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Policy Integrity Files Brief in Case Challenging EPA’s Clean Power Plan
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will soon hear the first set of cases challenging President Obama’s signature climate change initiative—the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. We recently filed an amicus brief for West Virginia v. EPA, one of the cases challenging the as-yet unfinalized regulation.
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Victory at Sea: New Offshore Leasing Program Begins to Adopt Policy Integrity Recommendations
Policy Integrity’s multi-year effort to make the government account for “option value” in its natural resource leasing decisions has begun to pay off. In its new proposal for offshore oil and gas leasing from 2017-2022, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) devotes 12 pages to option value and related resource valuation concepts, which will now be considered in leasing decisions. Much of this language closely resembles the arguments Policy Integrity has made to the agency repeatedly since 2009.
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Energy Conservation Standards - Public Comments
Policy Integrity has submitted comments to the Department of Energy, encouraging DOE to improve its economic justification for a proposed energy efficiency determination. DOE has determined that energy conservation standards for mercury vapor and metal halide high-intensity discharge lamps are not “economically justified” as required by statute, even though such standards could save up to 1.6 quadrillion British thermal units of energy. By reducing electricity demand at and pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants, such energy savings would generate environmental and health benefits. However, at no point in DOE’s documentation does the agency discuss environmental and health benefits as part of its analysis of “economic justification” and “national impact.”
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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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Policy Integrity Helps Reform Federal Rulemaking Petition Process
Individuals have the right to petition federal agencies to issue, amend, or repeal regulations, but agencies lack a uniform process for handling these petitions. Policy Integrity recently worked with the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent federal agency dedicated to improving the administrative process, to create new guidelines for the petition process. In early December, ACUS adopted new recommendations for federal agencies, based on Policy Integrity’s research and suggestions.
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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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EPA’s Clean Power Plan - Public Comments
In Policy Integrity’s recently submitted public comments on the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, we make the case that the EPA’s flexible, cost-minimizing approach to setting performance standards for existing power plants is consistent with over 30 years of EPA Clean Air Act practice, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. While opponents of the Clean Power Plan have argued that the EPA is taking unprecedented and unwarranted steps to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act, we show that the plan is deeply rooted in precedent.
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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
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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Public Comments on Net Metering in Wisconsin
Wisconsin is one of more than 40 states with a “net metering” law that allows solar-powered households to sell some of the electricity they generate back into the grid for a fixed price. The Wisconsin Electric Power Company and Wisconsin Gas LLC recently proposed changes to their net metering rates, arguing in part that the rates force them to fund additional grid maintenance and modernization without appropriate compensation. However, the current rates also do not account for the climate and public health benefits from distributed solar generation.