Profeta to Testify to Congress on Federal-State Partnership to Fight Climate Change

Climate change is among the greatest collective action challenges in history, requiring solutions that meet the scale and urgency of the problem. Yet progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has stalled in the United States in recent years.

On Thursday, Tim Profeta, director of Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, will meet with Congressional leaders to outline a potential path for overcoming the national political stalemate on the issue and achieving "fast and significant climate action." 

In prepared testimony for the House Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change, Profeta will encourage Congress to consider a model for fighting climate change that has worked for other environmental challenges—a federal/state partnership. Under the concept, the federal government would establish emissions targets while empowering states to craft individual plans for how to meet those goals.

"There is no reason that such a federal/state partnership cannot work to address climate change as it has in numerous instances before," Profeta writes in his prepared testimony. "Given the political uncertainty of our ability to achieve any other alternatives, the urgency of climate change demands that we consider it as the path of least resistance to achieve our climate objectives."

The concept is laid out in more detail in a Nicholas Institute policy brief, "Using the Old to Solve the New—Creating a Federal/State Partnership to Fight Climate Change." 

Profeta is one of four climate experts scheduled to testify in the hearing entitled, "Building a 100 Percent Clean Economy: Solutions for Economy-Wide Deep Decarbonization." The hearing is scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. in room 2322 of the Rayburn House Office Building.

Profeta has more than two decades of experience developing legislative and executive branch proposals to address climate change and other environmental issues. In addition to his role at the Nicholas Institute, he is an associate professor of the practice at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy.

Read Profeta’s prepared written testimony to the Subcommittee.

Read the policy brief.

Watch the hearing.