Recent Projects

We submitted comments to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) on recent draft environmental impact statements (EISs), in which we stressed the importance of addressing climate impacts of proposed projects.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has announced its intention to repeal the greenhouse gas (GHG) measure, which is part of a series of rulemakings intended to ensure the most efficient investment of federal transportation funds. We submitted comments to the FHWA on the proposed repeal, highlighting that the Administration had failed to consider foregone benefits in its decision to finalize the repeal and failed to explain why the benefits of the measure no longer justify the costs.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently suspended a rule to increase the availability of affordable housing in higher-rent neighborhoods. Our amicus brief in a suit against HUD argues that the suspension violates administrative law by disregarding economic impacts and failing to first seek public feedback.

The New York Independent Systems Operator (NYISO) and the New York Department of Public Service (DPS) recently began a joint effort to harmonize the state’s energy policies with the operation of wholesale markets, including by establishing a task force to discuss how to incorporate carbon pricing into the wholesale market. We recently submitted comments with a number of recommendations on how to ensure the task force’s work plan shapes the program in the most economically efficient and legally sound way. We suggested that price, revenue allocation, leakage, and harmonization with other state policies be included as topics in the work plan, among several others. We plan to continue to engage with this process over the next several months.

This summer, California passed Assembly Bill 398, extending the state’s well-regarded cap-and-trade program until 2030. The California Air Resources Board held a public workshop on October 12, 2017, on implementing the provisions of AB 398. The Board requested feedback on a number of specific issues to aid it in finalizing the cap-and-trade regulations, including on setting a price ceiling for emissions allowances and unsold allowance allocation. In our comments to the Board, we focused on these two issues, making recommendations for developing regulations under AB 398 that help ARB fulfill its statutory mandates to take into account the externalities associated with greenhouse gas emissions and promote overall societal well-being.

In September, Energy Secretary Perry asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to adopt a new rule that would guarantee plants with 90-day on-site fuel, mostly coal and nuclear plants, full cost recovery. We submitted an initial set of comments in response to their Notice Inviting Comments, and we have now submitted reply comments.

In September 2017, a federal court overturned the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM’s) decision to delay a rule that is designed to prevent private industry from wasting natural gas resources in mining activities on public land. In its decision to delay the rule, BLM had not considered the benefits that would be forgone. Now, BLM has proposed a second delay. Our comments to BLM argue that the agency manipulated the calculation of forgone benefits from delay—particularly, the calculation of the social cost of methane—in ways that are completely inconsistent with the best available science, the best practices for economic analysis, and the legal standards governing rational decisionmaking. The 2016 Waste Prevention Rule’s benefits exceed its costs by as much as $200 million per year, and thus the proposal to suspend the rule is arbitrary and capricious.

We filed these joint comments with the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In July, Governor Hickenlooper issued Executive Order D2017-015, Supporting Colorado’s Clean Energy Transition, which called for an update to the 2015 Colorado Climate Plan. We took this opportunity to share our recent guide, The Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases and State Policy, along with a letter encouraging Colorado state agencies to use the social cost of carbon in all major regulatory, resource management, and electricity decisions with possible climate effects.

EPA recently delayed the effective date of a rule that would have decreased the severity and number of chemical accidents at manufacturing facilities and refineries. State and NGO plaintiffs sued EPA over the delay, arguing that EPA did not have statutory authority to issue it, and that the delay was arbitrary and capricious. We filed a brief in support of petitioners arguing that EPA did not offer an adequate explanation for choosing to forgo the benefits of the chemical disaster rule.

Net metering, the predominant approach to compensating distributed solar generation in the U.S., essentially pays households with solar panels a flat retail rate for every kilowatt hour they send back to the grid. In response to the Department of Energy’s request for information on the costs and benefits of net energy metering, we submitted Richard Revesz and Burcin Unel’s law review article on net metering and distributed electricity generation. The paper analyzes the benefits and costs of distributed generation, and identifies ways for state policy to better match consumer compensation for solar generation with the energy system and environmental benefits that it provides. It also includes information that is relevant to the RFI including the identification and categorization of the costs and benefits of net energy metering policies.