In the News

Energy conservation has long been the main justification for having daylight-saving time. But there is no compelling scientific evidence that daylight-saving time conserves energy. Recent evidence shows that the effect is smaller than previously thought and very much dependent on local circumstances.

The downward trend of ozone levels has slowed in recent years despite regulatory efforts at the federal and state levels. New research suggests that regulation that targets emitters when high-ozone events are most likely could be a cost-effective way of further reducing ozone levels.

Environmental advocates have insisted for years on the need to robustly account for climate impacts when permitting fossil-fuel infrastructure. Courts and agencies are starting to listen. A recent decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and a new guidance document from the White House Council on Environmental Quality mark the latest developments in ensuring that federal agencies consider climate-change impacts before greenlighting fossil-fuel projects.

Policy Integrity research helped spur a novel climate bill introduced by New York state lawmakers: the Climate Change Superfund Act. The Act would establish a climate change adaptation fund by requiring the fossil-fuel companies most responsible for climate damages to pay $30 billion to the state over 10 years. This blog post highlights the key takeaways from Policy Integrity's legal and economic research on the Act, establishing its legal basis and economic viability.

The growth of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as rooftop solar, raises significant distributional justice and equity concerns about who has access to DERs and their benefits. DER compensation is critical to incentivize widespread adoption. However, traditional tariff design approaches suffer from the assumption that economic efficiency and equity must necessarily trade-off. Our paper describes a comprehensive tariff design framework that incorporates both economic efficiency and equity objectives to determine electricity tariffs. We offer recommendations on how efficient tariffs can be designed without sacrificing equity, and the role of spatio-temporal granularity in tariff structures to achieve equity.

Gas stoves are a dangerous source of indoor air pollution. The Consumer Product Safety Commission won’t be banning them, but it can make them safer, explains Laura Figueroa.

To prevent power outages like those that occurred during Winter Storm Uri, the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) is considering a fundamental overhaul of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’s (ERCOT) wholesale electricity market. We urge the PUCT to consider whether incentivizing more generation is needed or whether the key issue is enhancing the resilience of existing generation to extreme weather events. We then explain why any new reliability mechanism should compensate both dispatchable and non-dispatchable resources according to their reliability value, include an efficient penalty structure for non-performance of generation units, reduce uncertainty for market participants, and mitigate the exercise of market power.

While reading Isaiah McKinney’s recent piece on Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, I was struck by how different people can see the exact same facts and yet draw such wildly different conclusions from them. Where McKinney sees a problem with lower courts’ applying Chevron while the Supreme Court has relied on it less in recent years, I see lower courts doing exactly what they should be doing: Following Supreme Court precedent until a majority of the Court overrules it.

One of the most important features of West Virginia’s articulation of the major questions doctrine—and perhaps the feature most overlooked—is that it is not a clear-statement rule. At least not yet. Even though the West Virginia majority ultimately agreed with the petitioners that EPA lacked authority to issue the Clean Power Plan under the major questions doctrine, the majority did not use the petitioners’ framework and never used the phrase “clear statement” in its legal analysis.

The government has consistently undercounted the societal benefits of reducing climate pollution when assessing regulations and other policies, tipping the scales toward polluters over people. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took a critical step to correct this problem by proposing a comprehensive update to the social cost of carbon. Consistent with the scientific and economics literature from independent researchers, the update would raise the metric’s central value from $51 to $190 for each ton of carbon-dioxide emissions in 2020.