Common Resources

Who Benefits from Flexible GHG Rules?

US climate policy is unfolding under the Clean Air Act. Mobile source and construction permitting regulations are in place. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed draft final rules for the performance of new power plants. Most important, EPA and the states will soon determine the form and stringency of the regulations for existing […]

What to Expect From EPA Climate Rules

I have a new piece in the Milken Institute Review that looks at EPA’s current and near-future carbon emissions rules. It starts at the beginning of the story and is aimed at a more-or-less general audience, so if you haven’t been following the issue it’s a good place to start. Among other things I point […]

States Can’t Take the Credit, But They Do Matter

In America, the story goes, states lead on climate policy and the federal government follows. That argument is probably overstated a bit today, but it will become increasingly true in the future. Cap-and-trade programs in California and the Northeast and renewable portfolio standards across the country are the only major policies in place aimed specifically […]

Can Anyone Challenge EPA’s Coal Ban?

Dan Farber argued recently that coal interests would likely find it hard to challenge EPA’s new source performance standards (NSPS), even though the standards would effectively ban construction of new coal plants without expensive and unproven carbon capture and storage technology. The reason: standing. Since few if any coal plants are being built (because of […]

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 […]

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. […]

Realistic Expectations for Carbon Policy - A Response

This is a guest post by Brian Potts, a partner at law firm Foley & Lardner, LLP in Madison. Yesterday I (Nathan) critiqued some arguments he’s made recently regarding prospects for EPA’s future carbon performance standards for power plants. I’m happy to offer Brian space here to respond to that critique. -Ed First, I would […]

Realistic Expectations for EPA Carbon Policy

Brian Potts says EPA existing-source performance standards (ESPS) for power plant carbon emissions won’t matter much since they can’t or won’t be very stringent. This is partly true, if a bit overstated. You’re certainly kidding yourself if you’re counting on ESPS to take care of US climate policy on their own - though I know […]