Climate Change Law and Policy Lawyers & Attorneys : McKenna Long & Aldridge Law Firm : Climate Change Regulation, Green Strategies, Environmental Policy

Economists sometimes bear the brunt of criticism for pointing out what the rest of us don't like to hear. They seem determined to ruin the party, by pointing out that costs accompany benefits and that there is no free ride in the economy. Theirs, it has been said, is the dismal science, and it was for good reason that Malthus said of his own work that it had a “melancholy hue.”

For over a half-century, the Washington-based economics think tank Resources for the Future has tried to overcome some of the melancholy aspects of federal policy-making by proposing realistic, more efficient solutions to the economic burdens that environmental regulation imposes. Economists at RfF helped pioneer the emissions trading schemes that are now enshrined in the Clean Air Act's sulfur and nitrogen oxide schemes that are the models for the cap-and-trade provisions included in current climate bills. Now, RfF's realistic economists are turning to another aspect of the changing climate – the likelihood that national and global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) reductions will not be enough in time to keep regional climate from changing significantly.

A new two-year RfF project, “Adapting to Climate Change,” has as its purpose developing an array of on-the-ground measures to allow our institutions to mitigate the effects of climate change, when and if it occurs. True to the tradition of RfF to seek effective and efficient solutions, the project looks to draw upon the natural sciences and engineering communities to identify climate impacts and the strategies we can employ to mitigate the severity of those impacts.

The effort will look systematically at freshwater resources, coastal and marine ecosystems, public health, agriculture, public infrastructure and land use, and terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity. The World Health Organization, for example, drew attention to the severe potential health impacts of climate change on the occasion of World Health Day, April 7^th. With limited resources to meet the challenge, the project will try to establish principles to inform the choice among options, a means of ranking the threats and solutions, selection of the appropriate levels of governmental response, and means of financing adaptation measures that are sure to be quite expensive. The final product of the project may be a “Climate Adaptation Response Policy” that can help guide the nation's efforts when and if climate adaptation becomes a necessary part of the national response.

The project is guided by a broadly-selected interdisciplinary Steering Committee. Its members include McKenna's Fred Anderson, who has a long relationship with RfF in a number of areas.

Malthus’ view had a melancholy hue, but fortunately his speculations about human birth rates and population outrunning available resources and causing a dire overload of the earth's ability to cope were, to put it in the most generous light, premature. Perhaps predications of catastrophic climate change will also prove unfounded, either because nations manage to control GHG releases in time, or the science of climate change proves to be more forgiving than currently anticipated. But RfF deserves to be commended for taking one of the few meaningful steps to address the likelihood of significant impacts from global warming trend and to encourage clear-headed thinking about what can be done to adjust to the changes in weather pattern and severity, freshwater availability, irrigated agriculture, and the many other sectors likely to experience major change if the climate threat materializes.