California Offshore Wind Auction Results in Five Provisional Winners
First Lease Auction Held in the Pacific
Katherine Hoff, CLEE Research Fellow, also contributed to this post. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced the provisional winners of the first offshore wind energy lease auction in the Pacific. The five leases—three off of Morro Bay and two off of Humboldt—fetched more than $757 million in total from five separate winners: RWE Offshore Wind Holdings, LLC; California North Floating, LLC (operated b...
CONTINUE READINGThe Sleepwalking COP
Thoughts on COP27, this year's climate conference
It’s two weeks since the end of this year’s annual Conference of the Parties to the international climate treaties, COP27, held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. You might have noticed an odd vagueness in accounts of this year's COP. These annual meetings are huge media events -- understandably, since they are the highest-level international event on climate change, even if this over-states their importance relative to other ongoing work -- but there was a strange vagu...
CONTINUE READINGDeSantis and the Environment
A Little Bit of Nepotism and a Lot of Everglades Protection.
Compared to Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis is practically a Greta Thunberg on environmental issues. Of course, by the same token, I’m practically a Steph Curry on the court compared to Danny DeVito. Sarcasm aside, DeSantis is pretty good on environmental issues for a Republican. But he rarely mentions climate change, and his record on renewable energy is a cipher. One thing we do know, however, is that he’s not above a bit of shameless nepotism when making important...
CONTINUE READINGSupercharging Electrolyzers to Support Zero-Emission Hydrogen Generation
New CLEE/UCLA report identifies policy solutions to grow electrolyzer adoption
Join us for a webinar on December 13 at 12 PM to discuss the report's findings. Hydrogen could play a critical role in helping California to decarbonize its electricity grid and achieve carbon neutrality. The gas can be generated from surplus renewable energy resources (like solar or wind) to create zero-emission (or “green”) hydrogen. The clean electricity powers a device called an electrolyzer, which uses the process of electrolysis to separate water into oxygen...
CONTINUE READINGEnergy Price Shocks and the Failures of Neoliberalism
Why it’s time to rethink electricity market design to ensure a clean and equitable energy future
This post was originally published on the Law and Political Economy blog. The global energy price shocks of the past two years have made it painfully clear that energy cannot be treated as an ordinary commodity and that many governments have been insufficiently attentive to energy security. Given its dependence on Russian gas, the EU has been ground zero for the crisis, with natural gas and electricity prices rising to unimaginable levels over the past eighteen...
CONTINUE READINGShould China Pay Climate Reparations?
‘Yes’ under some reparation theories, ‘no’ under others.
At the international negotiating session in Egypt, demands for climate reparations -- "Loss and Damage" in UN lingo -- were front and center. The debate was focused on the obligations of developed countries. But there was another issue percolating in the background: Does China, the world's largest carbon emitter, have an obligation to compensate poorer countries for the harm it is causing? Whether China should pay carbon reparations is an academic question in two very...
CONTINUE READINGGlobal ZEV Infrastructure Innovations Accelerating Transportation Decarbonization
New CLEE/TDA report offers case studies from California, Rotterdam, British Columbia, Portugal, Costa Rica and Ghana
Last month at COP 27 in Egypt, CLEE partnered with the Transport Decarbonisation Alliance (TDA) to release a brief with six case studies of jurisdictions supporting the zero-emission vehicle market and installation of charging infrastructure. We at CLEE (including my co-authors Shruti Sarode and Ethan Elkind) worked with leading practitioners from around the globe to learn about how strategic policies, investments, and private-public partnerships are accelerating zero-em...
CONTINUE READINGWasting Gas
A proposed rule limiting flaring and venting of natural gas is a win for everyone except greedy oil and gas operators.
Yesterday, the Interior Department posted a proposed rule to limit flaring and venting of natural gas on public lands. The rule will be good for everyone except the oil and gas operators who waste the gas, increasing methane and carbon emissions while giving the public nothing in return. The rule is clearly a step in the right direction. But there’s an interesting twist: Interior claims to be ignoring the climate benefits in issuing the rule. The amount of gas tha...
CONTINUE READINGSubnational Solutions to Deforestation on Display at COP27
A recap of Sharm el-Sheikh from the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force
The Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF Task Force) participated in the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt during the second week of the conference (November 14-18, 2022). There were high-level talks, bilateral partnership discussions, celebrations, and re-engagement with the Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula). The primary g...
CONTINUE READINGRealizing Equitable Outcomes in Climate Action Plan Implementation
As my colleagues Katie Segal, Ted Lamm, and Ross Zelen have described, our team at CLEE released an analysis earlier this month detailing how San Francisco can fund implementation of its Climate Action Plan. Katie provided an overview of the city’s Climate Action Plan (CAP), describing how San Francisco will need to secure tens of billions of dollars over the coming decades to deploy the emissions reduction strategy set forth in the CAP. Ted’s post explained how a c...
CONTINUE READINGJoin Our Mailing List
Climate policy is changing rapidly. Stay in the loop with expert analysis via email Monday - Friday.
