Federal Climate Policy
Does More Energy Reporting = Less Climate Reporting?
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
If you are one of the many loyal readers of E&E News, big change is coming to your daily routine. POLITICO announced it is shuttering E&E, the standalone, subscription-based reporting outfit that it bought in 2020. “Beginning in September, we are modernizing how we deliver our energy and environmental policy journalism and launching a …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Compelling Case for Clean Energy Subsidies
There’s a solid economic case for government support
Tax credits and direct subsidies sound like handouts. That’s not true in the case of renewable energy and electric vehicles. No should feel bashful in advocating for these subsidies. They provide very real benefits to society, not just to the shareholders in a few firms. Tax credits and subsidies. like those that were contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, will help us avoid many billions of dollars a year of harm to our environment and health. They will also make America competitive in what are clearly the industries of the future, rather than abandoning the field to China.
CONTINUE READINGToo Cheap to Meter?
Unlimited energy abundance is more of a pipe dream than a realistic policy goal.
A recent post by Matt Yglesias on on “the case for clean energy abundance” disturbingly off pitch. One reason is that the post seems unduly dismissive of environmental harms. It pooh-poohs objections to a proposed ultra-large solar that would destroy what Yglesias describes as a “bunch of forest.” Maybe this would be warranted, but it’s not wrong to consider the environmental cost. Yglesias also opposes efforts to restrict fossil fuel production. This is partly on political grounds, because it makes it hard for Democrats to win in places like Louisiana, and partly because he doesn’t think those efforts accomplish much anyway. Yglesias could be right about the benefits of this hands-off approach, to regulating fossil fuels but it would be nice to see some acknowledgement of the harm to public health and the environment. Instead, he describes the only problem with coal as being “smoggy,” which underplays coal’s serious public health and environmental harms.
CONTINUE READINGAn Inconvenient Truth Two Decades Later
Global X via flickr
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
Twenty years ago this month, I walked out of a movie theater, dumfounded, after seeing “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Al Gore documentary that would go on to frame the conversation around climate change for years. I remember feeling riveted and freaked-out. I’d read enough Adbusters in college to have a decent critique of capitalism, …
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CONTINUE READINGThe 2026 Election and the Environment
Trump will still be able to take a lot of anti-environmental actions. But not as many as today.
I published a post a week ago about prospects for the upcoming 2026 elections. I didn’t say much, however, about why the results will matter for the environment. No matter what happens electorally, Trump will still be in the White House and able to use executive powers to favor fossil fuels and bulldoze environmental protections. Nevertheless, the elections could still make a real difference in environmental terms. Even just taking the House would matter, but there are additional potential environmental gains if there are power shifts in the Senate or governorships.
The best way to understand the shifts is probably to look at what Trump has been able to do with the support of Congress and then consider how the situation would shift if Democrats take one or both Houses.
Trump’s Slump
The Trump regime is losing ground, creating new policy opportunities.
Trump’s term began with brutal attacks on environment and clean energy policies, but he now longer looks unstoppable. Dems are likely to make major gains in the mid-terms, consumers are deeply unhappy, and his Iran War drags on. These setbacks create openings to push back against his “energy dominance” agenda. Outside the U.S., his effort to expand fossil fuel use is failing. Domestically, there are now openings to blunt his attacks on clean tech and prepare the ground for new policies when he leaves office.
CONTINUE READINGLessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of U.S. Environmental Law
UCLA’s Alejandro Camacho discusses his new book and the lessons we can learn from prior generations of environmental advocates.
This Earth Day, environmental advocates are looking backward as well as forward. With the U.S. federal government so dramatically overhauling environmental policy, history shows how American social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to preserve public lands and pass laws protecting human health. “I’ve been trying to look through the …
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CONTINUE READINGNever Give Up! Every Ton of Carbon We Can Cut Still Matters
It’s easy to be disheartened when we miss climate targets. But climate change isn’t a yes/no thing. It’s a matter of degree.
It’s easy to lose heart about our prospects for limiting climate change. The US has pulled out of international climate negotiations. Most of the countries that joined the Paris Agreement have missed targets , targets that weren’t aggressive enough in the first place. The 1.5 °C target is already basically out of reach. Is time to give up on slowing climate change and focus on adapting to it? The answer is no. Here’s why.
Climate change is a matter of degrees. That sounds like a truism or a pun, but it’s true in a deeper sense. There is no point past which further warming becomes irrelevant. degree, and every fraction of a degree makes things that much worse.
Policy Implications of Accelerating Warming
If warming is coming more quickly, we need to pick up the pace on policy responses.
There seems to be an emerging scientific consensus that the rate of global warming is rising. After screening out the effects of natural factors like El Niño, scientists have concluded that the pace of warming has roughly doubled since the 1970s. What does this tell us about policy? Some of the implications are more obvious than others, and at least one implication may be unsettling for some climate advocates. Most obviously, we need to accelerate our efforts to carbon emissions. We will be closing in on possible tipping points faster than expected. Climate impacts that we might have expected twenty years from now could hit in half that time.
CONTINUE READINGThe Trump Governance Playbook, in War and Peace
Going to war is very different than regulating pollutants, but the Trump Administration approaches both decisions similarly.
Trump’s approach to governance has some roots in previous practice, but it is not what Americans generally have been used to. It is a governance style that centralizes power not only within the executive branch, but in the executive branch at the expense of Congress, and in government rather than the public. Some might argue that this is more democratic since only the President is nationally elected. Others take a different view. There’s no question, however, that the governance system is in a very different mode of operation in all spheres, foreign and domestic.
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