ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on four key 'alternative policy pathways': tax policy and appropriation riders, sub-national regulation, litigation strategies, and the use of executive authority. While such strategies have undeniably created a regulatory landscape that is far more confusing and disjointed than a comprehensive national program, they have nonetheless helped to establish a base level of politically generated demand for clean technologies. The practice of using executive authority to impose environmental regulation is by no means a new phenomenon. Pre-dating golden age legislation by several decades, the first president to make extensive use of this strategy was Theodore Roosevelt in the early 1900s. As the modern administrative state has emerged as a dizzying labyrinth of agencies and bureaucracies with multiple objectives and forms of independent authority, the federal Congress has increasingly become merely one of several points of access to the policy process.
