Implementing the “Biden Environmental Litigation Bounce-Back”
Encouraging Signals As To How Biden's USDOJ Will Resolve Environmental Lawsuits Originally Brought Against the Trump Administration
The transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration makes for fascinating spectator sport. President Biden's first month in office reveals that he and his Administration are committed to undoing the widespread damage former President Trump and his minions engineered across so many policy and legal areas. The environment is a particularly prominent example. Notably, opponents of the Trump Administration's environmental rollbacks used litiga...
CONTINUE READINGNew Report: Improving Access to Energy Data
Policy solutions to support the data needed for resilient decarbonization
Today, the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) at Berkeley Law and the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA Law are releasing a new report, Data Access for a Decarbonized Grid, which highlights key policy solutions to expand access to the energy data needed to operate a fully decarbonized grid. Join our webinar on Wednesday, April 7 at 10am PT to learn more. As California approaches the state target of delivering 100 ...
CONTINUE READINGHow Much Should Texas Invest in Grid Resilience?
The Texas blackouts provide a case study in how to think through resilience issues.
As we begin to think through the long-term response to the Texas blackout, there’s a lot we don’t yet know. The ultimate issues are how much resilience we need against events like this and how we should obtain it. It’s helpful to lay out the kinds of questions we need to be asking as we analyze these issues, in the Texas context or elsewhere. Based on past experience, how big is the resilience problem? The Texas storm is being discussed as a “once in a cen...
CONTINUE READINGA Tale of Two Blackouts
Learning from the Texas and California Power Grid Failures
The Texas blackouts earlier this week have reminded us once again of the vital importance of electricity as part of the basic infrastructure of everyday life and the terrible consequences that ensue when the grid fails. Recent reports indicate that dozens of people have died as a result of the extreme weather and blackouts and many Texas residents continue to struggle with a lack of basic services. As Dan pointed out in his recent post and has been widely reported in...
CONTINUE READINGThe Big Chill
What went wrong in Texas and what can we learn from it?
The rolling blackouts in Texas were national news. Texas calls itself the energy capital of the United States, yet it couldn’t keep the lights on. Conservatives were quick to blame reliance on wind power, just as they did last summer when California faced power interruptions due to a heat wave.  What really happened? It’s true that there was some loss of wind power in Texas due to icing on turbine blades. Unlike their counterparts further north,  Texas wind op...
CONTINUE READINGThe End of the Juliana Litigation–Or Is It?
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Denies Rehearing, But Landmark Climate Change Litigation's Impact Will Endure
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied rehearing en banc in one of the nation's most closely-watched climate change lawsuits: Juliana v. United States. But the legal and policy impact of this landmark litigation will endure. And the case itself may not be concluded. Juliana involves a novel legal argument: that the federal government's longstanding, affirmative conduct--for example, in facilitating the extraction and combustion of f...
CONTINUE READINGExpertise versus Politics Under Biden
Experts will no longer be pariahs under Biden. But will their voices be heard?
One of the abiding issues in governance is the balance between democratic leadership and experts. We don’t want government solely by technocrats.  Nor do we want government steered solely by ideology and politics, as under Trump.  Biden will be a vast improvement, but there’s still some question about whether he’ll get the balance right. I wrote earlier about the trend toward presidential administration, which shifts authority toward the White House and away...
CONTINUE READINGPeer Production of Climate Action
Wikipedia and climate actions by cities and states have more in common than you might think.
Wikipedia is celebrating its twentieth birthday. When it was launched, this effort to create an encyclopedia seemed like a joke compared with Microsoft’s big-money effort, which was called Encarta. Encarta is long gone but Wikipedia has thrived beyond anyone’s expectations. Today, Wikipedia has fifty-five million entries, with 270,000 active editors a month.  While imperfect, the accuracy, too, has turned out better than expected. At around the time Wikipedia...
CONTINUE READINGHydrogen — Fuel of the Future?
Using this tiny molecule for energy may be key to decarbonization.
As it has more than once in the past, hydrogen has become a hot topic in climate policy circles. Although widespread use of hydrogen is probably a decade away, there’s a lot of excitement about the prospect. The fundamental appeal of hydrogen as an energy source is that it produces water rather than carbon dioxide when it’s used. Hydrogen could help solve some major problems in the energy transition to a zero-carbon future. For that to happen, however, we will have...
CONTINUE READINGRenewable Energy in the Midwest
Under Trump, it’s been a mixed picture, with progress except in two states. What were Midwestern states doing during the four years Trump was busy promoting fossil fuels? States with Democratic governors are making progress. Of the three states under unified Republican control, two are trying to prop up coal. Ohio has decreased support for clean energy and provided generous subsidies to coal, while Indiana is trying to slow the process of closing coal generators.Â...
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