Common Resources

Parsing the State of the Union

President Obama’s remarks on climate change on Tuesday were a mix of specificity and vagueness. It seems no two climate wonks interpret his State of the Union the same, leading to more questions than answers. The President linked specific trends—including high temperatures over the past 15 years and increased frequencies and intensities of heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods—to […]

U.S. Emissions Trends: Optimism, Pessimism, and One Big Decision

This week, the World Resources Institute released a report addressing U.S. progress on reducing GHG emissions to date, and the prospects for further progress without new legislation putting a price on carbon. The tone of the report is cautionary – it claims that ambitious “go-getter” policies are required to achieve the President’s Copenhagen target of […]

The Washington Post on California’s Cap and Trade Program

Just before the new year, the Washington Post ran a surprisingly conflicted editorial on California’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions. It endorsed the use of pricing as the most efficient approach to regulate carbon, suggested that it might be ineffective anyway because California is initially acting alone, and expressed criticism because California is not doing more […]

Policy Outfit Threatens to Sue EPA, Seeking Aviation Cap-and-Trade

Can EPA set up a cap-and-trade system for the transportation sector? If so, can it be forced to do so?The Institute for Policy Integrity, an (excellent) policy research and advocacy outfit affiliated with NYU, today announced it plans to sue EPA, aiming to find out. This is a provocative and interesting move, but I doubt […]

Substitutes and Complements

At yesterday’s RFF/AEI/Brookings carbon tax conference, the first two speakers correctly emphasized that with the right price in place, we wouldn’t need the panoply of indirect alternative policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as renewable portfolio standards and clean energy subsidies. The following speaker, however, referred to these indirect policies as “complementary.” That characterization […]

Does Eco-Certification Pay? Costa Rica’s Blue Flag Program

RFF Senior Fellow Allen Blackman and his colleagues present some of the first evidence that eco-certification programs in developing countries can have positive impacts for both the economy and environment. To read this piece in its entirety, click here.

Cap-and-Trade, Carbon Taxes, and My Neighbor’s Lovely Lawn

This post originally appeared on Robert Stavins’s blog, An Economic View of the Environment. The recent demise of serious political consideration of an economy-wide U.S. CO2 cap-and-trade system and the even more recent resurgence in interest among policy wonks in a U.S. carbon tax should prompt reflection on where we’ve been, where we are, and […]

Thoughts on Stiglitz, Inequality and the Environment

One hopes the market for intellectual thought is not like the market for comedy, where the retelling of highlights exhausts the creative resource. Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz has been a tremendously creative thinker over his career, and his lecture at Resources for the Future on October 5 offered intellectual highlights that deserve reflection and bear retelling. […]

Revised Maps of Shale Gas Regulation

Today, RFF is releasing a major update of our series of maps showing state shale gas regulation. The maps show 31 states’ regulations of 27 different elements of the development process, and have been some of our most popular and talked-about research products since their launch in July. Three big things have changed in this […]

Regulating in the Dark

20 years ago, bipartisan effort in Washington created possibly the most ambitious environmental program in US history - a trading market for sulfur dioxide emissions, intended to end the threat of acid rain. The program was astonishingly successful, achieving benefits that far exceeded its costs. But it is now moribund, without a functioning market. A […]