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  • Harmonizing Preservation and Production Cover

    Harmonizing Preservation and Production

    How Modernizing the Department of the Interior’s Fiscal Terms for Oil, Gas, and Coal Leases Can Ensure a Fair Return to the American Public

    Leasing federal lands for drilling and mining generates a huge amount of revenue for the United States, but the Department of the Interior, which oversees these leases, uses an antiquated fiscal system that deprives taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars. Our report analyzes how the fiscal terms for oil, gas, and coal leases could be modernized to ensure a fair return to the American public.

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  • Capturing Value Cover

    Capturing Value

    Science and Strategies to Curb Methane Emissions from the Oil and Natural Gas Sector

    Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a potent climate pollutant up to 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide on a 20-year timeframe. Currently the United States loses at least 1 to 3 percent of its total natural gas production each year when methane is leaked or vented to the atmosphere. Federal regulations could reduce methane emissions by up to 50 percent at little or no net cost, using available technologies.

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  • Interest Groups and Environmental Policy Cover

    Interest Groups and Environmental Policy

    Inconsistent Positions and Missed Opportunities

    This Essay examines and explains the positions of the principal interest groups over the past four decades with respect to the two central questions of environmental policy: the appropriate policy goal and the instrument that should be used to carry out the policy. While environmental groups and industry have largely switched positions on the two central questions of environmental policy, the points at which their positions overlapped were fleeting, and opportunities to make substantial progress in rationalizing the system of environmental regulation have largely been unrealized.

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  • Toward a More Rational Environmental Policy Cover

    Toward a More Rational Environmental Policy

    This essay argues that U.S. environmental policy should operate in accordance with five major components of rationality: cost-benefit analysis; cost minimization; flexible market-based instruments; constraints on grandfathering; and the sensible allocation of decision-making authority between the federal government and the states. This past Term, the Supreme Court decided two significant cases, which together should be seen as producing a move toward rationality in environmental policy.

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  • Dueling Amendments Cover

    Dueling Amendments

    The Applicability of Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act to Greenhouse Gases

    The United States Supreme Court determined that greenhouse gases (GHGs) were an “air pollutant” under the Clean Air Act in its ruling on Massachusetts v. EPA. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has since taken steps to regulate GHGs under a rarely utilized provision of the Clean Air Act, section 111(d). Despite the text printed in the U.S. Code, the true text of section 111(d) is in doubt. This is because of a small but potentially significant legislating error that occurred during the creation of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, when the Senate and House of Representatives made different revisions to section 111(d), both of which were passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President. This paper analyzes whether the conflicting amendments to section 111(d) will prove to be a problem or an opportunity for EPA in its efforts to regulate GHGs.

    This is a student working paper, and it does not necessarily represent the views of the Institute for Policy Integrity.

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  • 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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  • 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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  • Navigating Net Neutrality Cover

    Navigating Net Neutrality

    The Federal Communications Commission’s ability to protect the open Internet has been limited, due to recent court decisions. This report examines the regulatory options and recommends to FCC a course forward that will best promote the benefits of widespread Internet access.

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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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  • Rethinking Health-Based Environmental Standards Cover

    Rethinking Health-Based Environmental Standards

    In Whitman v. American Trucking, the Supreme Court interpreted the Clean Air Act to require the EPA to set the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), without considering costs. Instead, the agency must rely exclusively on health-related criteria. The authors argue that such health-based standards are problematic because there is no coherent way to set the permissible level of pollution based on health considerations alone and, ironically, the NAAQS have generally been set at levels that are inefficiently lax from an economic perspective. The authors urge a reinterpretation of the American Trucking case that would allow the EPA to consider costs-benefit analysis when it would lead to more stringent standards, as it currently does for most regulated pollutants.

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