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Obama's Climate Plans Face Long Fight
An anonymous reader writes "He hasn't even given his Tuesday speech yet but Obama's plans to tackle climate change are already raising objections in Washington. From the article: 'When President Barack Obama lays out plans to tackle climate change in a speech Tuesday, including the first effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, he will unleash a years-long battle that has little assurance of being resolved during his time in office. The president has called climate change a "legacy issue," and his speech may head off a backlash from environmentalists should his administration approve the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada. But the address is unlikely to blunt criticism of Mr. Obama's approach from the left or the right.'"
For this class of problems, people are going to have to do more than vote; some people are going to have to run. Pollution is primarily a problem for Congress, not presidents, and while every 4 years we have plenty of presidential choices (and we always reject the good ones) our Congress ballot choices tend to be more meager. For presidents, you can spend 4years-1day ignoring the issues and still cast a good vote on election day. Try that for Congress, though, and you're either going to end up abstaining or voting for a Republicrat.
BTW, pollution is a really hard problem, and even if presidents had significant enough power to address it, they wouldn't be able to.
The reason people choose to externalize costs, is that it's so (apparently) cheap, to a degree that it really makes a significant difference. You can't "take it away" without making a lot people extremely angry and nobody wants all that anger. We shouldn't expect pollution subsidies to end, until Congress (not a president) widely supports it. And that certainly isn't the case right now, with the Religious Left (Republicans) (*) having about half of the popular support, combined with each major parties being so corrupted and actually apolitical. So the anti-pollution-subsidy block is, if anything, a minority, where to really end the subsidies we'd need near-unanimity on the part of the public.
(*) Republicans, when not corrupted and therefore apolitical, are religious left because of their "you can get something for nothing" stance. Religious because that belief is based on dogma (e.g. global warming isn't happening), rather than observation.