Sophisticated Interdependence in Climate Policy: Federalism in the United States, Brazil, and Germany

By Vivian E. Thomson

With the US as the world’s most prominent climate change outlaw, international pressure will not impel domestic action. The key to a successful global warming solution lies closer to home: in state–federal relations. Thomson proposes an innovative climate policy framework called “sophisticated interdependence.” This model is based on her lucid analysis of economic and political forces affecting climate change policy in selected US states, as well as on comparative descriptions of programs in Germany and Brazil, two powerful federal democracies whose policies are critical in the global climate change arena.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783081080

Book preview

Sophisticated Interdependence

in Climate Policy

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Sophisticated Interdependence

in Climate Policy

Federalism in the United States,

Brazil, and Germany

Vivian E. Thomson

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2014

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Vivian E. Thomson 2014

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thomson, Vivian E., 1956–

Sophisticated interdependence in climate policy: federalism in the

United States, Brazil, and Germany / Vivian E. Thomson.

pages cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-78308-110-3 (hardback: alk. paper) –

ISBN 978-1-78308-017-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Climatic changes–Government policy–Cross-cultural studies. 2. Federal

government–Cross-cultural studies. 3. United States–Politics and government.

4. Brazil–Politics and government. 5. German–Politics and government. I. Title.

QC903.T54 2013

551.6–dc23

2013049737

ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 110 3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1 78308 110 4 (Hbk)

ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 017 5 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1 78308 017 5 (Pbk)

Cover images used with permission: photo of Pat Mulroy by Darryl Martin; photo of

Marina Silva by Francisco Messias; photo of Angela Merkel by DB Michael Kappeler/

picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

This title is also available as an ebook.

Dedicated to the memory of Ann Mihm Roach

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Researching and writing this book was a wonderful journey. Many colleagues, students, friends, and family members, lent a hand along the way and I am ever grateful to them all.

Anthem Press’s publisher, Tej Sood, and editors, Rob Reddick and Brian Stone, have been impressive from start to finish. They have been responsive, decisive, professional, and helpful. Caelin Charge designed the book’s marvelous cover.

The University of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Sciences, vice president for research, and Center for International Studies gave travel grants. The College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences provided a much needed sabbatical leave. I especially thank Pat Wiberg, chair of environmental sciences, for her confidence in my work. I am grateful to Chonna Gammon and Debra Shifflett for their capable assistance with travel arrangements and reimbursements.

Martha Derthick, retired Julia Allen Cooper Professor at the University of Virginia and the foremost expert on US federalism, encouraged me to include Brazil. She was right to do so. Her influence over my work commenced when I enrolled in one of her graduate classes, deepened when she was my PhD advisor, and continues to this day in the form of a wonderful friendship. She offered incisive, helpful comments. She is a model teacher, extraordinary writer, and generous mentor.

Barry Rabe, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and renowned expert on environmental policy, kept cheering me on. His advice and moral support were invaluable.

Vicki Arroyo and I co-authored a 2011 law review article that became Chapters 1 and 2. Despite the many demands on Vicki’s time as executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, the leading organization on state climate programs in the United States, she devoted a summer’s worth of her efforts and those of her law students to research and writing. Vicki keeps me current and connected with the latest developments in Washington. I value deeply this longstanding friendship, which started when we worked together at the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Kate Neff, my longtime Spanish tutor, dived into learning Brazilian Portuguese with me. Although I started studying that language before she did, I strain to keep ahead of her. She has kept me on my language game and she is a true friend.

Kate Hayes, graduate student and administrator extraordinaire, helped oversee the Environmental Thought and Practice BA program in fall 2012 while I was on sabbatical leave. This book would not have been written without Kate’s stellar organizational skills. I was truly lucky to have her assistance and I look forward to following her career as a landscape architect.

Capitol Hill friend David McCallum, deputy chief of staff to Senate majority leader Harry Reid, connected me with Pat Mulroy, director of Las Vegas’s water authority for over twenty years. I have admired Ms Mulroy from afar for her forceful, effective work on water conservation in the American desert. I thank her for the use of the cover photo, taken by Darryl Martin, and for her inspirational leadership.

In Brazil many colleagues provided information and they helped me navigate an entirely new country. They include Oswaldo Lucon, Roberto Schaeffer, José Drummond, Fabio Feldmann, José Goldemberg, Roseli Senna Ganem, Ilídia da Ascenção Garrido Juras, Suzana Kahn Ribeiro, Alessandra Magrini, and João Moreira Salles. Laura Albuquerque’s Master’s thesis at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro was an invaluable source of information. Treici Schwengber and Tereza Hezim of Marina Silva’s staff generously provided Ms Silva’s cover photo and the permission to use that image, taken by photographer Francisco Messias. I thank all of these friends for the gift of their time and expertise. They made me feel instantly welcome. I look forward to more opportunities to study this fascinating nation and its people. Brazil is truly a country on the rise, as New York Times reporter Larry Rohter has aptly observed.

It was an immense pleasure to take a different kind of look at Germany, where I have found many inspiring topics for research. German was my first second language, I have family roots there, and my father and grandfather studied music in Berlin. Thus I feel a natural kinship with Germans. Simone Koring and Georg Maue of the German Embassy in Washington provided responsive, thoughtful assistance at the start and along the way. My contacts in the Länder, in the Ministry of Environment, and at UBA could not have been more hospitable and informative. They are Sylvia Vanderhorst, Dr Edgar Freund, Andrea Rosenbaum, Anja Strohschein, Michael Deckert, Volker Begert, Lutz Mez, Klaus Müschen, Simon Marr, and Jessica Suplie. My dear friends and colleagues, Professor Dr Heinz-Georg Baum and Professor Dr Ingrid Seuß-Baum, have provided wonderful meals and extraordinary access. I thank Rebecca Bertram at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, who read parts of the manuscript and has committed to help promote the book upon its publication. Matt Lutts of the Associated Press provided Michael Kappeler’s photo of Chancellor Angela Merkel and made the necessary licensing arrangements.

As a professor I rely on students for research and to keep my outlook fresh. Halley Epstein, a graduate of the University of Virginia’s Environmental Thought and Practice program and later a Yale Law student, provided terrific, patient assistance for the updated newspaper content analysis presented in Chapter 2. In summer 2011 Vicki Arroyo assembled a wonderful cast of helpers at Georgetown Law, including Daniel Arking, Gabe Weil, Anne Harvey, Marc Levitt, Nicolas Viavant, Shani Harmon, Tsinu Tesfaye, Thanh Nguyen, and Elizabeth McAleese. My UVA undergraduates, especially the Environmental Thought and Practice majors, keep asking questions that open my eyes to new ways of looking at the world.

In my first career I was a senior policy analyst and manager at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). I have the greatest respect for those who labor at EPA, often under difficult political conditions. Paul Stolpman, whose leadership at EPA stretched over three decades, provided a helpful background interview, drawing on his work as head of EPA’s climate policy office. Mike Gordon of EPA’s Region 3 was always available to answer my detailed questions about Section 111(d)’s implementation. I thank Nick Hutson in EPA’s Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards for his time and interest.

My family is a deep well of unswerving emotional and intellectual support. My daughters Amelia and Flora show me the myriad possibilities for female leadership in the twenty-first century. Amelia’s brand of feminism inspires me to push ahead and to find the best in myself. Her fluidness as a writer is simply awesome. Flora’s incredible facility with languages and her love of all things Brazilian opened intellectual doors I had not seen before. I am grateful to her for translation assistance and for her review of my draft chapter on Brazil.

My sister, Jean Thomson Black, is executive editor at Yale University Press. Her advice was spot on and prompt. I am deeply grateful for the benefit of her experience. My other sister, Margaret Thomson, exemplifies self-awareness and discipline. My parents, Selma Wertime Thomson and James Cutting Thomson, gave the gift of high expectations and they paid for the solid educational foundation at Tower Hill and Princeton upon which I have built my career.

My husband, Pat Roach, is an enthusiastic fan of my work. He often travels with me and engages happily with new environments, where he invariably remarks on important things I would not have seen otherwise. In Germany our language skills proved complementary. His intellectual curiosity and legal skills illuminate unexpected connections among seemingly disparate arenas. His paragraph structure still marvels, after all these years.

Harry Potter was my constant canine companion for 13 years. Years ago he endured a long Fulbright stay in Denmark, where he cheerfully embodied all clichés about rude Americans by stealing Manfred’s food and crashing through carefully trimmed hedges. He was a beauty and he was always at my feet while I wrote this manuscript. I miss you, Mr P. The lithe, lovely Laska now occupies your dog beds and is quickly making her way into our hearts. I hope you don’t mind.

TABLES AND FIGURES

Introduction

THE WORLD’S MOST PROMINENT CLIMATE CHANGE OUTLAW

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

—James Madison, Federalist, No. 51

In 2001 when I was a Fulbright Professor in Denmark my students asked quizzically, why can’t the richest, most powerful nation on earth just count the votes? They were referring to the 2000 US presidential election, which remained undecided for five weeks as Florida officials tried to decide whether Vice President Al Gore or Texas governor George W. Bush had won the state’s pivotal electoral college votes. In what felt like the political equivalent of airing the nation’s dirty laundry, US federalism was on full, uncomfortable display as court battles over ballot counting dragged on. While the world stayed riveted to the unfolding drama it became clear that local election boards, governors, state legislators, state secretaries of state, state courts, party-appointed electors, and federal courts all have a say in US presidential election outcomes.

The division of, and overlap in, responsibility among state and national political institutions reflect the system of political checks and balances that James Madison predicted in 1788 would prevent concentration of political power. In Federalist, No. 51, Madison famously claimed that in the new US compound republic states and the national government would restrain one another. Further, Madison asserted, dividing power among legislative, executive, and judicial branches would ensure that no branch could act unilaterally. Madison was making this pitch to colonists skeptical about centralized power. In effect he was saying, don’t worry, we’re designing this system to have lots of inertia, to err on the side of protecting individual liberties. His concerns reflected the sentiment that Americans should avoid concentrating government power in any single authority.¹

Although Madison and his contemporaries might barely recognize the US political system now, ambition still counteracts ambition in myriad ways. Many local, state, and national institutions were involved in deciding how to count the votes in Florida’s disputed presidential election. Further, the states decide how to divide up electoral college votes, and Florida’s system, like that of most states, awards to the winner all of those votes rather than dividing them proportionally according to the popular vote. The winner of the popular vote in Florida, even if he won by a slim margin, would receive all of Florida’s electoral college votes. Because the stakes were enormously high prominent attorneys for Gore and Bush worked every aspect of the election system. Eventually the US Supreme Court stopped the vote counting and Bush was declared the winner by a slender majority. It took two weeks of class time in Denmark to explain why it took so long to just count the votes.²

Eleven years later I found myself lecturing to German university students on a different topic but with essentially the same message. My mission was to explain why it is sometimes hard to achieve consensus in the United States on social legislation like a national climate change law. While Germany also has no national climate change law, for over twenty years various German coalition governments have embraced action to reduce greenhouse gases using myriad means, including national energy law and the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). Well before the EU ETS came into force Germany adopted in 1990 an aggressive greenhouse gas reduction target, pledging to reduce national emissions by 25 percent in 2005, relative to 1987. In 1990 Germany introduced its famous feed-in tariff system, which guarantees payments over 20 years and connection to the grid for individuals or organizations generating electricity from renewable sources.

As a result of the feed-in tariff and other stimuli for renewable energy installation, windmills and solar panels are common sights in Germany, a country that is not especially sunny. These and related actions seem to have had the desired effects. Germany’s 2011 per capita greenhouse gas emissions were 11.4 MgCO2eq., 53 percent of the corresponding level for the United States in 2011 (the latest year available), 21.5 MgCO2eq./capita. In 2013 the cost of renewable electricity in Germany drew even with that of fossil-generated electricity.³

Accustomed to the notion of national political action in the climate and energy arenas, the German students wondered why no president has seized the day and pushed through a climate or renewable energy law. I reminded them the US president is not the leader of the Congress, unlike the German chancellor, who leads the majority party in the Bundestag. As presidential scholar Richard Neustadt famously observed, Presidential power is the power to persuade. Neustadt meant that to accomplish anything important the president must work to influence others in positions of power. But I also spoke to the students about climate action at the state level, to underscore the relative independence of the states in the US federal system. The absence of a national climate change law gives states room to develop individualized strategies or none at all, and we witness that entire range of choices in the states.⁴

National action to constrain greenhouse gas emissions has come only in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling that greenhouse gases meet the definition of air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. In 2009 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) formally recognized that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare under the meaning of the Clean Air Act. The endangerment declaration set the stage for more stringent vehicle emission limits and for stationary source regulation. By comparison with Germany or even less aggressive European Union member states, this progress at the national level in the US is modest and late in coming, and it trails far behind state-level efforts that date back to the early 2000s.

The United States is an outlier on the international stage as the only industrialized nation not to have ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, under which nations responsible for historical greenhouse gas emissions agreed to reduce their emissions. Yet the United States leads almost all industrialized nations in energy-related per capita carbon dioxide emissions and US greenhouse gas emissions rose by 8 percent between 1990 and 2011. By contrast, greenhouse gas emissions in the EU-27 member states decreased by 18.4 percent between 1990 and 2011 and emissions in the wealthier EU-15 nations dropped by 14.9 percent in the same period, well in excess of the EU-15’s Kyoto Protocol goal of 8 percent below 1990 levels. One credible estimate holds the United States responsible for 29.3 percent of cumulative global carbon dioxide emissions between 1850 and 2002, as compared with 7.6 percent for China.⁵

Prominent US politicians have balked at joining the Kyoto Protocol unless India and China, now the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, accept emission reduction commitments. The claim is that emerging high emitters must also accept constraints for the US’s efforts to have a meaningful effect on global temperatures since the US accounts for a smaller share of global emissions. It is true that the United States contributes a diminishing portion of global greenhouse gas emissions. In 2011 the United States accounted for 17 percent of global carbon dioxide gas emissions as compared with a 23 percent share in 1990. Overall global carbon dioxide emissions from energy use rose by 51 percent between 1990 and 2011 and 70 percent of that increase came from China and India. In early 2012 energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in the United States were at their lowest level since 1994.

It is also the case that US economic productivity has become decoupled from carbon dioxide emissions. Even as greenhouse gas emissions grew by 8 percent between 1990 and 2011, national GDP increased by 68 percent during that interval. At the same time, goods move around the globe, which makes it more difficult to attribute greenhouse gas emissions to particular countries. For example, it’s not clear to whom we should attribute greenhouse gas emissions at a Chinese steel factory exporting its product to the United States or Germany, where steel production has dropped as factories have moved overseas.⁶

US policymakers may run but they cannot hide from the fact that, debates over the data notwithstanding, the US’s participation is crucial to a meaningful global climate change effort because of the US’s current and historical greenhouse gas emissions. The US government has been the world’s most prominent climate change outlaw since the late 1990s, when President Bill Clinton decided not to submit the Kyoto Protocol to the US Senate for ratification. American resistance to forceful action was evident even during international climate change talks in 2009, when President Barack Obama said the United States would aim for a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 relative to 2005. By comparison, the European Union aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent in 2020 relative to 1990 levels, when US emissions were 16 percent lower than in 2005. If the United States embraced the European Union’s goal we would aim to emit 4.9 billion MgCO2eq. in 2020 rather than 6.0 billion MgCO2eq., the level corresponding to President Obama’s goal.⁷

International pressure applied over two decades has not impelled ratification of the Kyoto Protocol or spurred the passage of a national climate change law in the United States. The urge for climate change reform must originate domestically and that motivation is not likely to result from additional scientific studies. Rather, it will come when the right political coalitions form in support of aggressive action. The path to those coalitions is not clear. An antiregulatory majority controls the House of Representatives through 2014. Senators from lightly populated states, many of them with rural constituents suspicious of government regulation, wield a great deal of power.

The US states hold an important key to a successful global warming solution, for practical and political reasons. In the United States air pollution policymaking starts and ends with the states, whose governmental units implement national programs. Further, federal Clean Air Act amendments can pass only when lawmakers adapt them to state and local economic and political circumstances. But we find ourselves in uncharted waters in the United States when it comes to state–national relations in climate change. Many states have developed climate change and renewable energy policies ahead of the national government. While most observers expected the Congress to enact a climate change law with uniform national requirements, that outcome seems highly unlikely in the near future. US greenhouse gas emissions have unexpectedly decreased and that trend may well