National Review Online
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel
Maddow on Monday that President Joe Biden should declare climate change a
national emergency. “The move,” he argued, would allow the president to do
“many, many things under the emergency powers.”
Indeed, such executive action would allow the president
to bypass Congress and imbue Biden with unprecedented power to regulate
American energy policy. The alleged “climate emergency” touches virtually every
aspect of economic life.
This executive overreach would almost surely spark
litigation from numerous states. It would also undermine regulatory stability,
as each successive president either imposes decrees or undoes the policies
imposed by previous administrations, leaving a perpetually shifting regulatory
environment (which we already, to a significant extent, have). This is not the
way the United States is supposed to be governed.
While there are many substantive policy problems with
declaring a “climate emergency,” there are also constitutional ones. Last year,
presidential candidate Biden rightly argued that “you can’t [legislate] by
executive order unless you’re a dictator. We’re a democracy. We need
consensus.”
When President Trump relied on emergency powers to
redirect military funds to build portions of his border fence, we noted that it
was “unwelcome step in America’s long march toward unilateral government by the
executive.” At the time, Schumer agreed, calling it “an outrageous power grab
by a president who refuses to accept the constitutional separation of powers.”
What’s changed? Nothing other than the names of the
parties and the scope of power being grabbed.
Biden has promised to transform the United States into a
100 percent clean-energy economy with net-zero emissions by 2050 and to
decarbonize the power sector in a mere 15 years. The massive cost of policies
that deny Americans affordable and abundant energy sources would almost
certainly fail to win approval in Congress under its usual rules. Which is why
Democrats are doing everything they can to short-circuit or make an end-run
around the system.
The majority leader told MSNBC that Democrats were also
trying to figure out ways to sneak climate-change policy into Biden’s “Build
Back Better” plan under reconciliation, a budget tactic that allows some
spending-related bills to pass with only a simple majority in the Senate. Depending
on the particulars, that might be an abuse of the process, and would likely be
objectionable on policy grounds, but would at least involve congressional
action.
Biden has already done much to advance his climate agenda
via pen and phone. He issued a slew of consequential climate-related executive
orders, rejoining the Paris climate agreement without Senate ratification,
enacting a moratorium on new federal oil and gas leases, and shutting down the
Keystone XL pipeline by revoking permits for the project. This would only be a
taste of the job-killing initiatives he’d undertake after declaring a “climate
emergency.” Biden, remember, has previously stated that Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal offers the “crucial framework for meeting the
climate challenges we face.”
Climate change is not an existential threat that warrants
a declaration of emergency. If Schumer wants to tackle the problem, he presides
over the world’s most powerful legislative body. He is free to try to build
consensus, compromise, and pass enduring federal legislation. Or not. Whatever
the case, it’s certainly not his job to implore the executive branch to take
yet more unilateral power at the expense of the Congress.
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