Dana describes the challenges of ensuring that low-income consumers have access to reliable energy at affordable prices. Dana and David discuss how to address these challenges as energy markets transition toward cleaner power sources, electrified transport, and increased reliance on distributed generation.
Dana is the Executive Director of the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute, which seeks to improve energy services for low-income communities and reduce the burden of paying for energy.
The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: Apple | Google
David, Joel, and Shelley discuss hot-button questions about net-metering, which effectively pays homeowners with rooftop solar the retail price for the electricity that they provide to the grid. This price is higher than that received by other power generators. Net metering offers environmental benefits but imposes costs on other electricity users. David kicks off the discussion by addressing the common question whether net-metering is regressive and segues into a discussion of the broad array of studies on the effects of net metering.
Another week, another EnergyTradeoffs.com podcast episode. This week, the University of Florida’s Amy Stein talks with David Spence about her research on “Maintaining Reliability in a Distributed Energy World.”
Amy and David explore the challenges of maintaining power grid reliability when an increasing amount of electricity is produced by distributed sources such as rooftop solar. Amy explains how energy storage and demand response can provide this reliability. And she describes how these “reliability resources” may be a poor fit with historical methods of utility investment and regulation.
The interview builds on Amy’s 2016 article on “Distributed Reliability,” which was published in the University of Colorado Law Review.
The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: Apple | Google
Frank explains different approaches to ensuring the reliability of the electric grid, including Texas’s approach of allowing very high prices during periods of peak demand to encourage sufficient power supply—an approach that has been repeatedly tested during hot weather in the past month. He also explains the other, more common, approach of a regulatory mandate to purchase reserves in advance, and the downsides of that conventional approach.
Frank also explains why Southern California’s solar creates ideal conditions to motivate short-term battery storage of electricity: a quick spike of lots of power for a short slice of the day that then ramps down quickly just as power demand peaks.
The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: Apple | Google
Tonight, CNN will air seven hours of back-to-back townhalls from the ten top Democratic candidates on their climate plans. So far coverage of these plans has focused on initiatives that would require Congress to pass new laws, such as various versions of the “The Green New Deal,” proposals to take over or clean up the power sector, and plans to spend trillions fighting climate change. None of these proposals would pass the Senate in anything like their proposed form.
If you want to understand what the candidates would actually
do on climate, you should focus on three things:
How they would change federal permitting of oil and gas extraction and transport;
How much they hope to spend on climate change; and
How they approach tradeoffs between climate regulation and the economy.
Here’s a guide to what the candidates have said on these
issues and the key questions that should be asked of their plans in coming months.
How Candidates Would Change Federal Oil & Gas Permitting
By far the most important question for the candidates on climate change is how they would use existing presidential authority—particularly through executive orders. The candidates can be held to these promises because they don’t require any action from Congress.
By contrast, all the candidates’ proposals for legislation would need to be passed by the Senate, which currently has a Republican majority. Even if the Democrats somehow gained a Senate majority next year, they would still need to win over moderate Democrats such as Joe Manchin who famously won his seat by shooting President Obama’s cap-and-trade bill to advertise his opposition to climate regulation. There are no such obstacles to executive authority so the most important question for candidates is how they’d use it.
The most important executive action proposed to date is Vice
President Biden’s plan to ban “new oil and gas permitting on public land and
water” by executive order on his first day in office. This would have three dramatic
effects:
It would ban new oil and gas leases across all federal land, including centers of the energy industry such as the Gulf of Mexico.
It would ban new drilling on existing leases, because every new oil and gas well needs a permit.
It would ban new oil and gas pipelines from Canada and to Mexico, because these require a federal permit. It would ban new liquefied natural gas exports to Europe and Asia. And it could even ban new domestic pipelines, because even intra-state pipelines typically cross federal streams and rivers, which a fully comprehensive permitting ban would forbid.
So Biden’s ban would entirely shut down the oil and gas
industry on public lands. And it would choke off the private energy industry by
cutting off the new pipelines and gas export facilities that it needs to get its
products to market.
The argument against Biden’s ban is that there are far less economically damaging ways to cut U.S. carbon emissions. As I explain in this new op-ed, this ban would cause serious economic pain to Americans. And a ban on new fossil fuel transport would cut off U.S. gas more than oil—oil can easily be shipped by rail, truck, barge, or tanker but gas can only be shipped on pipelines or as liquefied natural gas. And U.S. gas exports are bringing huge environmental benefits to the world by replacing dirtier fuel sources in places with air quality problems, so Biden’s ban could damage the global environment.
Here’s a chart of the Democratic candidates climate policies, ordered by their current standing in national polls. (This is drawn from the candidates websites and their responses to questions here and here.) As you can see, many of the top candidates also support a ban on federal oil and gas leasing, but many have not said whether, like Biden, they would ban all new permitting—including new wells on old leases and new international and domestic pipelines. This is the single most important issue for the candidates to discuss in tonight’s town halls and it should be the focus of savvy reporters’ questions moving forward.
I am keeping this chart updated as candidates and climate plans evolve. (Last Update 3/1/2020)
How Much Candidates Would Spend on Climate Change
Although new spending requires congressional action, Congress
must regularly reach agreement with the President to fund the federal government,
which gives a new President some leverage to spend money on his or her priorities.
The Democratic candidates have widely varying goals on climate spending, from Mayor
Buttigieg’s plan to spend $25 Billion per year on green research &
development to Senator Sanders plan to spend $16.3 Trillion to transform the energy
economy.
To understand those massive numbers, let’s put them in
context. There are 128 million American households. So Mayor Buttigieg is
planning to spend $219 per household per year and Senator Sanders is planning
to spend $127,344 per household. Vice President Biden’s plan to spend $1.7
trillion would be $13,281 per household.
It would be helpful to hear more about how the candidates
will prioritize their climate and environmental spending. If Congress will only
give them so much money, would they prioritize spending it on research &
development, on climate change projects abroad, or would they consider other
environmental issues such as improving air quality and removing lead from the water
and soil? This should be a secondary focus of reporters’ questions.
How Candidates Would Balance Climate Regulation
and the Economy
So far, the candidates have said little about how they would
balance their climate and economic goals, in part because media coverage has
focused on the Green New Deal, which asserts that there is no tradeoff between
environmental and economic goals. But a new president would make countless
decisions on how much to cut greenhouse gas emissions from cars, from power
plants, and from industrial sources using existing regulatory authority. So we
need to know what the candidates will do when their economic and environmental
goals come into conflict.
As I explain in this podcast with UCLA’s Ann Carlson, the fundamental innovation of the Green New Deal is that it promises to achieve environmental and economic goals simultaneously. It will remove 100% of greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector in ten years. And it will “guarantee[] a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” What it doesn’t say is what it will do when those goals come into conflict.
There are many possible ways to manage tradeoffs between the environment and the economy. Historically, environmental laws have often mandated the cleanest technology that is “available” or “demonstrated.” And government regulators have interpreted those standards as requiring that industry cut emissions as much as it can without risking plant closures or job losses.
Another way to manage environmental and economic tradeoffs
is with carbon pricing: a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. These systems
make polluters pay for their greenhouse gas emissions. But if a product is so
valuable to society that consumers are willing to pay the cost of manufacturing
it plus its environmental cost, then they can still purchase it.
Almost all the candidates have said they support the Green New Deal, but they should be asked how they will balance their climate and economic goals. Will they use traditional standards that asks the fossil fuel industry to clean up but doesn’t shut it down? Or do they think that industries should only survive if they can pay the price of their carbon emissions? Or, like Vice President Biden, do they think that some industries should be shut down regardless of the cost? These questions arise every day for climate regulators so reporters should ask the candidates how they will manage these energy tradeoffs.
David’s research compares renewable portfolio standards, which are the most commonly used instrument for encouraging renewable power, with carbon pricing, which could be implemented through a cap-and-trade system or a tax. David concludes that carbon pricing is “dramatically more effective at reducing carbon emissions and increasing the percentage of renewables than a renewable portfolio standard.” And he explains why even a modest carbon tax could be better for the climate than a relatively aggressive renewable portfolio standard. At the same time, David acknowledges that renewable portfolio standards may, in some cases, help surmount non-market barriers to renewable power.
How much can the federal courts do on a climate change? If you want more climate regulation than Congress is willing to provide, it’s an urgent question. The most recent and most ambitious climate lawsuit is Juliana v. United States, a lawsuit by children asking the courts to order the government to aggressively regulate carbon emissions. These plaintiffs argue that they have unwritten constitutional and federal common law rights to a stable climate and that the government must uphold these rights by imposing limits on private carbon emissions. The Ninth Circuit recently heard their argument and its upcoming decision will help define the outer boundaries of what the courts can do on climate change.
There has been no progress on federal climate legislation for ten years, since a 2009 cap-and-trade bill narrowly passed the House of Representatives and then died in the Senate. Since then, climate activists have pushed climate action in the courts, hoping to build on their major 5-4 victory in Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007), which held a) that states had standing to consider the government’s refusal to consider carbon regulations for cars under the Clean Air Act and b) that the government had to consider such regulations.
But in the
ensuing decade climate efforts have largely been stymied in the courts,
particularly in the Supreme Court:
The Supreme Court unanimously rejected a federal common law claim that states brought attempting to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, holding that if there were any such claim, it has been displaced by the Clean Air Act. AEP v. Connecticut, 564 U.S. 410 (2011).
The Obama administration looked to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new industrial sources and existing power plants under the Clean Air Act. But its industrial source regulations were substantially narrowed by the Supreme Court. Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, 573 U.S. 302 (2014). And its power plant regulations, known as the Clean Power Plan, were stayed—the first time the Supreme Court had seen fit to stay a regulation even before it could be challenged in the Courts of Appeal. West Virginia v. EPA (2016).
Climate plaintiffs have, however, been somewhat more successful in persuading lower courts to strike down federal permits for fossil fuel projects on the basis that the government did not sufficiently consider how the projects might encourage more use of fossil fuels. James W. Coleman, Pipelines & Power-lines: Building the Energy Transport Future, 80 Oh. St. L. J. 263, 286–88 (2019). It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will step in to address these decisions; if it did, it seems likely that the Supreme Court would uphold the permits and shut down these lawsuits as well. Id. at 299–300.
The Juliana case will also likely prove fruitless in the end. The district court did initially allow the case to go forward and denied a government request for interlocutory appeal. But the Supreme Court again stepped in: it took the extraordinary step of first staying the case and then, while lifting the stay, suggesting it might reimpose it if the Ninth Circuit did not do so first. The Ninth Circuit then stayed the case and invited the district court to reconsider its decision on interlocutory appeal, which it did, allowing the appeal that was just argued in the Ninth Circuit.
The Supreme Court has already unanimously rejected federal common law climate claims. And it has already signaled its skepticism about this particular case. For this reason, some have suggested that it would be best for the plaintiffs to lose in the Ninth Circuit, because if the case goes to the current Supreme Court, the Court might well overturn its 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, or at least that decision’s holding on climate standing, which would be an even greater setback for climate regulation.
For an extremely helpful breakdown of the Juliana v. United States case and appellate arguments, as well as the likely results and implications, check out this Regulatory Transparency Project podcast.
Nathan recaps much of the history of efforts to adopt federal climate regulation, and explains what steps a new administration could take to establish durable greenhouse gas controls. He explains why he is skeptical that much will be accomplished under the existing Clean Air Act and lays out some of the costs and benefits of alternate approaches such as a carbon tax and the Green New Deal.
The interview builds on a 2014 article that Nathan wrote with Art Fraas, who is a fellow at the think tank, Resources for the Future. Here’s the article: “Comparing the Clean Air Act with a Carbon Price.”
The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: Apple | Google
Jesse describes why “firm low-carbon power resources,” such as nuclear and natural gas with carbon capture make it much cheaper to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electric power sector. Unlike variable solar and wind resources, these firm sources are “not weather-dependent, can be used anytime of the year, and can generate power for any length of time.”
Michael discusses the necessary tradeoffs in meeting California’s varied goals for its energy grid: the challenges of moving away from gas power plants and increasing rooftop solar and different ways to meet those challenges while limiting the costs borne by low-income ratepayers.
