This week in the magazine, Evan Osnos writes about a chemical spill in West Virginia, where the coal industry has declined economically at the same time that its political influence in the state has grown. “Over the last several years, the Department of Environmental Protection has been scaled back, and the federal government says West Virginia has become so lax in its enforcement of environmental-protection rules that they provide no deterrent at all,” Osnos says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. Osnos is joined by Robert Stavins, the director of the environmental economics program at Harvard University, and host Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the disparate political responses to climate change from state, federal, and international governments.

“It does appear—and there is something of a consensus—that the pace of climate change is such that, in this century, if there were no action, that we would begin to experience very severe impacts,” Stavins says. Based on regulations that the Obama Administration has put in place, Stavins continues, “My own view is that that is simply not going to happen, because action is going to be taken. Indeed, action is already being taken.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Osnos says, might make the passage of further environmental protections harder still. “What this guarantees is that we are going to have candidates who are even more and more beholden to specific interests. And I just think it’s quite striking how the widening gap between action in the executive branch and the inaction in the legislative branch is so visible on the subject of climate change.”

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Photograph: Tobias Hutzler