Howard Shelanski has been quickly thrust into the mounting debate over efforts to curb climate change and has emerged as the face of the president’s initiative to cut away regulatory red tape. ...
Shelanski, an economist and lawyer who previously worked at the Federal Trade Commission, was sworn in on July 10 as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a position sometimes called the regulatory czar.
The little known but influential office serves as a clearinghouse for regulations issued and proposed by federal agencies. OIRA has come under heavy scrutiny, both from industry groups who complain that the Obama administration is strangling businesses with “job-killing” regulations, and from public interest groups who blame it for delaying vital protections behind a veil of secrecy.
Just a week into his tenure in the position, Shelanski was subjected to a grilling from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who lambasted the administration for establishing a new “social cost” of carbon emissions out of public view.
Shelanski argued that the metric, used to assign a monetary value to costs and benefits of proposed environmental rules, was based on widely available and peer-reviewed science, and was not “generated by a black box,” as skeptics had suggested.
Lawmakers, however, appeared unconvinced.
From Wikipedia:
In science and engineering, a black box is a device, system or object which can be viewed in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge of its internal workings. Its implementation is "opaque" (black). Almost anything might be referred to as a black box: a transistor, an algorithm, or the human mind.
The opposite of a black box is a system where the inner components or logic are available for inspection, which is sometimes known as a clear box, a glass box, or a white box.
Here is some description of the inner components and logic of the EPA's SCC estimate: one, two and three.
