Roll Call Op-Ed Says Legislation Preferable to EPA Regs to Cut GHGs

In a commentary published by Roll Call, Peter Fox-Penner and Richard Schmalensee considered two pathways toward reducing GHG emissions: Legislation or EPA regulation. Former DOE official Fox-Penner heads the Brattle Group and is author of "Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities." Schmalensee is a professor of economics and management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and directs the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

Should the regulatory way win out, they wrote, "new, efficient plants are disadvantaged relative to old, inefficient plants, and the latter are thus encouraged to stay in operation as long as possible, continuing to emit greenhouse gases for free while new sources must pay to clean them up." Under EPA standards based on the best available control technology, they explained, there would be "no incentive for continued research and development or investments in technologies to beat the standard." And, since existing sources of emissions would remain in operation, GHGs would not be reduced significantly.

Climate legislation, they argued, would "represent an enormous improvement" over the EPA's way, which would omit using "markets to seek out the cheapest solutions, stimulate innovation, and reward efficiency." Though the several climate bills at play in the Senate would not solve all GHG-related problems, "they are steps in the right direction. It would indeed be regrettable if Members of Congress, who universally prefer carbon markets over command-and-control regulation, could not enact a bill that spares us such regulation and begins to solve the climate problem."