The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For almost three decades after the PRC’s establishment, there was a perception that a formal legal system for many areas of national life was unnecessary since the economy was centrally controlled and conflicts could thus be resolved through mediation or administrative means without reference to legal rights and obligations.

This Article proposes an “environmental practices money security interest” (EPMSI) that lawmakers could add to Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) Article 9.1 The EPMSI would grant priority over earlier investors to financers whose extensions of credit enable debtors to invest in improving environmental impact.

Professor Wagner presents a strong and provocative set of arguments on how information overload is creating barriers to public participation, obfuscating the most important information for decisionmaking, and capturing and clogging the administrative rulemaking process. The forest can, indeed, become obscured by the trees when it comes to effective, efficient, and fair administrative agency decisionmaking.

There are no provisions in administrative law for regulating the flow of information entering or leaving the system, or for ensuring that regulatory participants can keep up with a rising tide of issues, details, and technicalities. Indeed, a number of doctrinal refinements, originally intended to ensure that executive branch decisions are made in the sunlight, inadvertently create incentives for participants to overwhelm the administrative system with complex information, causing many of the decisionmaking processes to remain, for all practical purposes, in the dark.

We wish to begin with a note of thanks to Richard Morgenstern, Jeffrey Hopkins, Laurie Johnson, Daniel Lashof, and Kristen Sheeran for their comments on our article, Climate Change and U.S. Interests. The comments have helped our own thinking on the subject, and it is gratifying to know that our paper stimulated such thoughtful responses. In the few pages we have for our reply, we focus on the claims that are most important and in the greatest tension with our article.

Jody Freeman’s and Andrew Guzman’s article, Climate Change and U.S. Interests, was engaging and convincing in many aspects, though I am not sure that the parts that engaged and convinced me were the parts that Freeman and Guzman intended. While I find their introductory premise flawed, these flaws are not fatal. Still, the material that follows must necessarily be updated and enhanced.

Developing a rational, globally efficient time path for pricing or controlling greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions presents daunting challenges to policy makers, with large scientific uncertainties, and the absence of consensus over the long term goals of climate policies. In their article Climate Change and U.S.

Economic analysis occupies a central role in national debates over climate and energy policy. As the scientific consensus on climate change becomes clear and unambiguous, the case for inaction on climate change is increasingly argued on grounds that it will be too costly to initiate more than token initiatives.

In this sobering article, Freeman and Guzman (FG) challenge the argument that the United States could be a “climate change winner,” which asserts that, due to its temperate climate and advanced economy, climate change will benefit the United States relative to other countries or even in absolute terms. They argue that, setting aside any moral argument that the United States has an obligation to act aggressively to reduce emissions, it is independently in its self-interest to do so.

There is, after years of debate, a widespread though not universal consensus in the United States that climate change is real, that it is primarily the result of human activity, and that it poses a serious global threat. A consensus on the appropriate U.S. response, however, remains elusive. While the new focus on climate change suggests that the United States may play a key role in attempts to negotiate a new international agreement to reduce global emissions,2 there is serious debate in academic and policy circles over whether doing so would be in the national interest.