Climate Change and EPA

The Fall 2010 class of John Glenn Fellows recently read Andrew E. Dessler and Edward A. Parson's The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), a book that I have been assigning since last year, when Congress appeared on the verge of adopting some version of the Waxman-Markey bill. That proved a chimera, of course, and now, as Robin Bravender explains in Politico, it devolves to the Environmental Protection Agency to do what it can to slow down the pace of global climate change by regulating greenhouse gases.

Bravender's is a pretty good account of the "iron triangle" of Congressional committees, bureaucrats, and industry lobbyists that sees to it that change occurs incrementally in our pluralistic system.