RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anti-Trump protests continue to swell across the country, but what best sums up the president-elect’s challenge was a Monday night tantrum barely noticed by the press. Climate activists in Washington, D.C., waited until dark, then beamed huge images onto the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency. Their demand? That Donald Trump pick someone other than Myron Ebell to lead the EPA.

Mr. Ebell is a whip-smart policy wonk at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He has spent years at the epicenter of conservative efforts to combat backward environmental regulations. His appointment to manage Mr. Trump’s EPA transition team was an inspired and encouraging surprise.

On the left it provoked a complete meltdown. Environmental groups whipped up tens of thousands of petition signatures demanding Mr. Trump ditch the “climate denier.” Students at Georgetown and Harvard demonstrated against the appointment. There’s even an online hashtag: #RebelAgainstEbell.

The political class is obsessed with whom Mr. Trump will pick for plum cabinet posts: the future secretaries of state, defense, Treasury. Inside activist groups and corporate boardrooms, the preoccupation is who will occupy the positions with the greatest bearing on the economic bottom line: the secretaries of labor, health and human services, energy.

The biggest battle lines will be drawn over the dismantling of Mr. Obama’s environmental regime. This is where the president’s crushing rules have arguably done the most broad-based damage to the economy. It is also where the progressive left is most organized—and most emotional.

Lifting environmental burdens is (along with tax reform) where conservatives see the most sweeping upside for growth. Talk to Mr. Trump’s economic advisers: They understand that the advent of fracking and new drilling techniques—the ability to tap untold reserves of oil and gas—represents a global paradigm shift that can reset America’s economy and foreign dealings. President Obama’s willful decision to ignore this was as if Bill Clinton had opted the country out of the internet revolution. CONTINUE AT SITE

Donald Trump this week released a video detailing the plans for his Administration’s first 100 days, and one bright spot is his agenda for American energy. The President-elect promised to peel away government obstacles, and he will have plenty of work after President Obama’s eight-year regulatory onslaught.

“I will cancel job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy, including shale energy and clean coal, creating many millions of high-paying jobs,” Mr. Trump said in his two-minute clip. “That’s what we want, that’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

Here’s one place to look: Last week the Obama Administration finished a five-year plan for offshore drilling contracts and canceled planned leases in the Arctic through 2022. That retreat is a reaction to protests from environmental groups, which melted down after a March Bureau of Ocean Energy Management draft included a sliver of drilling in the frozen North.

Leases off the Atlantic Coast were already excluded, and green groups hope Mr. Obama will make these diktats permanent under an arcane clause of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. But that executive overreach is unlikely to stand up in court.

Mr. Obama says there’s no reason to drill in the Arctic because oil prices are so low, as if the government can predict energy prices five or 10 years from now. The Arctic region is thought to hold 90 billion barrels of oil, and up to 30% of the world’s untapped natural gas. Exploration and drilling would create thousands of jobs, and most resources lie in relatively shallow waters fewer than 100 meters deep.

Regulation is already crushing: A report last year by the National Petroleum Council noted that a company needs permits from some 12 federal and state agencies merely to dig an exploration well in the Arctic. Recall that Shell spent seven years and $7 billion trying to exploit leases it had already paid for off Alaska’s Arctic coast before giving up. Russia is already exploring in the Arctic and won’t be deterred by American moralizing.

For decades, in administrations Democratic and Republican alike, the Environmental Protection Agency has been a paragon of waste, fraud, and abuse, a corrupt taxpayer-funded Evil Empire. “Science” there is just a tool to be manipulated in order to advance radical anti-technology and anti-industry agendas, even if it means distorting the intent of statutes and affronting common sense.

The EPA is the prototype of agencies that, driven largely by politics, spend more and more to address smaller and smaller risks. In one analysis by the Office of Management and Budget, of the 30 least cost-effective regulations throughout the government, the EPA had imposed no fewer than 17. For example, the agency’s restrictions on the disposal of land that contains certain wastes prevent 0.59 cancer cases per year — about three cases every five years — and avoid $20 million in property damage, at an annual cost of $194 to $219 million.

In his excellent book Breaking the Vicious Circle, written shortly before he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer cited another, similar example of expensive, non-cost-effective regulation by the EPA: a ban on asbestos pipe, shingles, coating, and paper, which the most optimistic estimates suggested would prevent seven or eight premature deaths over 13 years — at a cost of approximately a quarter of a billion dollars. Breyer, appointed to the court by President Bill Clinton, observed that such a vast expenditure would cause more deaths than it would prevent from the asbestos exposure, simply by reducing the resources available for other public amenities.

Also, perversely, the very act of removing asbestos from existing structures poses greater risk from asbestos than does simply leaving it where it is: During removal, long-dormant asbestos fibers are spread into the ambient air, where they expose workers and bystanders to heightened risk. When the EPA banned asbestos in 1989, it was already an old product whose risks and benefits were well understood. Nevertheless, political pressures from environmental activists pushed the EPA into making a decision that actually raised public-health risks.

Breyer also addressed the EPA’s counterproductive efforts to eliminate the “last 10 percent” of risk from a substance or activity, noting that it involves “high cost, devotion of considerable agency resources, large legal fees, and endless argument,” with only limited, incremental benefit. Such overly stringent rules are also more likely to be challenged in court and overturned on judicial review. Breyer quotes an EPA official as observing that “about 95 percent of the toxic material could be removed from [Superfund] waste sites in a few months, but years are spent trying to remove the last little bit.”

Given the emotional reactions that Donald Trump and climate change each trigger separately, they offer an especially combustible combination.

Paul Krugman worries that Trump’s election “may have killed the planet.” Activist Bill McKibben calls Trump’s plan to reverse the Obama climate agenda by approving the Keystone XL pipeline and other fossil-fuel projects, repealing the Clean Power Plan, and withdrawing from the Paris agreement “the biggest, most against-the-odds, and most irrevocable bet any president has ever made about anything.” And let’s not forget “Zach,” the DNC staffer who reportedly stormed out of a post-election meeting upset that “I am going to die from climate change.”

A Trump presidency offers many reasonable reasons to worry. But the fear that he will kill the planet, or even poor Zach, is at least one anxiety we can dispel.

Just listen to President Obama. His administration developed a “Social Cost of Carbon” that attempts to quantify in economic terms the projected effects of climate change on everything from agriculture to public health to sea level, looking all the way out to the year 2100. So suppose President Trump not only reverses U.S. climate policy but ensures that the world permanently abandons efforts to mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions. How much less prosperous than today does the Obama administration estimate we will be by century’s end?

The world will be at least five times wealthier. Zach may even live to see it.

The Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model, developed by William Nordhaus at Yale University, which has the highest climate costs of the Obama administration’s three models, estimates that global GDP in 2100 without climate change would be $510 trillion. That’s 575 percent higher than in 2015. The cost of climate change, the model estimates, will amount to almost 4 percent of GDP in that year. But the remaining GDP of $490 trillion is still 550 percent larger than today.

President Obama pledged to wield a pen and phone during his second term rather than engage with Congress. The slew of executive orders, enforcement memorandums, regulations and “Dear Colleague” letters comprised an unprecedented assertion of executive authority. Equally unparalleled is the ease with which the Obama agenda can be dismantled. Among the first actions on President Trump’s chopping block should be the Clean Power Plan.

In 2009 Congress rejected a cap-and-trade scheme to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency then devised a nearly identical scheme to mandate shifting electricity generation from disfavored facilities, like those powered by coal, to those the EPA prefers, like natural gas and renewables. No statute authorized the EPA to seize regulatory control of the nation’s energy sector. The agency instead discovered, in an all-but-forgotten 1970s-era provision of the Clean Air Act, that it had that power all along.

To support its preferred policy, the agency was compelled to “interpret” the statute in a way that contradicts what it acknowledges is the “literal” reading of the text and clashes with decades of its own regulations. It also nullifies language blocking regulation for power plants because they are already regulated under an alternative program. By mangling the Clean Air Act to intrude on areas it was never meant to, the regulation violates the constitutional bar on commandeering the states to carry out federal policy.

These defects are why the Supreme Court put the EPA’s plan on hold while an appeals court in Washington, D.C., considers challenges brought by the energy industry and 27 states. These legal challenges now appear to have been overtaken by events. President Trump can immediately issue an executive order to adopt a new energy policy that respects the states’ role in regulating energy markets and that prioritizes making electricity affordable and reliable. Such an order should direct the EPA to cease all efforts to enforce and implement the Clean Power Plan. The agency would then extend all of the regulation’s deadlines, enter an administrative stay and commence regulatory proceedings to rescind the previous order. CONTINUE AT SITE