The limited progress of the recent Copenhagen climate negotiations and domestic legislative activity suggests that the time is ripe to identify additional politically viable, low-cost, nonintrusive strategies to reduce carbon emissions. Laws and policies that induce changes in household technology use and adoption are one such strategy. This "behavioral wedge" strategy can be pursued in the near term.

Climate change legislation restricting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is necessary to avoid the costly and potentially catastrophic environmental and economic consequences likely to result from an unabated buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. However, such legislation also imposes compliance costs on electricity generators and other emissions sources. These costs will largely be passed on to consumers. Low-income households will feel the resulting squeeze on their budgets most acutely.

I. Cooperative Federalism and Climate Change

In the universe of prime suspects for greenhouse gas (GHG) controls, the transportation and manufacturing sectors at first blush seemingly emerge as relative afterthoughts in the legislative and regulatory agenda. While both sectors each contribute roughly one-third of the nation's GHG emissions, they are most often overshadowed by approaches to climate change controls on the utility sector, which contributes a greater percentage of emissions and which has been front and center in the discussions so far.

When Jonathan Cannon, Michael Vandenbergh, and I started planning this conference last summer, we planned to call it "Implementing Climate Change Legislation." We assumed that by today a new law aimed at addressing climate change would be in place, or at least would be in the final polishing stage, in the United States. We even imagined that the federal agencies would be rolling up their sleeves to implement not only the new U.S. climate law but also our part of the comprehensive climate pact that the nations of the world had agreed to in Copenhagen.

Public concern about the impacts of rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continues to put pressure on state, federal, and international policymakers to adopt tougher emissions limits. Given the range of potential legislative and regulatory outcomes in the United States, industry faces challenges in planning, implementing, and financing appropriate GHG emission controls. If federal legislation falters in 2010, there is growing potential that a complex system of overlapping state programs and federal regulations could emerge over the next year.

Attempting to regulate the temperature of the planet by readjusting the mixture of gases in the atmosphere would be the most ambitious project undertaken by human beings. Nothing that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has done previously matches this task, but perhaps the closest analogy in EPA's history is implementing the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act (CAA). The lessons learned from EPA's implementation of the 1990 Amendments can provide valuable insight for the implementation of future climate change legislation.

The United States has a complicated relationship with international offsets. During the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, the United States was a forceful advocate for integrating offsets into the international regime--ensuring that market-based mechanisms and an international trade in emission reductions became a part of the Kyoto framework.

The renewable fuels standard (RFS) is one of the federal initiatives that will bring about a reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions even before the U.S. Congress enacts comprehensive climate change legislation. When President Barack Obama announced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) final RFS rule at a White House meeting with state governors in February, he was able to dodge a bullet previously aimed at the RFS.

Editors' Summary