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Climate Damages of U.S. LNG Exports
Our resource compiles the greenhouse gas emissions and resulting damages from liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals.
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Public Comments
Comments to HUD on Fair Housing Rule
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has proposed to repeal and replace the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which sought to improve the process by which state and local governments that receive HUD funding identify and mitigate impediments to fair housing in their communities. We submitted comments detailing deficiencies in the Department’s regulatory impact analysis for the proposal. Specifically, we explain how HUD (1) ignores benefits of the 2015 rule that will be forgone under the proposed replacement, and (2) overestimates cost savings that will result from the proposed replacement.
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Public Comments
Comments to CEQ on the National Environmental Policy Act
The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) proposed changes to the regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a decades-old statute that requires federal agencies to analyze the environmental impact of actions. We submitted comments explaining how the proposed rule runs afoul of the statute, drastically limiting agencies’ abilities to consider various effects and implement NEPA procedures. We also submitted joint comments detailing how the provisions would undermine analysis of climate effects, and encouraging CEQ to promote the use of the social cost of greenhouse gases.
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Public Comments
Comments on the Transportation and Climate Initiative
The Transportation and Climate Initiative called for public input on a Draft Memorandum of Understanding, which lays out a proposal for a Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regional program to establish a cap on carbon pollution from transportation and invest in further emissions reductions, cleaner fuels, and infrastructure. We submitted comments on the proposal suggesting that TCI adjust its definition of affected fuels, set the emissions cap to better reflect external damages from carbon emissions, implement the banking of allowances carefully, and verify that all offsets are real, permanent, and additional.
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News
Fuel-Economy Standards, Corporate Penalties, and a Very Costly Rollback
The mistake of setting corporate fuel-economy penalties just a little too low can be magnified by automakers’ decisions to produce millions of cars with worse fuel-economy. And the Trump penalty appears to be way too low to motivate compliance. Here’s a breakdown of the reduced penalty and how it will likely affect cars, consumers, and our climate.
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Public Comments
Comments on Connecticut’s Study of the Value of Distributed Energy Resources
Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) and Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) are conducting a study to determine how it can best compensate distributed energy resources, like solar panels and residential battery installations, which can provide provide significant value to the grid. DEEP and PURA’s study involves an electric system dispatch simulation model and various DER technology use cases. We submitted comments on the model’s outputs and how they can be improved to better serve the study.
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Public Comments
Comments to BLM on Oil and Gas Lease Sale in New Mexico
The Pecos District Office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released an environmental assessment of a 2020 oil and gas lease sale in New Mexico. Despite calculating that foreseeable leasing activities would produce over 28 millions tons of downstream CO2-equivalent over a 20-year time horizon, BLM fails to monetize the real-world impacts of those emissions. We submitted comments encouraging BLM to estimate climate impacts using social cost of carbon metrics.
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Public Comments
Comments to BLM on Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve
The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) activity plan for the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve could lead to as much as 76.86 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in a given year during peak production. We submitted joint comments urging BLM to monetize and contextualize the climate impacts of its plan using social cost of carbon metrics.
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Public Comments
Comments to SEC on Shareholder Proposal Regulations
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a rule that would limit investors’ ability to propose shareholder resolutions for a vote by fellow shareholders. The rule would raise requirements on the amount of stock required to be owned, impose requirements for the length of time the stock must have been held, and make it harder to resubmit resolutions that had failed to reach majority support in prior years. We submitted comments critiquing the rule, which will limit shareholder monitoring and likely have an outsized impact on shareholders’ role in environmental oversight.
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Public Comments
Comments on Medicaid Fiscal Accountability Regulation
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at the Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule that would likely reduce Medicaid funding, provider payments, and beneficiaries’ access to care. We submitted comments explaining serious flaws in the agency’s analysis, which fails to quantify funding reductions and assess the health impacts of reduced care.
