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  • Enacting the  “Polluter Pays” Principle Cover

    Enacting the “Polluter Pays” Principle

    New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act and Its Impact on Gasoline Prices

    This policy brief analyzes how New York State’s recently proposed Climate Change Superfund Act is most likely to affect consumer gasoline prices. The Act would require payments from fossil-fuel companies based on their historical contributions to current greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. The payments would be used to build green infrastructure to help the state adapt to climate change. The brief finds that the Act would likely have a negligible impact on current and near-term oil prices, while potentially lowering future energy prices in New York, including for transportation.

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  • The Role of Information in Distributed Energy Resource Deployment and Policy Cover

    The Role of Information in Distributed Energy Resource Deployment and Policy

    While appropriate compensation for DERs has received considerable attention in DER policy discussions, one important dimension has received less attention: informational gaps and asymmetries. In particular, key information about distribution networks, energy consumption, and marginal emission rates is often either entirely lacking or readily available only to some parties. Such information disparities can impede effective policymaking. To overcome the inefficiencies information asymmetry creates, regulators must carefully tailor disclosure mandates and incentives for utilities, as these actors often have little incentive to go beyond the letter of the law in data disclosure.

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  • Interior’s Authority to Consider Downstream Emissions from Offshore Leasing Cover

    Interior’s Authority to Consider Downstream Emissions from Offshore Leasing

    In its proposed Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas leasing program for 2023–2028, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) claims that it cannot consider downstream greenhouse gas emissions when setting leasing policy because of a 2009 D.C. Circuit case, Center for Biological Diversity v. Department of the Interior (CBD). This Policy Brief explains that BOEM misreads CBD, which held only that the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) does not require the agency to consider downstream effects. The Policy Brief further explains that neither CBD nor any other case law bars BOEM from considering downstream effects and that consideration of such effects is in fact consistent with the text, legislative history, and regulatory history of OCSLA.

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  • Ensuring Robust Consideration of Climate Change Under NEPA Cover

    Ensuring Robust Consideration of Climate Change Under NEPA

    Six Priorities for CEQ’s Phase 2 Rulemaking

    In April 2022, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) finalized a limited, “Phase 1” rulemaking to restore several longstanding features of the regulations that guide agency assessments under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) which CEQ had removed in 2020. In that rule, CEQ reaffirmed its intentions to further revise the regulations to better ensure that agencies make decisions that “advance environmental, climate change mitigation and resilience, and environmental justice objectives.” This policy brief outlines six simple regulatory revisions that CEQ should prioritize for its “Phase 2” rulemaking to improve consideration of climate change during environmental review.

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  • Transmission Siting Reforms in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 Cover

    Transmission Siting Reforms in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021

    This policy brief highlights Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) provisions that are relevant to transmission siting, summarizes the changes they effectuate, and describes important implications of those changes for efforts to develop more interstate transmission capacity. It then offers a brief assessment of the IIJA’s overarching significance to such efforts, including by comparing them to a more ambitious legislative alternative.

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