The Reasonable and the Rational
The CPR report on Cass Sunstein’s nomination to head OIRA made a little splash last week, largely for two incredible claims: (1) that Sunstein is some kind of climate change denier, and (2) that there has never been a risk in occupational safety or environmental regulation which has turned out to be less serious than first thought. These two unfortunate slips of hyperbole aside, CPR’s report—and the scholarly work of several of CPR’s members—raises important questions that the Obama Administration is facing. First . Climate change is intimately connected with everything (shameless plug for Penn State’s own lecture series and symposium here ). As MIT’s John Sterman has argued forcefully , the public is not appreciating the threat climate change represents with anything like the urgency it should. Of course, taking CC seriously doesn’t mean you should turn off your lights and heat and sell your car. It means we must urgently and collectively seek system -wide replacements for fossil...