Statehouse And Greenhouse

No environmental issue triggers such feelings of hopelessness as global climate change. Many areas of the world, including regions of the United States, have experienced a wide range of unusually dramatic weather events recently. Much climate change analysis forecasts horrors of biblical proportions, such as massive floods, habitat loss, species loss, and epidemics related to warmer weather. Such accounts of impending disaster have helped trigger extreme reactions, wherein some observers simply dismiss global climate change as, at the very worst, a minor inconvenience requiring modest adaptation. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that an American federal government known for institutional gridlock has accomplished virtually nothing in this area in the last decade. Policy inertia is not the story of this book, however. Statehouse and Greenhouse examines the surprising evolution of state-level government policies on global climate change. Environmental policy analyst Barry Rabe details a diverse set of innovative cases, offering detailed analysis of state-level policies designed to combat global warming. The book explains why state innovation in global climate change has been relatively vigorous and why it has drawn so little attention thus far. Rabe draws larger potential lessons from this recent flurry of American experience. Statehouse and Greenhouse helps to move debate over global climate change from bombast to the realm of what is politically and technically feasible.

An updated investigation of alternate pathways for American environmental policymaking made necessary by legislative gridlock. The “golden era” of American environmental lawmaking in the 1960s and 1970s saw twenty-two pieces of major environmental legislation (including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act) passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress and signed into law by presidents of both parties. But since then partisanship, the dramatic movement of Republicans to the right, and political brinksmanship have led to legislative gridlock on environmental issues. In this book, Christopher Klyza and David Sousa argue that the longstanding legislative stalemate at the national level has forced environmental policymaking onto other pathways. Klyza and Sousa identify and analyze five alternative policy paths, which they illustrate with case studies from 1990 to the present: “appropriations politics” in Congress; executive authority; the role of the courts; “next-generation” collaborative experiments; and policymaking at the state and local levels. This updated edition features a new chapter discussing environmental policy developments from 2006 to 2012, including intensifying partisanship on the environment, the failure of Congress to pass climate legislation, the ramifications of Massachusetts v. EPA, and other Obama administration executive actions (some of which have reversed Bush administration executive actions). Yet, they argue, despite legislative gridlock, the legacy of 1960s and 1970s policies has created an enduring “green state” rooted in statutes, bureaucratic routines, and public expectations.

“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system,” Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1932, “that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” It is one of the features of federalism in our day, Paul Nolette counters, that these “laboratories of democracy,” under the guidance of state attorneys general, are more apt to be dictating national policy than conducting contained experiments. In Federalism on Trial, Nolette presents the first broadscale examination of the increasingly nationalized political activism of state attorneys general. Focusing on coordinated state litigation as a form of national policymaking, his book challenges common assumptions about the contemporary nature of American federalism. In the tobacco litigation of the 1990s, a number of state attorneys general managed to reshape one of America’s largest industries—all without the involvement of Congress or the executive branch. This instance of prosecution as a form of regulation is just one case among many in the larger story of American state development. Federalism on Trial shows how new social policy regimes of the 1960s and 1970s—adopting national objectives such as cleaner air, wider access to health care, and greater consumer protections—promoted both “adversarial legalism” and new forms of “cooperative federalism” that enhanced the powers and possibilities open to state attorneys general. Nolette traces this trend—as AGs took advantage of these new circumstances and opportunities—through case studies involving drug pricing, environmental policy, and health care reform. The result is the first full account—far-reaching and finely detailed—of how, rather than checking national power or creating productive dialogue between federal and state policymakers, the federalism exercised by state attorneys general frequently complicates national regulatory regimes and seeks both greater policy centralization and a more extensive reach of the American regulatory state.

A political science analysis of the feasibility and sustainability of carbon pricing, drawing from North American, European, and Asian case studies. Climate change, economists generally agree, is best addressed by putting a price on the carbon content of fossil fuels—by taxing carbon, by cap-and-trade systems, or other methods. But what about the politics of carbon pricing? Do political realities render carbon pricing impracticable? In this book, Barry Rabe offers the first major political science analysis of the feasibility and sustainability of carbon pricing, drawing upon a series of real-world attempts to price carbon over the last two decades in North America, Europe, and Asia. Rabe asks whether these policies have proven politically viable and, if adopted, whether they survive political shifts and managerial challenges over time. The entire policy life cycle is examined, from adoption through advanced implementation, on a range of pricing policies including not only carbon taxes and cap-and-trade but also such alternative methods as taxing fossil fuel extraction. These case studies, Rabe argues, show that despite the considerable political difficulties, carbon pricing can be both feasible and durable.

From the implications of Donald Trump’s presidency on intergovernmental relations to the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on state-federal relations, the Eighth Edition of Governing States and Localities introduces students to the most recent challenges, developments, and political changes impacting state and local politics.

A comprehensive examination of the inability of liberal capitalism to generate the technological innovations necessary to prevent dangerous climate change. The case is made for the need for institutional evolution to drive the climate innovation, and the potential for climate innovation in an increasingly economically interconnected world.

Explains how the earth's climate system works, and how global climate change can impact individual nations. Also explains the science of why these changes are occurring, including discussion of greenhouse gases and aerosols and their effect on melting glaciers.