Carbon Prices, Elizabeth Warren, and the Pledge to America

Carbon Prices

GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt wants the U.S. government to set a long-term price for carbon so the U.S. can compete with China in the green energy market.

Adjunct Scholar Fran Smith criticizes Immelt’s proposal.

“Immelt said that a carbon pricing scheme would create jobs[.][. . . .] Doesn’t sound like it, if he has in mind a cap-and-tax scheme. (Here’s also a useful primer on costs of global warming policies.)”

Elizabeth Warren

President Obama has picked Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren to run the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection–but he’s managed to bypass a Senate vote on her nomination through a technicality.

Senior Counsel Hans Bader explains Obama’s strategy.

“To avoid having the Senate vote on her nomination (as the Constitution’s Appointments Clause clearly requires for such presidential appointees), which might result in her nomination being defeated, the administration has formally appointed her not to be Director of the Bureau (the position she will in fact be exercising), but rather to two other White House and Treasury Department positions that did not historically require Senate confirmation — positions from which she will informally control the Bureau. In essence, President Obama is circumventing constitutional checks and balances, as Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman, a staunch liberal, notes today in The Wall Street Journal.”

The Pledge to America

The GOP unveiled their “Pledge to America” this week.

Vice President Wayne Crews talks about where the writers of the “Pledge” should go from here.

“We may need to think well beyond this political pledge; What kind of society is sustainable over centuries? How about over thousands of years? Whatever the requirements, we have to make sure that America is the kind that can survive. Even with creeping government growth and paternalism, a handful of centuries is enough to wipe out precious freedoms if government is not restrained. So we want to see packages like this pledge, but also serious, fundamental extensions of it that ask questions not driven merely by responses to the antics of an opposing party.”