Newsletters

January 31, 2023

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  Limiting the Health Harms of Gas Stoves

  This month, the health harms of gas stove pollution, which we highlighted in our recent report, received nationwide attention. Outlets from the Washington Post to Time Magazine covered our research and discussed gas stoves’ disproportionate impacts on communities of color. Meanwhile, policymakers from the Consumer Product Safety Commission to the White House weighed in on possible regulatory responses. Our recent blog post summarizes the policy options examined in our original report, including stricter performance standards for gas stoves, consumer warning labels, and a public education campaign aimed at improving ventilation and reducing unsafe concentrations of pollutants in homes.

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  Reducing Gas Waste on Public Lands

  Each year, substantial amounts of natural gas are wasted through industry practices of venting, flaring, and leakage—enough to serve roughly 675,000 homes a year. In November, the Bureau of Land Management proposed a regulation to reduce gas waste, and we submitted comments recommending avenues for BLM to bolster its legal and economic support for the proposal. In particular, we recommend that BLM disavow its prior position that waste-prevention regulations must specifically benefit regulated industry (as opposed to society as a whole), better evaluate the proposal’s resulting benefits and royalty revenues, and recognize the significance of the rule’s climate benefits.

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  New White House Guidance Improves Climate Consideration in Environmental Reviews

  The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) recently released new guidance on how federal agencies should assess climate impacts when reviewing new actions or projects. This guidance will modernize the federal environmental review process, including by using the social cost of greenhouse gas metrics to quantify and monetize climate impacts. We have long advocated for such updates, and several of our publications are cited in the new guidance. “Agencies have too often in the past ignored or downplayed the climate impacts of proposed projects, but the new guidance should force a more meaningful accounting,” Max Sarinsky told Bloomberg Law.

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  DER Compensation for Environmental Justice

  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. And, because net metering–the most common form of DER compensation–relies on the underlying retail rates, tariff design is key to advancing equity. However, traditional tariff design approaches suffer from the assumption that economic efficiency and equity must necessarily trade-off. A new paper by Hafiz Anwar Ullah Khan, Burçin Ünel, and Yury Dvorkin develops a justice-cognizant tariff design framework that improves system-wide savings without sacrificing distributional equity, and encompasses economic welfare, the social costs of environmental and public health impacts, and socio-economic and demographic characteristics of electricity consumers. The paper focuses on Manhattan but contains lessons for other regions as well. Khan summarizes they key takeaways in a recent blog post.

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  Assessing New York’s Climate Superfund Act

  Policy Integrity research helped spur interest in a novel climate bill introduced by New York state lawmakers. The Climate Change Superfund 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. Rachel Rothschild, who conducted legal research that informed the proposed legislation, told Gothamist that currently no federal laws prevent New York or another state from passing a Climate Change Superfund Act. Economists Peter Howard and Minhong Xu found that the act would likely have a negligible impact on current and near-term oil and gasoline prices, while potentially lowering future energy prices in New York, including for transportation. The bill has been widely endorsed by the environmental community.

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  Hiring: Senior Energy Attorney or Director

  We are seeking an experienced energy attorney to direct our work on energy and electricity policy, focusing on efficient decarbonization of the energy system. The attorney will draft regulatory comments, petitions for rulemakings, and other formal submissions to agencies, including, but not limited to, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, and state public utility commissions. The attorney will also draft amicus briefs to the Supreme Court, DC Circuit, and other courts in major energy and environmental cases as well as supervise legal fellows and research assistants. The full job description is available here, and the review of applications will begin February 9th.