Publications

Policy Integrity and the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University convened a conference on March 3, 2020, to discuss current, and potential future, approaches to carbon pricing in wholesale markets. This brief highlights some of the major points of discussion and suggests open questions for future study. 

This issue brief summarizes EPA's enforcement and compliance policy in light of COVID-19, describing its significance and clarifying its contours. The policy opens the door to potentially problematic and harmful actions, especially on a short-term basis. 

In restricting the scope of the Clean Water Act through two regulatory rollbacks, the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers claim that the estimated compliance-cost savings exceed the environmental harms (in the form of forgone benefits). Yet these analyses suffer from severe methodological flaws. And correcting the analyses would very likely show that the rollbacks are net costly to society, depriving the public of potentially billions of dollars in annual forgone benefits. As detailed in this report, the agencies’ failure to meaningfully assess the substantial harms that will result from their rollbacks violates both regulatory precedent and the agencies’ legal obligations.

This report explains how carbon-pricing rules in organized wholesale electricity markets can improve economic efficiency. It then explores the economic principles and legal requirements for RTOs, states, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to consider when implementing a carbon-pricing rule in organized wholesale electricity markets. And it identifies several policy-design approaches that, to varying degrees, meet those economic principles and are likely to be found legally permissible.

While the Trump administration’s goal of “energy dominance” has increased the public lands available for oil and gas development, no effort has been made to modernize the leasing system, even in the face of climate change. Our report explains how option value—which accounts for the informational value gained by delaying leasing decisions—can and should be factored into the Bureau of Land Management’s land use planning processes. Accounting for option value at multiple stages of the land use planning process would significantly improve BLM’s public lands stewardship, better protect the environment, and regain some of the economic and strategic advantages it has ceded to private developers. The report also describes case studies where BLM’s failure to consider option value has led to costly litigation and missed opportunities.