Recent Projects

The Arizona Corporation Commission regularly requires that load serving entities (LSEs), which supply electricity to ratepayers, file plans with a 15-year time horizon disclosing environmental impacts from different resource mixes and how they will address those impacts. We submitted comments encouraging the Commission to ask that LSEs provide monetized estimates of the damages they expect to result from greenhouse gas emissions using the social cost of carbon.

The North Baja XPress Project would provide a significant increase in natural gas compression and transportation, potentially resulting in 9.5 million metric tons or more in downstream greenhouse gas emissions. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, however, failed to estimate the project’s total emissions and climate damages. We submitted comments recommending that FERC consider the full range of upstream and downstream emissions and contextualize their impacts using the social cost of carbon.

A proposed oil and gas lease sale in Colorado would offer over 45,000 acres in areas valuable for recreation, wildlife, environmental conservation, and tourism. We submitted comments explaining how the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) environmental assessment neglects its duties to manage public lands for multiple uses and consider more limited leasing scenarios.

The PennEast 2020 Amendment Project, which provides for various additions to the proposed PennEast pipeline, would result in significant greenhouse gas emissions. We submitted comments on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions’s draft environmental assessment of the project, which fails to meaningfully assess the impact of emissions using social cost of carbon metrics.  

The Brattle Group developed a resource adequacy scenario analysis for the New York Public Service Commission (PSC), which is considering how to best meet its electricity generating capacity and resource adequacy needs. We submitted comments encouraging the PSC to consider several questions that Brattle’s analysis does not examine in depth.

As the climate crisis intensifies, it is crucial that we effectively contextualize and consider how policies affect our climate. We have worked hard to ensure that governments, regulators, and courts account for the social cost of carbon in policy and decisionmaking—and a string of recent policy outcomes has created positive momentum.