Michael Levi at his Council on Foreign Relations blog has an interesting take on a recent decision by New Jersey's Governor:
People who care about climate change are understandably upset with Chris Christie's announcement that he's pulling New Jersey out of the Regional Greeenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the first-of-a-kind cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide emissions in the northeast. Indeed Governor Christie's justification for withdrawing is pretty much nonsense: he claims that RGGI was an unacceptable tax on electricity "“ yet the cost of RGGI permits was far too low to have any meaningful impact on ratepayers. So why one cheer? Because in the course of rejecting RGGI, Christie embraced the reality of the climate problem. Last fall, he said he was skeptical that human-caused climate change was a real problem. In his withdrawal announcement, though, he made it pretty clear that he thought climate change was a serious matter. This ...
