Law Commons^™

Anatomy Of Industry Resistance To Climate Change: A Familiar Litany, Robert L. Glicksman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The industries that generate environmental risks in the United States have long been hostile to regulatory programs that increase their costs of operation and reduce their profits. While industry may have been unprepared for, and thus poorly organized to resist, the first wave of federal environmental legislation enacted during the “environmental decade” of the 1970s, it quickly marshaled its forces. Regulated or potentially regulated entities, their trade associations, and their lobbyists began a concerted effort to defeat, delay, and weaken environmental regulation.

This book chapter describes the process by which regulatory opponents successfully relied on free market ideology to couch …

The Past, Present, And Future Of Energy Regulation, Richard J. Pierce Jr

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This essay is a contribution to a symposium at University of Utah. It begins with a summary of the history of energy regulation from 1960 until 2011. It then makes three arguments. First, the essay argues that the US should abandon pursuit of the goal of energy independence and pursue exclusively the goal of global warming mitigation. Second, it argues that the US should replace its present reliance on expensive and ineffective subsidies and mandates to mitigate global warming with a single mechanism to attain that goal – a large carbon tax. Third, the essay recognizes that, while a carbon …