Recent Projects

Jason Schwartz and Denise Grab prepared a testimony for the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission regarding a proposal to retire the San Juan Generating Units, a coal-fired power plant in New Mexico. Their testimony details how applying Social Cost of Carbon metrics would allow the Commission to better monetize and contextualize the climate impacts of the proposal. Retiring the San Juan coal units would deliver billions of dollars in benefits to agricultural productivity, property values, and human health.

The Bureau of Land Management released its updated environmental assessment for May 2015 and February 2016 lease sales in Utah, in response to a court remand in WildEarth Guardians v. Zinke. We submitted comments asking BLM to monetize the real-world climate impacts of the lease sales using the social cost of greenhouse gases.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is proposing to place new, more effective health warning labels on cigarette packages and advertisements. We submitted comments supporting the proposal and suggesting ways the agency can strengthen its assessment of the new labels’ costs and benefits.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently proposed to significantly weaken requirements for the disposal of coal combustion residuals from coal-fired power plants. We submitted comments focusing on inadequacies in EPA’s assessment of the rule’s costs and benefits.

We submitted comments to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding changes to its New Source Review (NSR) applicability regulations. Our comments focus on EPA’s failure to perform a cost-benefit analysis for the proposed rule.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's environmental assessment of the Alaska LNG project failed to provide a meaningful analysis of the pipeline project's climate effects. We submitted joint comments encouraging FERC to monetize the social cost of greenhouse gases in its Environmental Impact Statement.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to abandon its longstanding “Once In, Always In” policy, in turn allowing “major sources” that reduce emissions below major source thresholds to reclassify as “area sources” subject to less stringent regulation. We submitted comments detailing inadequacies in EPA’s assessment of the rule’s costs and benefits. The agency fails to analyze the rule’s aggregate emissions impacts, conduct its illustrative analyses against an appropriate baseline, account for the possibility of inadequate state enforcement, and monetize the health and environmental effects of emissions changes.

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed revisions to eligibility for its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. We submitted comments focusing on serious flaws in the agency’s analysis of the rule’s impacts.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its draft resource management plan for the Eastern Colorado planning area, projecting millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year from oil and gas development, coal production, and downstream emissions. We submitted joint comments focusing on BLM’s failure to monetize climate damages and properly analyze energy substitution effects.

New Jersey’s 2019 Energy Master Plan (EMP) outlines how the state can achieve its emissions reduction target of 80% below 2006 levels, as well as 100% clean energy, by 2050. We submitted comments applauding improvements to the draft EMP and making further suggestions. Our comments encourage the state to establish a technology-neutral policy framework to achieve its emissions reduction goal, compensate distributed energy resources in a way that reflects their full social value, and implement reforms to advance related technological and regulatory frameworks. We also submitted comments last October, during the EMP scoping phase, that made suggestions on grid resilience, rate design, and energy storage incentives.