Category Archives: 2008 presidential campaign

Serious Research Balances Economic Costs & Environmental Benefits of Climate Policy

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Ten years ago this summer, President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, of which I was a Member, responded to requests from the Congress, which was then under Republican control, to explain in analytical terms what would be the economic effects of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change that had just been negotiated among the members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.  Our response was a document called the Administration Economic Analysis.   It relied on some of the leading Integrated Assessment Models, and showed that the costs of Kyoto could be relatively low provided international trading of emission permits were freely allowed, and provided developing countries participated in the system.    Not zero costs, as wishful thinking by some techno-optimists would have it.  Not prohibitive costs, as some skeptics would have it.   But moderate costs — relatively low if measures could be implemented sensibly.
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Good International Exposure for Obama and McCain

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Senator Obama is on a vist to 
the Middle East and Europe.   Senator McCain went to visit Colombia earlier in July.   These trips suggest a seriousness of purpose that American presidential candidates often lack.    They offer us hope that the candidates want to learn how to do the job well.   Furthermore, they offer a hyper-attentive world grounds for hope that the next president will have a higher level of interest in other countries than did his predecessor.

 

So far as I know, it is unprecedented for the two party candidates to do foreign policy trips before the election.    I can think of three reasons why we are seeing this now.    First, because the primary elections started early this year, there is a hiatus between the end of the primaries and the party conventions.   Thus the candidates can spare the time to go abroad.   Second, foreign policy has risen much higher on the agenda of concerns of typical American voters, since September 11, 2001, and since the invasion of Iraq.   (And of course Obama wants to put to rest McCain’s past jibes about not having visited Afghanistan and Iraq.)   Third, Barack Obama and John McCain are not the usual inward-looking, domestically-oriented parochial governors that we all too often get as presidential candidates.    Both are US Senators, and both in their youths had very formative adventures in foreign countries (both in Southeast Asia, as it happens).    Thus both, if nothing else, have the cosmopolitan outlook that a world leader needs. read more

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