Walter A. Rosenbaum

Bureaucratic Politics and Regulatory Reform: The EPA and Emissions Trading

Preface Abbreviations The Regulatory Reform Landscape The Regulatory Form Debate Congress and Economic Incentives An Emissions Trading Chronicle Challenges to Implementation Ideological Controversies Organizational Character and Policy Reform Appendix: A Note About Research Methods References Index

The Paradoxes of Public Participation

New public participation programs have been enacted in the federal bureaucracy in the last 15 years; these programs intend to broaden the diversity and range of interests participating in agency affairs. to bring citizens into policy planning and to encourage greater ageney sensitivity to citizen interests. One explanation for the apparent failure to achieve these objectives in current programs is that advocates have not based goals on sound empirical and theoretical grounds. A number of propositions, based on program experience, are suggested because they seem to offer a more satisfactory description and explanation of program accomplishment .

Explaining the Attitude of Community Influentials Toward Government Consolidation: A Reappraisal of Four Hypotheses

In the litany of civic ills, one commonly cited problem is the fragmentation of local government. This fragmentation dissipates governmental powers, increases competition for scarce public resources, and frustrates comprehensive urban planning; understandably, urban reformers have given considerable attention to creating and promoting solutions to this multiplicity of governmental entities within limited geographic areas. One remedy frequently advocated is comprehensive consolidation, a set of reforms differing in detail but commonly proposing to abolish existing city and county governments and to replace them with a new metropolitan governmental entity or to absorb one governmental body in another. These proposals are increasing. Between 1950 and 1971, at least 25 .

The Good Lessons of Bad Experience Rethinking the Future of Commercial Nuclear Power

New scientific and political realities make it necessary for the United States to continue research and development (R & D) in commercial nuclear power. However, this approach must be based upon a new institutional management structure that recognizes commercial nuclear power as a “Faustian technology,” the management of which requires new forms of institutional controls. This new institutional design should involve a government-private consortium that is aimed at correcting past mistakes made by the institutional management of the commercial nuclear power industry from 1950 to 1975. The new institutional design must (a) involve a multiple partnership between government, industry, environmental interests, and other significant stakeholders; (b) begin with small-scale start-up technologies; (c) include an open public involvement process throughout its duration; (d) aspire to a new standard of institutional constancy; and (e) explicitly socialize management to the political aspects of risk communication as a basic technical preparation. The institutional constancy standard is particularly significant because it involves provisions for managing the intergenerational equities associated with commercial nuclear technology and an explicit recognition of problems associated with the social and temporal distribution of risk.

Explaining Comprehensive Governmental Consolidation: Toward a Preliminary Theory

Efforts to reform local government have a long and vigorous history in the United States and have stimulated considerable scholarly interest. One can readily discover a rich body of analytical literature dealing with many aspects of non-partisan elections, city-manager government, urban fiscal planning, local governmental services, and a multitude of other topics relating to urban governmental reform. Comprehensive consolidation, however, is an exception. Such ambitious proposals to reorganize various metropolitan governments

Perceptions of intergenerational conflict: The politics of young vs. old in Florida

Abstract Not long ago, syndicated columnist Richard Reeves pondered the portents in an aging America and found trouble. “There is a confrontation coming in the United States between the demands of old people and the needs of the whole society,” he declared (Reeves 1988). His premonition is widely shared. Many social prophets are convinced that the graying of America is the prelude to a new politics. It will be the young against the old, they suggest, a politics of age polarization characterized by political mobilization, confrontation and backlash between generations reaching from Congress to city hall. Florida, with the nations highest proportion of aging and a steady inflow of new retirees, is where many expect such conflict to appear early and often. This article concerns whether Florida is, or soon may be, the arena for such a confrontation and, if so, how it has become manifest.

Slaying Beautiful Hypotheses With Ugly Facts: Epa and the Limits of Public Participation

ment. The essence of this antipathy lies in a remark by environmental lawyer Joseph Sax, Jr.: &dquo;...the administrative process tends to produce not the voice of the people but the voice of the bureaucrat--the administrative perspective posing as the public interest.&dquo;1 The ecologist commonly sees himself as the guardian of a public interest long sacrificed on the altar of the &dquo;administrative perspective.&dquo; His polemics abound in bitter administrative caricatures: the

William R. Freudenburg and interdisciplinary innovation

I had never met Bill Freudenberg nor imagined what awaited when I responded to an invitation to attend an ‘Environmental Summit’ at the University of Santa Barbara in late February 2006. The agenda was inviting, and Santa Barbara was oh so pleasant in February (Bill was a strategic thinker). It sounded convivial: renew acquaintances with friends and colleagues and perhaps an opportunity to meet new, interesting people. I did not anticipate that more than 250 individuals—many nationally recognized environmental scholars, governmental regulators, consultants, academic administrators and environmental advocacy leaders representing seven nations—would show up.

Introducing The Forum

In this issue, we present a new Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences feature called The Forum . The Forum creates opportunities for reflection, lively debate, and insight based on informed opinion about all aspects of contemporary interdisciplinary environmental studies and sciences. Here, a reader will find essays, op-eds, letters to the editor, and film reviews, all intended to promote engaging discussion. The essays will be a regular feature of the Forum . These essays, often solicited from senior scholars and professionals in interdisciplinary environmental studies and practice, are peer-reviewed for timeliness, accuracy, and cogency. They create contrasting, sometimes controversial, perspectives about critical issues in contemporary environmental studies, science, and professions. The initial essays in this issue present early, incisive explorations of a controversial and innovative public policy recently proposed by the internationally known climatologist James Hanson. He proposes that mitigating global climate change requires that most of the remaining international fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground, and this can be achieved by pricing carbon through a “fee-and-dividend” strategy. This plan would tax carbon at various points of entry into a national economy, such as seaports. The fee would then be returned directly to consumers in relation to their carbon consumption, thus providing an incentive to move away from fossil energy sources. Is this practical, or even plausible? What will be the actual impact? We all know about the iron law of unintended consequences. Here, three scholars in two essays evaluate the notion of carbon pricing, its distributional problems, and alternatives. In “Two World Views on Carbon Revenues,” Dallas Burtraw and Samantha Sekar, policy specialists associated with Resources for the Future, maintain that carbon pricing would be more efficient than the prescriptive regulation of greenhouse gases. From this perspective, they ask the important question concerning to whom should this additional revenue go? While Hanson’s fee-and-dividend would allocate the funds straight to consumers, Burtraw and Sekar argue that the rightful recipients depend on how we think of the atmospheric commons. Recipients of the funds could, for example, be nation states if the atmosphere is determined to be state property; then the tax or fee could go to governmental budgets. However, if the atmosphere is conceived as the property of individuals in common, then a dividend to individuals may be politically expedient but complicated by the global nature of such a commons. In a second essay, “Climate and Economic Storms of Our Grandchildren,” international energy expert and consultant John “Skip” Laitner, currently president-elect of AESS, uses research he and others conducted for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy to analyze the idea of US carbon pricing. Laitner begins with the premise that economic welfare in the USA is hampered by dreadful energy inefficiency. This inefficiency is so pervasive that Laitner concludes through a thoughtful experiment that the USA could have reduced its 2012 energy consumption in half to 1980 levels, and also lowered carbon emissions below 1980 levels, while still creating a stronger economy. What is the best way to accomplish this task, far more ambitious than the now-expired Kyoto Protocol? Laitner argues that non-pricing programs, some of which need government investment and intervention to establish efficiency and behavioral feedbacks, will bring more options and value across the US economy. These benefits include economic savings for households, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and deep cuts in greenhouse gases. These essays illustrate the quality of informative and accessible insight we hope to bring to Journal of Environmental Preface for the new Forum section of the journal to appear in the March 2014 issue