Court Casts Doubt on Constitutionality of Michigan’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, Upholds Cost Sharing for Transmission Lines
In an important victory for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) -- and in my view for renewable energy more generally -- the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit has upheld a FERC order that helps finance transmission lines to carry renewable energy from rural areas to urban centers in the midwest and mid-Atlantic regions. One of the biggest obstacles to the growth of renewable energy is transmitting the energy (especially wind) from the generating reg...
CONTINUE READINGThe Optimal Amount of Nuclear Power Generation?
Is it zero? I don't think so. I believe that it is important to keep our options open. The NY Times reports about a new nuclear plant being built in Georgia and highlights that this is a rare event. This story raises an important human capital point. Suppose you are a young engineer at UCLA, MIT or Stanford. Are you going to specialize in nuclear engineering if you don't expect that new plants will be built? The answer is "no" but then a death spiral takes...
CONTINUE READINGWhy the Warming Plateau Can’t Disprove Global Warming
The NY TImes has a thoughtful appraisal of the warming plateau -- the fact that global temperatures rose until about fifteen years ago and have wobbled around the same level since then. I think the Times has it about right, but I'd like to point to a less obvious reason why the plateau should not make us doubt the reality of climate change. The Times points out that the climate system is still dominated by natural variability, which can obscure longer trends, that ...
CONTINUE READINGMemo to EPA: It’s Illegal to Respond to Letters from Senators (at least in the Eighth Circuit)
I thought about entitling this post "Lamest Judicial Opinion of the Year." The case is called Iowa League of Cities v. EPA. This Eighth Circuit opinion says that two letters from EPA to a U.S. Senator are legally binding agency rules, The court then solemnly invalidates the letters because EPA failed to get public notice and comment before responding to the Senator's questions. Also, apparently, EPA is supposed to publish its responses to letters from Congress in the ...
CONTINUE READINGCan We Replace HFCs?
What was supposed to be an informal meeting between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping has yielded something substantive: an agreement to include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) under the Montreal Protocol, and thus an agreement by both nations to reduce their use: As some environmental analysts had hoped, President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China found room to maneuver on global warming in their California desert retreat. They sidestepped the su...
CONTINUE READING“The Past Isn’t Dead…”
"...it's not even past." -- William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun. After its excellent special issue on "Oil in American History," the Journal of American History has done it again. Its new issue includes a State Of The Field Symposium on American Environmental History, with an interpretive essay by the University of Georgia's Paul S. Sutter, with comments from leading scholars in the field. The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History Since the Journ...
CONTINUE READINGThe Cost of Carbon Revisited
In 2010, an inter-agency task force provided a series of estimates of the “social cost of carbon” to guide government cost-benefit analyses. The estimates vary with the discount rate and the date. For instance, using a 5% discount rate, it would be worth spending hardly anything -- only $4.70 -- to eliminate a ton of CO2 in 2015. On the other hand, with a 3% discount rate, the amount rises to $23.80, and at 2.5%, it rises again to $38.40. An alternative estima...
CONTINUE READINGNEPA Saves the World!
Well, not really. But in some circumstances it might have helped. Consider the civil unrest now roiling Turkey. It began over protests against the government's plan to turn a much-beloved, historic urban park into a mosque and shopping mall. But as many news reports have indicated, the point was not simply the plan, but the high-handed and authoritarian way in which the government, and particularly Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, simply decreed that it was...
CONTINUE READINGWhich City Has the Best Parks? Trust for Public Lands Releases Annual ParkScore Ranking.
The Trust for Public Land (TPL) recently released its annual ParkScore index, which ranks the park systems of the fifty largest U.S. cities. As with all scorecards, the methodology is imperfect and the metrics are somewhat crude; but seeing how U.S. cities compare across uniform parameters is a good starting point for a larger conversation about what is important to us as a society in urban planning, parks, recreation, and environmental justice. In the ParkScore inde...
CONTINUE READINGNot Enough Money in the Pipeline
When regulators approve rates for a utility such as Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), they are making their best guess as to how much money the company will need to cover various kinds of activities. The utility starts out the process by offering its position on how much it will need for things like salaries, or rent, or activities designed to ensure gas pipeline safety. Pipeline safety has been the subject of especially close scrutiny for the last two years...
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