Common Resources

Will Congress Halt the EPA’s Climate Policy?

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court announced it would review a small part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) agenda for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Yesterday, two members of Congress (Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-KY, and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV) floated a bill that would substantially limit EPA’s authority to regulate GHGs under […]

Supreme Court To Hear Key EPA/Carbon Case, But Only on Narrow Grounds

The Supreme Court today granted cert for (agreed to hear) appeals from a set of consolidated cases decided by the DC Circuit last year. In those cases, the lower court had preserved EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Ann Carlson of UCLA has an excellent summary on Legal Planet - it’s worth […]

Market Shares and Technology Driving Up Fuel Economy in New Vehicles

From the late 1980s to about 2004, the average fuel economy of new passenger vehicles in the United States declined gradually. Then, over the past 10 years, fuel economy jumped suddenly, up almost 20 percent by 2012. In a recent paper, my colleague Shefali Khanna and I ask which end of the production line explains […]

A Global Perspective on the Social Cost of Carbon

Some recent posts examining estimates of the social cost of carbon (SCC) noted that the SCC applies to the world as a whole: it is the global concentration of CO2—irrespective of the geographic origin of emissions—that prompts concern over climate change. How does that fact translate into costs facing one or another CO2-emitting country?

Update: EPA NSPS Proposal -Does- Separate Coal and Gas

On Friday, I wrote that EPA’s newly-proposed performance standards for GHG emissions from new power plants (NSPS) mostly preserved the agency’s earlier approach of putting gas- and coal-fired plants in the same “source category”: It’s true that the new proposal would revert to EPA’s past approach of separating steam plants, including natural gas combined cycle plants […]

Small Changes, But an Important Signal in New Power Plant GHG Proposal

Update: I’ve revised my understanding of EPA’s proposal and this post is no longer correct. See the update here. EPA released a major and long-awaited proposed regulation today, but the most important news might be something it didn’t do, and how that affects the next major step in regulating carbon under the Clean Air Act. […]

Good News for Gas from New Fugitive Methane Numbers

Is the shale gas boom good or bad for climate? It largely depends on methane. Methane, the primary constituent of natural gas, is a double-edged sword in climate terms. It burns much cleaner than coal—about half of the CO2 emissions and far less of most other pollutants for the same energy output. But released directly […]

Economic Growth and Carbon Taxes

I believe it’s time to end the discussion of the impact a carbon tax would have on US economic growth. To me the question is settled – it has no substantive impact. A new study by scholars at RFF shows that a substantial, broad-based, revenue-neutral tax on carbon dioxide emissions would have imperceptible effects on […]

Estimating The Social Cost Of Carbon: Robert Pindyck’s Critique

The US government’s new consensus estimate of the social cost of carbon (SCC)—around $43 per ton of CO2 from a 2020 baseline—has met with some approval in academic and other circles (as we discussed yesterday). But some of the harshest criticisms, at least insofar as the blogosphere would interpret them, have come from MIT economist […]

Towards an Agreed-Upon Social Cost of Carbon

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary estimate of the global external (i.e., non-market) costs from a ton of CO2 (or greenhouse gas equivalent) emissions. These costs include, among other things, damages related to sea level rise, more frequent storms, and higher temperatures. These effects will vary over time but the SCC is […]