Ten Years On, Summers-Browner Conflict May Return As Climate Policy Debate Reopens - NYT

[hatrack]

WASHINGTON — In the fall of 1997, when the Clinton administration was forming its position for the Kyoto climate treaty talks, Lawrence H. Summers argued that the United States would risk damaging the domestic economy if it set overly ambitious goals for reducing carbon emissions.

Mr. Summers, then the deputy Treasury secretary, said at the time that there was a compelling scientific case for action on global warming but that a too-rapid move against emissions of greenhouse gases risked dire and unknowable economic consequences. His view prevailed over those of officials arguing for tougher standards, among them Carol M. Browner, then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and her mentor, Al Gore, then the vice president.

Today, as the climate-change debate once again heats up, Mr. Summers leads the economic team of the incoming administration, and Ms. Browner has been designated its White House coordinator of energy and climate policy. And Mr. Gore is hovering as an informal adviser to President-elect Barack Obama.

EDIT

Mr. Summers and Peter R. Orszag, the economist whom Mr. Obama has designated director of the White House budget office, have both argued that a tax on carbon emissions from burning gasoline, coal and other fuels might be a more economically efficient means of regulating pollutants than a cap-and-trade system, under which an absolute ceiling on emissions is set and polluters are allowed to buy and sell permits to meet it. But Mr. Obama and Ms. Browner have ruled out a straight carbon tax, perhaps mindful of the stinging political defeat the Clinton administration suffered in 1993 when, prodded by Mr. Gore, it proposed one.

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/03/washington/03enviro.html?_r=1&ref=us

[pscot]

1. The best idea I've heard

is to make the tax revenue neutral, by offering payments to consumers and businesses that use less carbon, while taxing heavy users. Without some sort of sweetener the Congress will never accept it.