Politicians prefer technology mandates partly because they can claim credit for a visible artifact—pointing to a mandated scrubber and saying 'without it this smokestack would be dirtier'—whereas a performance standard's benefits accrue to unknown future innovations that cannot be easily pointed to or claimed.
causalpending
Speaker
Russ RobertsEvidence Quote
“a politician likes to to claim credit for stuff and I think it's easier to point to a SC scrubber and say see I mandated that scrubber... rather than saying I pass a regulation that let this... power plant find something that was better”
Created: 6/15/2026, 9:20:30 AM
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