Climate Policy

Climate Policy’s “Plan B”

As the initial top-down approach failed, a new approach to climate policy crystalized.

My last blog post told the story of the original top-down approach to climate policy. It was supposed to feature binding restrictions on carbon emissions in a global treaty and federal legislation. By 2012, it was plain that neither half of this “Plan A” strategy was in the offing. Building on trends that had begun …

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Biden’s silent climate victory lap

The president talks up his climate laws without saying “climate.” Can the U.S. meet its climate goals without telling voters about them? 

Well, we finally got a real “Infrastructure Week.” President Biden has been traveling from Baltimore to New York to Kentucky, touting his major legislative achievements in front of trains, tunnels and bridges. He’s talking up both the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as a warm-up for his State …

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The Transport Decarbonisation Alliance at COP27

Call to Action on Active Mobility and Deep Dive on Clean Trucks

Last month at COP 27 in Egypt, CLEE partnered with the Transport Decarbonisation Alliance (TDA) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) as chair of TDA, to convene experts to discuss some of the major next steps in clean transportation. While avoiding the worst of climate change requires a rapid increase in the pace of …

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Realizing Equitable Outcomes in Climate Action Plan Implementation

As my colleagues Katie Segal, Ted Lamm, and Ross Zelen have described, our team at CLEE released an analysis earlier this month detailing how San Francisco can fund implementation of its Climate Action Plan. Katie provided an overview of the city’s Climate Action Plan (CAP), describing how San Francisco will need to secure tens of billions …

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Coordinating Climate Policy

We have a White House climate czar. That’s not going to be enough.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) creates a massive funding program for clean energy and other climate policies. This funding complements regulatory efforts at EPA elsewhere.  Yet authority over energy policy is fragmented at the federal level. Without better coordination, there’s a risk that various policies will mesh poorly or operate at cross-purposes. And state governments, …

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Are carbon taxes a thing of the past?

What is the role for carbon pricing in the future of decarbonization policy?

That’s the question implicitly raised by this article in the New York Times from late August.  The article surveys a range of criticisms of the use of carbon taxes as a tool to address greenhouse gas emissions, and criticisms of the focus of many economists on carbon taxes as the primary tool to address climate …

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The Inflation Reduction Act and the Sequencing of Climate Policy

Why subsidies for clean energy generally are preconditions for other climate policies

The Inflation Reduction Act would be, if enacted, the biggest piece of climate legislation that the U.S. Congress has ever passed.  As such, it’s gotten a fair amount of coverage attempting to put it into context for the broader scope of climate policy in the U.S. and globally – in particular, this article in Slate …

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Why We Can’t Wait

In climate policy, delay is deadly.

There are a lot of complaints about the very real flaws in the Inflation Reduction Act, tied with arguments that we should wait until we can do something better. In climate policy, however, waiting is dangerous.  We’ve already delayed far too long. Further delay means having to cut emission much more rapidly to make up …

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Making Climate Policy Work

New book highlights the weaknesses of carbon pricing in addressing climate policy

I have a new post up at JOTWELL reviewing a recent book from Danny Cullenward at the climate think-tank Carbon Plan, and Professor David Victor of UC San Diego.  Their book, Making Climate Policy Work, is a terrific overview of the political and administrative weaknesses of carbon pricing as a tool for climate policy.  Please …

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Don’t hamstring carbon removal

California needs to lead in developing critical carbon removal technologies

Assessments by the IPCC have made clear that the most feasible way for the world to meet its target of restricting climate change to below two degrees Celsius of warming includes rapid and massive expansion of carbon removal technology – technology that would extract carbon dioxide and permanently sequester that carbon dioxide underground.  California has …

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