Last week, Senator Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont) introduced a new bill, SB 775, that would replace California’s cap-and-trade system with a new approach to regulating California’s greenhouse gas emissions beginning in 2021. There is much to admire in the new bill, including an aggressive pricing approach that would ensure that California’s carbon price remains high. The […]
This post is the preface to a series of posts by multiple authors (including guests) over the coming week (starting May 9) about the future of the state’s cap and trade program for greenhouse gases. Two bills, AB 378 and SB 775, are being debated by the environmental and environmental justice communities, and our bloggers […]
It was clear early on that the stop-gap funding measure rejected Trump’s budget priorities. Emerging details about the bill demonstrate how starkly Trump lost. Environmental and energy programs survived with very little damage. Let’s begin with the EPA budget. Trump sought an immediate cut, followed by a 33% cut in the next budget. Instead, EPA […]
Bret Stephens, the New York Times’ new columnist, got the climate change world into an outrage with his first column last week, which compared climate science to Hillary Clinton’s pre-election polling and argued for restraint from climate advocates. In his follow up column yesterday, he took a more measured tone, noting that he believes the […]
Sometimes, it seems like the world is upside down: the head of EPA is a climate skeptic; the head of DOD takes climate change very seriously. But the view of the Secretary of Defense isn’t a fluke. There’s a liong list of Pentagon documents about the risks of climate change, going back over twenty years. […]
Fierce battles will be fought to stem the federal government’s retreat on climate policy. Meanwhile, states like California are mobilizing to pursue their own policies. But not everyone lives in a progressive state, and even progressive state governments can’t do everything. We need to consider other channels to make progress, especially in states that aren’t […]
In terms of energy and environmental issues, Trump has turned out to be as advertised. Last June, I did a post contrasting Clinton and Trump’s views about the environment. Below, I revisit the June post in order to compare what Trump said before Election Day and what he’s done since. In case you’ve forgotten, Clinton’s position […]
If it feels like we’re being inundated with bad news about federal climate policy, here’s a cause for hope: this month marks the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, one of the most important environmental cases in our nation’s history. The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Massachusetts came when the […]
President Trump’s Executive Order on climate policy is an invitation to bad policymaking and legal uncertainty. The big-ticket item targeted by the Order, of course, is the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan and related rules on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. The EO has limited immediate legal impact: none of the major rules can […]
The President’s Executive Order rolling back climate change-related initiatives, “Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth,” just came out today, and there’s already plenty of analysis to help people to understand its likely impact. While the short answer is that it is terrible for our country, the long answers tend to make people’s eyes glaze over if […]
