Publications

Thinking productively about New York’s options for achieving deep decarbonization requires policymakers, advocates, and other stakeholders to appreciate the state’s current suite of decarbonization programs both as a portfolio of disparate parts and considered in the aggregate. This report aims to further this effort by providing an overview of the state’s GHG emissions-mitigation policies.

As interest in advanced nuclear technologies grows, understanding the legal regime underpinning the deployment of small modular reactors (SMRs) is critical. This report describes the legal and factual background behind the regulation of SMRs and explores a recent challenge to the authority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to license these reactors. At the heart of the litigation is whether SMRs qualify as "utilization facilities" under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 — a question that determines whether the NRC has the authority to license them at all. The report explains that the NRC acted reasonably in labeling all nuclear reactors as utilization facilities, that the 2024 ADVANCE Act indicates Congress understood the NRC to have authority to license SMRs as such, and that nearly all the reactors at issue in the litigation can reasonably be considered utilization facilities given the quantities of special nuclear material they use. However, the report does not suggest that the current licensing regime for SMRs is beyond improvement.

Recent debates over the future of New York’s climate policies have highlighted the idiosyncratic approach to greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting in the state’s landmark 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which differs from the approach of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) used by most other states and countries. Some have argued that changing the CLCPA’s accounting approach to align with the UNFCCC’s will help the state meet its climate goals; others have pushed back on this argument. This report aims to shed light on this debate, revealing how the CLCPA’s accounting approach affects New York’s progress toward its climate goals and highlighting how additional data from the state could better inform this analysis.

In 2024, EPA finalized a rule to limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. oil and gas sector’s major segments: production, processing, transmission, storage, and distribution. The U.S. oil and gas sector is a sizeable source of greenhouse gas emissions and the largest domestic industrial source of one gas in particular: methane. Methane (i.e., natural gas) is a valuable commodity when captured, but a potent greenhouse gas when emitted into the atmosphere. The Trump Administration has delayed implementation of this rule’s various provisions, asserting the U.S. oil and gas sector produces energy cleanly, but clear evidence shows that the sector’s emissions are enormous. This issue brief examines the sector’s emissions and the negative health effects and economic damages of these emissions.

Greenhouse gas emissions are an example of a tremendous market failure: climate damages are not reflected in market transactions. Businesses and governments try to correct these negative externalities through the voluntary carbon market, but this market itself suffers from its own market failures. In this report, we first give an overview of the structure of the voluntary carbon market and identify several market failures hindering the market’s effectiveness. Key market failures include information asymmetry, where certain market actors possess more information than others about the quality of carbon credits, resulting in adverse selection, where high quality carbon credit suppliers exit the market. We also discuss potential solutions to these market failure issues, and point out prominent gaps in economic research.