Is Obama's 2014 Greenhouse Gas Reduction Plan Symbolic? The Creation of the US EPA and a Reliance on the States

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ Barrow explains that “corporations emerged as the dominant economic institutions in capitalist societies by the end of the nineteenth century” (1993, 17). He goes on to note that as early as the late 1920s “the bulk of U.S. economic activity, whether measured in terms of assets, profits, employment, investment, market shares, or research and development, was concentrated in the fifty largest financial institutions and five hundred largest nonfinancial corporations” (1993, 17).Political scientists Jeffrey A. Winters and Benjamin I. Page, writing in 2009, hold that “it is now appropriate to … think about the possibility of extreme political inequality, involving great political influence by a very small number of extremely wealthy individuals.” They go on to add that “we argue that it is useful to think about the U.S. political system in terms of oligarchy” (744, emphasis in original; also see Krugman 2011; 2014a; Winters 2011; Dewan and Gebeloff 2012; Leonhardt 2014).

² The Ash Council Memo can be found at http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/ash-council-memohttp://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/ash-council-memo.

³ According to one historian, by the late 1960s, “over eighty federal agencies dealt with pollution” (Flippen 2000 [2012], 85).

⁴ Indicative of this, the New York Times reported recently that the Obama Administration will not seek a binding global warming treaty at the 2015 COP. It will seek a nonbinding agreement instead (Davenport 2014c).