Environmental Policymaking in an Era of Climate Change

Matthew Nowlin

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315441702
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politics & International Relations
• Categoria: Environment & Energy Policy

As the world considers how to deal with the impacts of a changing climate, it's vital that we understand the ways in which the United States' policymaking process addresses environmental issues. A mix of existing theory and original analysis, Environmental Policymaking in an Era of Climate Change applies recent policy scholarship to questions of environmental governance, with a particular focus on climate change. The book examines how competing political actors influence policies within and across institutions, focusing on both a macro-level, where formal bodies set the agenda, and a meso-level, where issues are contained within policy subsystems.

Divided into two sections, the book incorporates insights from political science and public policy to provide the reader with a better understanding of how environmental policy decisions are made. Part I offers a framework for understanding environmental policymaking, exploring the history of environmental policy, and discussing the importance of values in environmental policy. Part II applies the framework to the issue of climate change, focusing on agenda-setting and the role of formal institutions in the policymaking process, covering topics that include Congress, the Executive and Judicial branches, and how climate change cuts across policy subsystem boundaries. By placing specific climate change case studies in a broader context, Environmental Policymaking in an Era of Climate Change will help students enrolled in political science, public administration, public policy, and environmental studies courses – as well as all those interested in the impacts of policy on climate change – to understand what is, and will likely continue to be, one of the most pressing policy issues of our time.

Part I

Foundations

1

Introduction

In 2017 the United States underwent a number of natural disasters and extreme weather events. At the beginning of 2017, the state of California experienced its wettest winter on record, having experienced its driest just two years earlier. The cycle of drought-to-deluge, where extreme drought is followed by record-breaking precipitation, has increased in California since 1980 (Lin II and John 2017). Later in 2017, California saw its most destructive wildfire season ever, with over 9,000 fires across the state that burned over 1.3 million acres. Several wildfires continued into December for the first time since records begin in 1936. Outside of California, wildfires raged across several states in the Pacific Northwest and western United States, including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, exacerbated by dry conditions and extreme heat.

The extreme heat resulted from a heatwave in the western United States in the summer. California was hit particularly hard, with several cities breaking heat records, including San Francisco that reached a high of 106°F. Other parts of the country were affected by extreme heat as well. In June, flights had to be cancelled in Phoenix, AZ due to abnormally high temperatures. Also in June, Las Vegas, NV, Olympia, WA, and Seattle, WA all broke, or tied, record high temperatures. South Florida experienced its hottest July ever, with only one day that month failing to reach 90°F.

The hurricane season of 2017 was marked by three category 4 hurricanes hitting the United States. Brock Long, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), stated to Congress that, “To say this [2017] hurricane season has been historic is an understatement” (Long 2017). In late August 2017 Hurricane Harvey pounded the states of Texas and Louisiana, leaving record rainfall in Houston, TX, where Harvey unleashed more than 4 ft of rain. This was shortly followed by Hurricane Irma which cut a swath through Florida. Finally, in September 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving the vast majority of the island without power for months, and as many as 3,000 to 4,500 or more deaths (Kishore et al. 2018; Milken Institute School of Public Health 2018).

The extreme weather and disaster events of 2017 led many to wonder whether or how much of the seemingly extreme events were a result of climate change. For example, California governor Jerry Brown noted the California wildfires are the “new normal” as a result of climate change and that, “This could be something that happens every year or every few years” (Vives, Etehad, and Cosgrove 2017). More bombastically, Governor Brown also stated that, “The world is not on the road to heaven, it’s on the road to hell” as a result of climate change (Skelton 2017). Climate scientists have long noted that climate change is likely to make some extreme weather events more likely; however, until recently scientists were not likely to attribute any single weather event to climate change. Yet the science of attribution is expanding rapidly (see Diffenbaugh et al. 2017).

Climate attribution science examines the degree to which events are pushed outside the bounds of what would be predicted with natural variability alone. Recently, scientists for the first time were able to attribute three specific extreme heat events in 2016 to human-induced climate change, including the record global heat of 2016, heat across Asia, and a marine heatwave off the coast of Alaska (Herring et al. 2018).

Apart from extreme heat events, attribution science is also advancing with regard to extreme precipitation. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the number of heavy precipitation events have increased in the United States (US Environmental Protection Agency 2016). As the climate warms, evaporation of water increases and the air is able to hold more water. One recent study noted that the probability and intensity of extreme precipitation events in the US Gulf Coast region have increased since 1900, likely as a result of climate change (van der Wiel et al. 2017). In addition, several recent studies noted that climate change made the extreme precipitation associated with Hurricane Harvey more likely (Emanuel 2017; van Oldenborgh et al. 2017; Risser and Wehner 2017). Apart from increased participation, scientists expect warming ocean temperatures to increase the intensity of hurricanes, and sea-level rise to make hurricane-induced flooding more destructive to coastal communities.

The impacts of human activity on the environment are such that we are likely in a new geographic epoch dubbed the Anthropocene (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007; Steffen et al. 2018; Waters et al. 2016). Human activity has had a significant impact with regard to ozone depletion, forest loss, land conversion, and biodiversity loss (Dryzek 2016, 937). However, perhaps the most significant impact comes from the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are likely to significantly alter the climate over the next century, and we are likely already seeing the effects now; therefore, we are in an era of climate change.

In this book, I explore how climate change can be addressed in the United States given the nature of the actors and institutions involved in environmental policymaking and governance. To do this, I develop a framework to examine the environmental policymaking process in the United States. The framework will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2, but the next section provides a brief overview.

Environmental Policymaking and Politics

Environmental policymaking in the United States is the result of a set of interactions between policy actors within and across multiple policymaking venues that are nested within a larger environmental policymaking system. The environmental policymaking system is a complex system consisting of the various macro-institutions of government, multiple policy subsystems, and multiple policy actors. It comprises a system, where systems are understood to be a “set of components that contain energy flows between the components and where these energy flows are regulated between components in some manner” (McGuire 2012, 10). The environmental policymaking system is nested within the social, economic, and natural environments, and these environments emit information signals that are continuously bombarding the system, creating energy flows that permeate throughout the system. Therefore, in essence, the environmental policymaking system is an information-processing system.

To understand the complexities of information processing and environmental policymaking, I develop a framework to identify the important components of environmental policymaking and the relationships among those components.¹ The components of the framework include information signals as inputs, the policymaking system, and the public policies that are generated as outputs. A simplified version of the environmental policymaking framework is presented in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1The environmental policymaking framework simplified

The process of policymaking involves taking some inputs, processing them through the environmental policymaking system and turning them into outputs that then feed back into the system as inputs. Inputs are information signals emitted by the external environment; the system includes all the actors, institutions, and subsystems involved in policymaking; and the outputs are policies that can take multiple forms, such as legislation, executive orders, agency rules, or court decisions. The process of feedback involves the implementation and evaluation of the policy outputs. Finally, the multiple policy outputs associated with environmental issues that have developed over time constitute the green state.

Inputs are information flows from the social, economic, and natural environment, and contain signals about potential problems, possible solutions, and political support or opposition. The arrows in the depiction of the framework above represent the movement of information signals through the environmental policymaking process. As information signals reach the system, they must gain a significant amount of attention from the system, reach a critical mass, or reach a certain threshold to be prioritized and placed on the policymaking agenda. The policymaking agenda includes all the issues that are being considered within the environmental policymaking system. Once on the agenda, it becomes more likely that the issue will be addressed through some sort of policy action.

The environmental policymaking system is comprised of the macro-institutions of policymaking, including the Congress, the executive, and judiciary, as well as policy subsystems, which are configurations of actors and institutions organized around particular policy domains and geographic areas. Much of the development of policy occurs within policy subsystems, and information signals are sent back and forth between the macro-institutions and subsystems. Each of the macro-institutions offers a unique institutional pathway for information flows to become policy outputs (Klyza and Sousa 2013). For example, the congressional pathway is legislation and the judicial pathway is court decisions. However, policymaking authority is diffused across multiple institutions, which allows the other institutions to act as pivot points or veto players, such as when the president is able to veto legislation passed by Congress or the courts determine a particular policy action to be unconstitutional.

Policy subsystems also include multiple levels of government such as federal, state, and local. Subsystems are semi-autonomous from the macro-institutions and they connect states to federal environmental policymaking creating a polycentric system of policymaking authority. Polycentric “connotes many centers of decision-making which are formally independent of each other” (Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961, 831). As a result of polycentricity, environmental policy decisions are made across multiple institutions and across multiple levels of government. Polycentricity and institutional diversity are important for the functioning of the environmental policymaking system in the same way that species diversity is important for ecosystem functioning (Norberg et al. 2008).

The diffusion of decision-making authority within the environmental policymaking system creates friction that makes the process of turning information into policy outputs disproportionate, resulting in an over- or under-reaction to information signals (Jones and Baumgartner 2005; Maor, Tosun, and Jordan 2017). Path dependence – the tendency of past choices to constrain future choices – is another factor that creates friction in the environmental policymaking process. As a result, any future approaches to address climate change are likely to be constrained by the ways in which environment policy has developed in the United States.

Inherent in the process of environmental policymaking are feedback loops that occur as policies are implemented and evaluated. Policy implementation is the act of turning policy into action; however, the process of implementation often involves creating policy, such as when an executive agency creates rules to implement legislation. The evaluation of policies to determine whether the policy has met its goal may create new inputs by identifying shortcomings or unintended consequences that may need attention. Policies are constantly being evaluated by actors within and outside the major policymaking institutions and the information generated by these evaluations is fed back into the policymaking system.

The above discussion briefly presented the broad strokes of the framework that will be used and developed throughout the book to better understand environmental policymaking and the potential policymaking pathways available to address climate change in the U...