The Weekly Planet:<em> </em>An Outdated Idea Is Still Shaping Climate Policy
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The moderate Democratic president wanted the United States to tackle climate change, and he had pledged to get serious about it during the recent campaign. On the president’s desk sat a memorandum laying out two options.
One set of officials—those who worked at the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency—urged the president not to worry, for now, about how developing countries such as China and India acted. Most important for an issue as important and unwieldy as climate change, these advisers said, was that the U.S. be willing to slash its emissions alone, should it fail to wrangle international commitment first.
But another team, composed of White House economists, insisted that climate change was essentially a global free-rider problem. Although all countries would benefit from American efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas pollution,
