Environmental Legislation

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An Affordable Energy Transition Will Require Supportive and Sensible Regulation

The transition to decarbonize the grid and to electrify end uses to reduce emissions will be challenging, and customer bills may increase in the short term. Regulators can help to keep utilities financially healthy and make a smoother energy transition possible.

Ismael Arciniegas Rueda, Brian Wong

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California's Ambitious Decarbonization Plan Hasn't Been Future-Proofed

California has an ambitious blueprint to make the state carbon-neutral by 2045. But there's been no integrated stress test of the whole plan. The state needs and deserves a future-proofed, stress-tested plan that all Californians can trust to achieve its climate goals.

Nidhi Kalra

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To Help Climate Migrants, We Must First Recognize Them

Despite the large and growing population displaced by extreme weather, there is no common definition of a “climate migrant.” Once we get a clearer sense of just who is a climate migrant, policy efforts should begin focusing on the full fabric of life in our communities, creating systems that will help migrants become a part of that fabric in safe and dignified ways.

Jay Balagna, Aaron Clark-Ginsberg @aclarkginsberg, et al.

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Manipulating the Climate: What Are the Geopolitical Risks?

Geoengineering technologies that could block the sun's rays or siphon huge amounts of carbon from the air are not that far out of reach. Yet the international community has not established the kinds of guardrails you might expect for potentially world-changing technologies.

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Achieving Decarbonization and Energy Equity Through Reconciliation

The past two years have witnessed increasingly vocal calls for rapid decarbonization of the global economy through a clean energy transition. How can Congress ensure that new costs associated with a clean energy transition do not fall disproportionately on lower-income ratepayers?

Liam Regan, Benjamin Lee Preston @bl_preston

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How Voters Can Assess New Climate Plans

While the U.S. government has announced its intention to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, most presidential candidates and many states have proposed climate plans of their own. How might voters determine if any of these plans can seriously address climate change?

Robert J. Lempert @RobertLempert

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When It Comes to Climate, Look for Vulnerabilities in Policy, Not Science

Federal policymakers have picked up on the concept of red teaming — actively seeking out one's own vulnerabilities. While red teaming may not make sense for climate science, it does offer great benefits when weighing climate policy options.

Benjamin Lee Preston @bl_preston, Nicholas E. Burger, et al.

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Impact on the Environment from President Trump's First 100 Days

President Trump's actions have not yet resulted in demonstrable change in environmental conditions or funding. But the groundwork is being laid to unwind major regulations and diminish staff at the EPA and other federal agencies with climate-related research in their portfolios.

Debra Knopman

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With Trump in the White House, States Could Step Up on Climate Change

The new administration has expressed skepticism about climate change. But states may choose to pursue their own climate change initiatives.

Robert J. Lempert @RobertLempert, Debra Knopman

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Paris Gets the (Decision) Science Right

The framework for the Paris negotiations is in sync with what science tells us about how to make effective public policy decisions. This alone makes them historic and may provide a model for both local and global action on more than climate alone.

Steven W. Popper

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COP21: Ambition and Momentum

Negotiators in Paris achieved a historic breakthrough by adopting a fundamentally different, and likely more effective, institutional framework to address climate change. It builds on two concepts missing from past attempts to forge a global treaty: voluntary participation and adaptive policymaking.

Robert J. Lempert @RobertLempert, Debra Knopman, et al.

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COP 21 Not a Silver Bullet on Climate Change

The Paris climate conference cannot provide the engine that will drive a solution to the world's climate change challenge. Rather, it can best serve as a mediator that will help guide and structure the swirling, bottom-up process of radical change that is the best hope of preserving Earth's climate.

Robert J. Lempert @RobertLempert

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Adapting to a Hotter World

Because climate change is largely irreversible, mitigation alone won't solve the problem. While mitigation will prevent even greater, future climatic changes, adaptation — efforts to adjust to climate change's effects — will prepare the world for a new set of living conditions, whatever they may be.

Evan D. Peet @evandpeet, Jaime Madrigano @JMadrigano

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Breaking Down Nuclear Waste as a Two-Part Issue

The U.S. Department of Energy is now planning separate repositories for commercial waste and the waste from the military's nuclear weapons production instead of disposing of both in the same repository as originally intended. Decoupling different parts of the nuclear waste problem is a small but positive step forward.

Tom LaTourrette, Debra Knopman

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Removing Road Blocks to Climate Change Adaptation Planning

Despite increasing interest and investments in climate adaptation science, the implementation of adaptation plans through institutional policies or other actions designed to reduce health vulnerabilities has been slow. Institutionalized assumptions are an important roadblock.

Melissa L. Finucane, Regina A. Shih @ReginaShih

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San Onofre Risk Factors

The ongoing effort to open a spent fuel repository in the U.S. demonstrates the magnitude of the technical and political challenges of such an undertaking, writes Tom LaTourrette.

Tom LaTourrette

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Transitioning to a Carbon Tax Credit

Instead of setting an arbitrary Production Tax Credit value, we could provide a tax credit based on the social value of clean electricity generation, writes Constantine Samaras.

Constantine Samaras