcomes, the debate is less clear, and committee members would have to make a judgment call on the relative value of aggregate efficiency versus the harms to an identified group of miners.

The basic political issue regarding sulfur dioxide cleanup for the committee members was the distribution of the cost of cleanup across geographic regions. These costs are passed on to consumers—that is, constituents—in the form of higher electricity rates. The midwestern members argued in the hearing that the bill required their region to bear a disproportionate share of the cleanup costs. Consequently, midwestern members pushed for a general sharing of the costs, similar to the savings-and-loan bailout or the national financing of hydropower in the West. Members from western states argued in response that their utilities had already cleaned up and should not be required to pay a second time to help midwestern utilities to clean up their excessive emissions. These distributional issues, however, are largely independent of the mechanism chosen to control emissions. Indeed, many committee members were interested in the emissions trading program precisely because if it worked in practice it could minimize costs and thus reduce but not eliminate the interregional dispute on cost sharing. Therefore, committee members' only question about the emissions trading program was whether it would work in practice and thereby help to resolve this interregional dispute.

While the debate sent a clear message regarding the efficacy of the program, the question remains whether committee members listened to and learned from the instrumental arguments made in debate. I show that the committee indeed “received” the message in two ways. First, the committee and subcommittee chairs directly engaged lobbyists in technical questions to help refine the program's design; second, the committee devoted a considerable amount of its scarce time to ironing out the specific details of the program design and implementation.

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