Region: National

The Top Ten Reasons Trump Should Endorse a Carbon Tax

A bold move, if Trump is brave enough to go there.

Not that he’s asked for my advice, but here are ten powerful reasons why Donald Trump should endorse a carbon tax: 10.  It would be completely inconsistent with his past positions. 9.    It would shock the GOP establishment. 8.    It would shock the media. 7.    He’s already endorsed a tax increase for …

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Guess Who Benefits From Regulating Power Plants

The answer will surprise you.

What parts of the country benefit most from the series of new EPA rules addressing pollution from coal-fired power plants?  The answer is not what you think. EPA does a thorough cost-benefit analysis of its regulations but the costs and benefits are aggregated at the national level. In a new paper, David Spence and David Adelman from the University …

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Dueling Laws and the Clean Power Plan

EPA has shifted its position toward more readily defensible ground.

One of the most serious legal challenges to EPA’s Clean Power Plan — and probably the only one that could completely derail it — involves an exceptionally abstruse legal issue.  When Congress tried to amend an obscure part of the Clean Air Act, someone screwed and two different versions were included in the final law. That …

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Coal States File Premature Petition to Block Clean Power Plan

AGs Sue For Tactical and Political Reasons Even Though Their Legal Case is a Loser

Attorneys General from 15 states, led by West Virginia, filed a petition in federal court yesterday to block the Clean Power Plan (CPP) from going into effect.  The filing seems to be more tactical and political than a serious legal claim:  the Environmental Protection Agency has yet to publish the rule in the Federal Register …

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Politics v. Legality and the Clean Power Plan

EPA’s Final Plan Changes State Targets, With New Winners and Losers

When the President released the final version of the Clean Power Plan last week, it contained a number of big alterations to the draft plan.  One of the most significant changes  was the way each state’s greenhouse gas emissions target was calculated.  The bottom line is that — generally — states more heavily reliant on …

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What the Market Is Telling Us About Coal

Dump your coal stocks while you still can!

The market’s message is simple: coal’s day is ending. Three major coal companies (Alpha Natural Resources, Walter Energy, and Patriot Coal) have gone into bankruptcy. The two largest publicly traded  companies (Peabody and Arch) are now trading for a dollar a share, down from $16 and $33 within the past year. They, too, may well …

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Why legal challenges to the EPA Clean Power Plan will end up at the Supreme Court

Cross-posted from The Conversation. Even before President Obama announced the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan on August 3 to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, there were a number of legal challenges to block the law at its proposal stage – none of them successful. Earlier this year, the DC Circuit Court told …

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Global Warming and Changing Weather

Why DOESN’T global warming just raise the temperature everywhere a little bit?

The amount of global warming that scientists are predicting doesn’t seem like that big a deal — maybe about 4 degrees Fahrenheit if we control emissions, up to maybe 12 if we don’t.  But as I’ve said a hundred times — and the experts have said a lot more often than that — we won’t …

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The Climate Issue & the 2016 Election

There are, to say the least, a broad range of views among the candidates.

We’re beginning to have a sense of where the leading candidates stand on climate change. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton announced a goal of 33% renewables by 2030, after saying that the “reality of climate change is unforgiving no matter what the deniers say.  Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is said to have the strongest record on …

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A Case of Reverse Causation?

Tomorrow’s Emission Determine Today’s Social Cost of Carbon

Here’s the weird thing: the social cost of carbon today, depends significantly on the year-by-year emissions of carbon in the future, which we obviously don’t know. (Because it depends on our own future actions!)  It takes some explanation to show why that’s true and how it matters. If you know a bit about climate policy, you know …

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