By Jeff McMahon
What would possess two Obama Administration veterans to propose that the Trump Administration—which on Tuesday revoked much of Obama’s climate legacy—implement a cap and trade program to reduce auto emissions?
A new cap-and-trade proposal was unveiled Monday by Cass Sunstein, now of Harvard Law School, who headed Obama’s effort to streamline regulations, and Michael Greenstone, now of the University of Chicago, who served as chief architect of Obama’s “social cost of carbon” policy, which enabled the government to consider the climate impacts of nearly everything it does—until Trump abandoned the policy yesterday.
Sunstein and Greenstone unveiled their new cap-and-trade plan at a forum that also featured an energy expert who seemed to regard it as dead on arrival.
“It was a great, thoughtful paper,” said Trevor Houser of the Rhodium Group, poignantly using past tense at the proposal’s very unveiling. “And it was a paper that would have been perfect for a different administration that was actually curious about how you can make our vehicle standards more environmentally effective…”
Continue reading at Forbes…