States of Nature In their long-standing campaign against environmental protections, American conservatives have taken a kitchen sink approach: First they exalted states' rights and attacked the Environmental Protection Agency; later, they reversed course, attacking states' rights and exalting the EPA. The only consistent objective was to thwart regulation, and the only question was which strategy would be most effective in achieving that goal. But their political opportunism may soon come to haunt them. By abandoning their strict states'-rights principles for a broad view of the EPA's authority, conservatives have boxed themselves into a corner. If Congress and the White House are in a more environmental mood after November, conservative anti-environmentalists may find that they have laid the legal groundwork for their ultimate defeat. The debate among conservatives over the best strategy for pro-business environmental policies has been raging for three decades. During the Reagan and first Bush administrations, the states'-rights strategy initially prevailed. In a series of legal challenges, conservatives embraced a pre-New Deal vision of Congress's power to regulate the environment. They insisted that the Clean Air Act, which instructs the EPA to "protect the public health" by regulating ozone and particulate matter, was an unconstitutional delegation of regulatory authority. In a federal appellate opinion in 1999, Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. embraced this radical argument. (He was the same judge who had called for the resurrection of the "Constitution in Exile"--a reference to judicial limitations on federal authority that had been dormant since the 1930s and that would have called the EPA itself into question.) But, in 2001, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court disagreed. (In a separate concurrence, only Clarence Thomas indicated that he would be amenable to similarly radical arguments in the future.)....
Drilling The Future America's energy crunch is sadly self-inflicted. While others around the world engage in a mad dash to find more oil reserves, the U.S. seems to think $111-a-barrel oil won't be affected by more supply. A line from the recent film "There Will Be Blood" reminds us of the spirit this country's original oil entrepreneurs once had. "There's a whole ocean of oil beneath our feet," bellows antihero Daniel Plainview. "No one can get at it except for me." Such sentiment these days is in short supply. But not overseas. Take Brazil's Petroleo Brasileiro. On Monday, it announced that its Carioca offshore oil field may hold up to 33 billion barrels — more than the estimated official reserves in all the U.S. This follows Brazil's discovery last December of a huge new oil source, the Tupi field, also thought to hold billions of barrels. Haroldo Lima, head of Brazil's National Oil Agency, estimates that Carioca might be as much as five times the size of Tupi. Why the spate of discoveries off Brazil? Simple: With oil topping $100 a barrel, it's now more economical to prospect for hard-to-get supplies, whether deep in the ocean or in remote regions of dry land. When prices soared, Brazil got busy. This is happening around the world....
Economic Pain Of Carbon Cuts Will Be Global The political debate over climate change has advanced rapidly in recent years, and there is now tremendous pressure to reduce carbon emissions from U.S. industrial activity. Unfortunately, the economic debate over the cost of attempting to achieve such reductions has gotten little attention despite the direct financial impact it will have on all our nation's citizens. As the country teeters on the brink of a recession, it is even more imperative to have a frank conversation on the cost of potential actions set for debate in Congress and who will shoulder the burden. The Senate will soon consider legislation, sponsored by Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and John Warner, R-Va., that would institute a cap-and-trade system for emissions of greenhouse gases. This program would set a limit on the amount of carbon dioxide and other emissions from economic activity that many link to climate change. Firms and industries that cut their emissions below a preset level would be able to trade credits to firms or industries that cannot meet their targets. Any economist will tell you that if you want less of something, the best thing to do is tax it. A cap-and-trade program serves as a tax on emissions to reduce them. Make no mistake, that's what the proposed program is: a hidden tax on the use of energy....