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Recent Projects

Viewing recent projects in Climate and Energy Policy
  • Flammable Planet: Wildfires and the Social Cost of Carbon Cover

    Flammable Planet: Wildfires and the Social Cost of Carbon

    Climate change is expected to make wildfires more frequent and intense, with new areas facing wildfire risk. This could take a serious toll on the U.S. economy by expanding the area that wildfires burn 50 percent by 2050—and raising projected damages by tens of billions of dollars a year. Flammable Planet provides the first-ever estimate of the extent to which climate change will magnify the future economic costs of wildfires.

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  • Offshore Leasing and Option Value - Comments on BOEM’s 2017-2022 Leasing Program

    Policy Integrity recently submitted comments to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) on its five-year offshore leasing program from 2017-2022. BOEM is charged with stewarding vital and valuable resources for the benefit of the American people. On the one hand, the agency must direct the orderly development of offshore oil and gas deposits; at the same time, the agency must safeguard the ecosystems, cultural assets, and human lives affected by resource extraction decisions, and must preserve competing uses of offshore areas. BOEM thus has a responsibility to ensure the reasonable development of offshore resources so that costs to society are appropriately balanced against the benefits generated. Moreover, BOEM must collect a fair return on any of the American people’s oil and gas reserves that are leased for private development. Finally, the agency must attend to the different effects of offshore development on different regions, ecosystems, and communities.

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  • Richard Revesz Testifies at House Energy and Commerce Committee Hearing

    Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, testified at a U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing on July 11 to discuss the proper role of the federal government in environmental regulation. At the hearing, entitled, “Constitutional Considerations: States vs. Federal Environmental Policy Implementation,” Revesz discussed a series of instances in which federal action is desirable.

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  • EPA Proposes Power Plant Regulations

    The centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s effort to address climate change through executive action is now a known quantity with the release of the EPA’s proposed carbon pollution guidelines for existing power plants. The rule, pursuant to Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act, would cut carbon pollution from power plants 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 and allow states to use flexible approaches to meet this target.

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  • Regulating Greenhouse Gas Pollution from Existing Power Plants Cover

    Regulating Greenhouse Gas Pollution from Existing Power Plants

    The State of the Debate

    Environmentalists, industry groups, and state governments have been vocal regarding their preferences for the shape of EPA’s forthcoming rule on greenhouse gas pollution from existing power plants. In this policy brief, Jack Lienke and Jason Schwartz survey 30 public letters, white papers, presentations, and reports from these stakeholders and outline their positions.

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  • Joint Public Comments on the Social Cost of Carbon to DOE and HUD

    On May 16, we submitted joint comments on the social cost of carbon to two Department of Energy energy efficiency rules and to another energy efficiency rule proposed jointly by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Agriculture. They are substantially similar to those we submitted for EPA’s proposed New Source Performance Standards rule on May 9th. The comments to DOE are available here, and the comments to HUD are available here.

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  • Comments Submitted to EPA on Proposed Emissions Standards for New Power Plants

    Policy Integrity submitted comments to the Environmental Protection Agency on its proposed performance standards for greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants. To help maximize the net benefits of the proposed standards and to ensure their solid legal foundation, Policy Integrity made the following recommendations:

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  • Annual Energy Outlook Projections and the Future of Solar PV Electricity Cover

    Annual Energy Outlook Projections and the Future of Solar PV Electricity

    The topic of this paper is the assumed growth of solar photovoltaic (PV) in current energy models, with a focus on information from Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) of the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). EIA resolves the difficulty of modeling solar energy into the future by assuming its current growth will not continue. However, EIA’s assumptions on the future costs of solar PV are highly pessimistic, and its methodology would appear to bias its “Reference Case” projections toward lower growth of solar energy. Sure enough, past AEOs have systematically underestimated the future growth of solar PV. Energy modelers therefore may need to adjust the AEO forecast in order to reflect a most likely baseline trajectory for solar PV.

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  • Shifting Gears Cover

    Shifting Gears

    A New Approach to Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the Transportation Sector

    To overcome a stall out of “command-and-control” regulations for biofuels, EPA should move towards a flexible, market-based emissions trading system for the transportation sector.

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  • Global Warming: Improve Economic Models of Climate Change Cover

    Global Warming: Improve Economic Models of Climate Change

    Costs of carbon emissions are being underestimated, but current estimates are still valuable for setting mitigation policy, say Richard L. Revesz, Peter H. Howard, Kenneth Arrow, Lawrence H. Goulder, Robert E. Kopp, Michael A. Livermore, Michael Oppenheimer, and Thomas Sterner in Nature.

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