In the News

The vanishing of the daily commute has brought to light the burden of cars and trucks on health and the environment. As an intentional effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, at low cost to society, policymakers and businesses should continue to encourage working from home for jobs that allow it, even after the coronavirus crisis has receded.

Looking at three proceedings, completed within weeks of one another, exposes the shameless analytic opportunism of the Trump EPA. The result is a slate of deregulatory actions that put thousands of lives at risk each year, cause serious adverse health impacts on many more, and impose net harms on the American people. A heedless commitment to dangerous deregulation is the only logic that explains its actions.

Senate Republicans are worried that BlackRock could take climate change–related financial risks into account in making its securities purchase recommendations, as the firm has pledged to do when shaping its own investment strategies. If BlackRock is going to make the best decisions for American taxpayers, it must be allowed to assess these climate risks as it does for other clients.

While states are right that new FERC rules will needlessly increase costs and be a drag on clean energy, they shouldn’t rush to exit electricity markets yet. States could meet their climate goals while retaining the benefits of markets by pursuing another option: carbon pricing.

The Trump administration significantly weakened the most important existing regulation limiting planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions: the “Clean Car Standards,” which were also set to save consumers billions of dollars by making new cars and trucks use less fuel. If the administration’s track record is any indication, the courts are likely to see through the manipulation involved. But in the meantime, the end result will be substantial economic, climate, and public health harms.

Using three instruments—Congressional Review Act disapprovals, requests that courts hold in abeyance pending cases challenging Obama-era regulations, and suspensions of final regulations—the Trump Administration was able to reach a far greater proportion of regulations than would have been possible under prior practices. And in this way, the Trump Administration has ushered in a new era of aggressive regulatory rollbacks that is likely to become an enduring feature of American politics and to radically change the nature of the presidency.

Tax credits for companies that “capture” carbon dioxide have been a success, by some measures. Even before the expansion, companies have claimed hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits—possibly as much as $1.3 billion—and reported 63 million tons of carbon dioxide kept out of the air. There’s one big problem, though. All of that carbon is supposed to be stored securely underground and monitored by an Environmental Protection Agency program, to be sure it doesn’t leak out or create other complications. But so far, only 17 million of those 63 million tons have been registered with the EPA as legally required—about one-quarter of the carbon that companies have taken credit for.

It is impossible to ignore the incongruity of the Trump administration’s latest attack on environmental protection with the dire effects of climate change now being felt around the world. Thousands have fled burning towns in Australia and California, helpless in the face of catastrophic wildfires, and Arctic sea ice is declining at an unprecedented rate. Rather than develop even modest solutions to this grave crisis, the Trump administration has focused its efforts on a newly unveiled proposal to weaken the United States’ bedrock environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act, enacted in 1970.

The Trump administration said the decision to exit the Paris agreement was made because of its “unfair economic burden” on the U.S. economy. These dire predictions about the costs of addressing climate change have been a mainstay of the administration’s rhetoric since its beginning. Yet at times when it was convenient to take the opposite position, the administration has argued that climate regulations in fact impose no costs on the economy. These contradictory efforts have been used to protect the coal industry at the expense of the American people

Policy makers and regulators around the country are trying to figure out how to rapidly decarbonize the electricity sector. There are debates about what renewable goals states should have, by when, what should count as clean energy, and how much energy efficiency states should invest in. These debates overlook the most important tool we can rely on to achieve our clean-energy goals: markets and price signals.