Environmental news: EPA regulations, CA climate change policy, and drought in China
Do regulations kill jobs? House report draws on businesses' answers: The Republican staff of a key House oversight committee has expressed a degree of sympathy for industry arguments that federal environmental regulations are killing jobs. Washington Post
Let me just quote from the article -
In an interview, Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, put it this way:
"Presumably, we could generate a lot of jobs by getting rid of all regulations and working for $2 an hour in dangerous and fetid working conditions in cities whose air could hardly be breathed and spewing out products that one in 10 consumers might die from."
Try thinking long term here, we'd all be paying a lot more in medical costs if there weren't any environmental regulations.
Lawsuit by low-income groups may delay climate law: The latest legal challenge to California's landmark climate-change legislation isn't coming from big polluters faced with a series of new regulations. Instead, groups representing low-income residents are challenging the environmental law as unfairly burdening their beleaguered communities. California Watch
This highlights one of the problems with air pollution and the carbon trading market strategy. I think there are a lot of benefits to carbon trading because the market incentive is built into the system. But if the companies all buy carbon credit and carbon pollution is decreased somewhere, geographically it'll look like we're solving the problem, but locally there'll still be air pollution issues, which is exactly what's happening here. Bottom line is, there isn't a perfect solution (yet) to large scale pollution problems like this. The larger scale the problem, the harder it is to govern.
U.N. food agency issues warning on China drought.: The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued an alert on Tuesday that a severe drought threatened the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and was even resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock. New York Times
Brace yourselves, the time of plenty is behind us.
Let me just quote from the article -
In an interview, Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, put it this way:
"Presumably, we could generate a lot of jobs by getting rid of all regulations and working for $2 an hour in dangerous and fetid working conditions in cities whose air could hardly be breathed and spewing out products that one in 10 consumers might die from."
Try thinking long term here, we'd all be paying a lot more in medical costs if there weren't any environmental regulations.
Lawsuit by low-income groups may delay climate law: The latest legal challenge to California's landmark climate-change legislation isn't coming from big polluters faced with a series of new regulations. Instead, groups representing low-income residents are challenging the environmental law as unfairly burdening their beleaguered communities. California Watch
This highlights one of the problems with air pollution and the carbon trading market strategy. I think there are a lot of benefits to carbon trading because the market incentive is built into the system. But if the companies all buy carbon credit and carbon pollution is decreased somewhere, geographically it'll look like we're solving the problem, but locally there'll still be air pollution issues, which is exactly what's happening here. Bottom line is, there isn't a perfect solution (yet) to large scale pollution problems like this. The larger scale the problem, the harder it is to govern.
U.N. food agency issues warning on China drought.: The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued an alert on Tuesday that a severe drought threatened the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and was even resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock. New York Times
Brace yourselves, the time of plenty is behind us.