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E.P.A. Is Said to Propose Rules Meant to Drive Up Electric Car Sales Tenfold.
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To me this looks like they failed to make electric vehicles attractive to consumers compared to gas ones, so they're giving up on that and instead are going to effectively make gas vehicles illegal to manufacture. It's absolutely insane to me that the EPA can just destroy a major industry like this, and have a massive effect on the lives of every American, and they don't have ask anyone. Congress doesn't vote on it, the president doesn't sign it, it just happens because they said so.
I think that's a trend that's common with environmental regulations. Whether it's CFL bulbs, paper straws, gas stoves or low flow toilets, consumers get stuck with an inferior substitute and the alleged crisis never seems to actually get solved. It's always just a prelude for the next demand. And by doing it through the administrative state elected officials never have to take any flack for it. If congress had to pass a bill outlawing incandescent bulbs and the president had to sign it then voters would have someone to get mad at. But when it's a new DOE regulation that just appears, people don't know who to blame. Nobody ever has to argue for it or stake their career on it.
So I don't think things will change. Just like the CDC can declare themselves dictators of all apartment rentals because of the Covid crisis, the EPA can declare itself king of all energy because of the climate crisis. Year after year, more things will be banned, prices will go up and life will get worse. But most people will either not realize the reason or will have entirely forgotten that things used to be different.
On the one hand, this is horrible.
On the other hand, I'm glad that we Euros are no longer alone with this kind of horrible policy.
Misery loves company.
They're nowhere near as screwed as us yet. The EPA is part of the executive branch. The next president can simply order them to change it back.
As for the EU, decision making has been moved pretty much entirely out of the remit of anyone who is elected, and the only legal, democratic way to put a halt to it at this point is if everyone all at once were to vote to install national governments that leave the EU.
I am not familiar with the full gamut of EU legislation, but in the area I am most familiar with professionally (bank capital adequacy), this is the opposite of the truth. In the EU, the bits of technical detail of bank capital regulation which are not expected to change a lot are included in the primary legislation (the Capital Requirements Regulation). You can see the key financial regulations on the European Banking Authority's Single Rulebook - "Regulations" and "Directives" are two types of EU primary legislation. The ratio of primary legislation to EBA rules implementing it is such that it makes sense to display the implementing rules as footnotes to the primary legislation.
EU regulations and directives are made by the European Parliament, which is elected, and by the Council of Ministers, which consists of the relevant minsters of the elected governments of the Member States (finance ministers in the case of banking regulation). It is a trope of anti-EU ranting that this is a smokescreen and that legislation is actually written by the Commission (effectively the EU executive). This is simply false. The Commission does have the exclusive power to produce the first draft of legislation, but the Parliament and Council have an unlimited right to amend it, and do so extensively. They are no more cut out of the process than the US Senate is cut out of the budget process by the Constitutional requirement that money bills originate in the House.
Regardless of the de jure situation, if the Commission had a de facto power to write banking regulations, the banks would spend more time lobbying it. I have spent many happy hours lobbying the European Banking Authority in person. I have worked on Powerpoint decks that were used by professional lobbyists to lobby the Parliament and Council. I am not aware of any serious attempt by my employer to lobby the Commission.
In most other jurisdictions, very much including the UK and the US, the basic structure is that the primary legislation effectively says "The regulators have the power to make bank capital adequacy regulations. They are required to take the following aims into account when doing so...", and then the entire bank capital rules are in agency regulations. When we lobby the UK authorities, we only talk to the PRA. The Treasury have to come and talk to us (which a particular gunner civil servant is keen to do) - since the Tory government cut free coffee in government offices, it is no longer worth our while to take the tube three stops to talk to them.
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