After decades of producing climate disinformation, the Koch's Cato Institute shuttered its climate program back in 2019 and sent its climate team Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger off to pasture. Since then, the Koch-controlled think tank has largely left the right's pretense of environmental policy to other front group friends.
But when we saw they published a new 9th edition of their Handbook for Policymakers, which supposedly provides "an in-depth analysis and concrete recommendations" on 77 different policy areas, we were curious to see what sort of advice this storied conservative think tank had for policymakers when it came to climate and the environment.
After all, it's been five years since the 8th edition came out in 2017, when things were so full of promise for rightwing policymakers. And since then, the turnover from Trump to Biden and passage of the Inflation Reduction Act's massive climate spending might have one expecting a new approach, particularly given the newly divided government as Republicans take the House.
Nope! On climate, Cato simply cut the 2017 chapter on climate change that Michaels and Knappenberger produced in a fruitless attempt to influence the Trump administration and then-Republican Congress. They had hoped Congress would "reject any proposed tax on emissions of carbon dioxide," which is an easy ask, to put it lightly. They also suggested changes to the "social cost of carbon," which Trump tried but failed to close the deal on, defund climate science, and submit the Paris Agreement to the Senate as a treaty for ratification (which isn't necessary since it's an agreement under the already-ratified UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which a bipartisan congress approved back in 1992).
Not to worry though, Cato isn't just totally ignoring the environment in its massive guide for policymakers. It does have a section on environmental policy, in which they suggest Congress simply "repeal national air and water quality laws and regulations" and then "set a price on emissions or limits on the quantity of emissions and funnel the proceeds from the sales to those who are exposed to pollutants."
So instead of having regulations to limit pollution, Congress should simply let polluters make people sick, and then pay them for the privilege of choking on fumes. Which is not only a ghoulish sacrifice of human health to corporate profits, but also an obvious badfaith distraction, as it seems somewhat unlikely that Republicans are going to put a price on carbon (or any other) pollution!
Another indication of how serious Cato is about this policy? Save for three paragraphs of updates about the Trump administration's failures to make changes stick, the other sixteen paragraphs are, with the exception of a handful of copy edits, exactly the same as the 2017 policy brief.
Which also recommended putting a price on pollution, but was then followed by the chapter in which the first thing they say is that Congress shouldn't put a price on pollution!
And it's not like they even put much effort into that either, as it's basically a combination of tobacco-lawyer-turned-climate-denier Steve Milloy's ploy to use "transparency" as a shield to attack the science showing that soot (from smoking or burning coal) causes health problems. As we (and others) explained, demanding "transparency" of studies that were based on (anonymized) personal health data was a way to disqualify many epidemiological studies because releasing the patients' health data they are based on would violate health privacy laws.
So while "data access and reproducibility of results are the very essence of the scientific method," Cato's Peter van Doren wrote in one of the few new lines of the 2022 version, "the transparency rule was also a clever attempt to undermine the current basis for EPA regulation of PM by excluding the SCS and ACS studies."
After laying out all the supposed reasons to be skeptical of the science, parroting Milloy's crusade (which Amy Westervelt recently did a great job of contextualizing) but then exposing it as a farce, van Doren pivots to the suggestion that government set up a system for companies to pay the people they pollute.
And that job of facilitating fair payments from billion-dollar industries with buildings full of lawyers and accountants to regular everyday people in small communities? It shouldn't be the federal government, but instead "the relevant unit of government to facilitate these bargains is probably at the metropolitan level" because before federal pollution regulations in the '70s forced businesses to switch to tall smokestacks that sent pollution to other places, "environmental quality was a local issue."
So "as long as smokestack heights are low and transport is minimal," pollution is a local issue.
Except it's not 1970 anymore, smokestacks are already high, and global warming caused by what's coming out of coal and gas smokestacks is the opposite of a local issue!
But those are only issues to worry about if you live in the real world, and care about people dying from pollution. Which is why they're not exactly priorities for Cato and its conservative audience.