Air Act Success Serves As Model for Carbon Cuts

The technological challenges we face to decarbonize the economy are immense. But the governance challenges necessary to spur technological development and deliver massive greenhouse gas reductions may be even larger. The lag between emissions cuts and climate benefits, the sheer scale of the energy transformation, and the complex connection between emissions and harms make the problems especially thorny. Deep decarbonization requires close attention to governance.

In a forthcoming book, my co-authors and I suggest that climate policy will need to build in three attributes in the regime that governs multi-decadal greenhouse gas reductions. To start, policy should be durable, capable of sustaining a long-term energy transformation through steadily declining emissions. We need to send a consistent signal to the private sector to invest in substantial infrastructure. Policy must also be adaptable to incorporate and respond to new scientific, technological, and economic information. Policies then must both endure and evolve. Finally, the climate transformation will be the most complicated environmental challenge we have ever confronted. Decisionmakers should also embrace policy flexibility, drawing on emitter knowledge and experience to determine how best to reduce emissions at lowest cost.

Though the governance challenge is an immense one, the United States has confronted other major environmental problems with significant success. The Clean Air Act, in particular, has delivered extraordinary benefits in the five decades since its adoption, reducing multiple pollutants across the country from a huge number of sources.

Our book contains in-depth studies of five CAA programs from an interdisciplinary team of legal scholars, economists, and political scientists to examine the extent to which these programs incorporate mechanisms to promote durability, adaptability, and flexibility. Our focus is not on the use of the act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — even though the CAA requires that. Instead, the book evaluates our experience in reducing traditional air pollution to see what it can tell us about promoting policy that meets the three necessary attributes.

The book reaches several conclusions: Policymakers should delegate significant, but not unlimited, discretion to an expert agency. Limitations might include the setting of deadlines, requirements to collect updated information, and citizen suit provisions. One of the most powerful adaptive mechanisms in the CAA is the broad delegation to the Environmental Protection Agency of authority to set National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Importantly, this authority is cabined by the requirement that the standards be revisited every five years and, if warranted, tightened based on up-to-date scientific information and enforced in part through citizen suits. The NAAQS program has not only led to massive reductions in ubiquitous pollutants that had been identified at the time the CAA was passed, such as lead and carbon monoxide, but also to the reduction of pollution whose harm was not even recognized in 1970, such as fine particles.

Well-structured, adaptable policy promotes durability — the two are deeply intertwined. Policies that promote regularized adaptability with built-in processes can make policy long-lasting, delivering pollution reductions decades after a statute is passed but in a manner that is predictable and legitimate. With regularized review and procedural fairness, policymakers can signal how regulation will develop in the future and help regulated parties form expectations that guide investment decisions.

Regularized, built-in processes will also foster stakeholder involvement, allowing supportive coalitions to emerge and adapt to new information and to coalesce around new proposals. CAA programs that contain provisions that promote regularized adaptability include not only NAAQS but also technology-based standards for stationary sources that require the Best Available Control Technology, and California’s special role in regulating mobile sources.

Flexible mechanisms can also make policy more durable and adaptable. Such mechanisms in the CAA draw on the expertise of regulated parties, incentivize private innovation, and minimize the cost of pollution reduction, making regulation more politically palatable. Flexibility has also produced adaptability by producing information about cost-effective regulatory approaches and technologies that have led to further pollution reductions. Examples here include the phase-out of lead in gasoline, the Acid Rain Program, the Clean Air Transport Rule, and technology-based standards for stationary sources.

Our book is based on this foundational premise: to develop the technology necessary to achieve deep decarbonization by mid-century, we need to create governance mechanisms that promote durability, adaptability, and flexibility. The Clean Air Act provides crucial lessons about how to do so.