Tag: energy policy

Can Weak Manchin Permitting Bill Be Strengthened?

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After authorizing $370 billion in new funding for new, cleaner energy sources, Congress is turning to permitting reform: All the money in the world will not help if projects don’t have permission to build. Wednesday evening, Senator Manchin released proposed text for his permitting bill, which he apparently negotiated in return for his vote to authorize the energy funding. Unfortunately, the bill is not well-designed to speed up construction of new energy sources. But with a few strategic additions it could go a long way toward speeding up permitting to secure a cleaner, more reliable, and affordable energy future for the United States.

The biggest roadblock to energy sources is not financial; it is receiving permission to build. And many of the projects that we most need for a clean energy transition face particular permitting difficulties because they need permits from multiple states or local communities and the federal government. Our traditional energy commodities, oil and coal, are less dependent on building long-distance infrastructure because they can rely on existing railroads and pipelines, and they are easier to ship by multiple pathways using rail, road, and water transport. By contrast, cleaner energy products such as renewable electricity, natural gas, and hydrogen can only be shipped by new long-distance infrastructure.

Think of a long-distance power-line designed to bring renewable energy to market, a pipeline shipping natural gas to communities hoping to move away from coal, or a hydrogen pipeline designed to help replace fossil fuels. These linear infrastructure projects often need approvals from each state they cross and may also need approval from the federal government as well whenever they cross federal lands, borders, or streams.

There are two huge legal permitting challenges for these new cleaner energy projects.

So if we want to clean up our energy system and address the global energy crisis, which is causing energy shortages and price spikes around the globe, we need to speed up permitting. If the $370 billion authorized by Congress just goes to the few projects that would already have passed the permitting gauntlet, it will be money wasted. So we’ve seen a growing chorus of voices demanding reform to the permitting process to ensure this money isn’t squandered and that we can build a cleaner energy future.

The federal and state permitting challenges are linked because perhaps the most common proposal to speed permitting is to replace state and local siting processes with federal processes. For example, in 2005, the U.S. Congress gave the federal Department of Energy the power to designate areas that particularly needed more electricity transmission and gave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission power to, in some circumstances, permit power-lines that hadn’t been approved by the states in those areas. Senator Manchin’s bill leans heavily on this method of speeding permitting: it gives federal government more power over permitting new power-lines and hydrogen pipelines.

The problem is that this is not an improvement at all when federally-approved projects are facing Kafkaesque challenges when they seek approval to actually build their projects. The energy sector where federal permitting is most common is in interstate natural gas permitting and these projects are routinely stopped by local objections even when they have federal approval. In fact, the two highest-profile recent gas pipeline projects—the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the PennEast Pipeline—eventually had to give up on building their projects after years of expense and struggle, even though the federal government repeatedly backed both pipelines and both pipelines won blockbuster decisions in the U.S. Supreme Court.

If the Manchin bill passes as is, the gas pipeline industry can welcome the power-line and hydrogen industries to national regulation with this unwelcome news: “Even if the federal government backs you on every permit, and even if the Supreme Court backs you in every decision, no matter how long you wait, or how much you spend, states and lower courts will make life so difficult that your proposed project will never be built.”

The dysfunctions of federal permitting under court review are well known in energy policy. Congress’s 2005 grant of power to the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was eviscerated by two federal appeals court decisions over the next six years. This is why the single project that really will be helped by the current Manchin proposal is the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The bill makes special provision for this project, directing that all actions “necessary for the construction and initial operation at full capacity of the Mountain Valley Pipeline shall not be subject to judicial review.”

The Manchin bill does almost nothing to help other energy projects stop endless court demands for further environmental review. The bill does address some less important timing issues so it’s important to keep straight three kinds of time limits:

  1. Time limit for the federal government to complete environmental review. The proposal directs a two year limit for environmental review of major projects and a one year limit for minor projects. Unfortunately, such deadlines are unenforceable—the federal government routinely misses even the statutory deadlines it is trying to meet. The deadlines may even be counterproductive if they encourage courts to stop projects and order further reviews because of concern that review was rushed to meet an artificial deadline.
  2. Time limit for plaintiffs to challenge a project after it receives its permit. This kind of “statute of limitations” is not harmful but of very little use. Smart plaintiffs hoping to stop infrastructure generally sue at the earliest opportunity because the best chance to stop an infrastructure project is before construction begins. So big projects are almost never held up by plaintiffs that waited years after the project was approved to bring their lawsuit.
  3. Time limit for courts to order more review on projects that have already been under review for years. Unfortunately, the Manchin proposal does not put any time limits on courts’ ability to hold up nationally-approved projects other than the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The federal environmental review law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), is a procedural statute simply intended to ensure the government did sufficient environmental review of a project. If the federal government has been reviewing the environmental consequences of a project for years and has approved it, and the court would still like more review, the court can order the government to do more review. But it is not reasonable to make a nationally-approved project, and all the consumers and producers that depend upon it, wait for the court and government to reach agreement on how much environmental review is enough.

The crucial importance of a time limit on judicial delay of projects is well explained in the Institute for Progress’s excellent recent report on “How to Stop Environmental Review from Harming the Environment“:

The time limit that would likely have a major impact on outcomes is restricting the ability of the courts to issue injunctions against projects that have undergone extensive environmental review under NEPA. This change would provide developers the certainty they need to invest in large-scale build outs of solar, wind, transmission and other clean energy infrastructure. Without a time limit on judicial injunctions, developers have a sword of Damocles perpetually hanging over their head, threatening the entirety of the project.

As it stands, the Manchin permitting proposal would be a serious lost opportunity that would be unlikely to significantly speed up construction of new energy projects. The focus on federalizing review of clean energy projects is particularly unhelpful when the proposal doesn’t address the problems that are making federal review the bane of energy project developers.

The good news is that the Manchin proposal could be improved relatively simply if it added limits on federal court and state delays on federal projects. Speeding up permits for nationally-approved projects would accelerate construction of all the new energy projects that it designates for federal review.

Supreme Court: EPA Can’t Cap Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Power Plants

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The Supreme Court just decided “the most closely watched environmental case in decades,” West Virginia v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the 6-3, opinion, the Court holds that the EPA cannot use Clean Air Act §111(d) to set power-sector-wide greenhouse gas emissions standards for state power plants. The Court also explains that the Major Questions Doctrine is crucial to this analysis and reflects both “separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent.”

A Justice Gorsuch concurrence, joined by Justice Alito, lays out their view of history and application of clear statements doctrines and the major questions doctrine specifically. Justice Kagan wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Breyer and Justice Sotomayor.

The opinion can be found here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf

As a reminder, here is a summary of how the case got to the court from a blog post and webinar I did last December, in anticipation of the Supreme Court argument:

Under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency regulates greenhouse gas emissions from various sources including new cars and new industrial sources. But a large proportion of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions come from existing sources, such as the nation’s coal and natural gas power plants, which provide over half of American electricity.

In 2015, the Obama administration issued a regulation for existing fossil fuel power plants under Clean Air Act §111(d), which allows the EPA to “establish a procedure” for each state to adopt “standards of performance” for existing sources of air pollutants. The administration called this rule the “Clean Power Plan.” It was controversial, in part, because it went beyond asking states to make their existing power plants run more efficiently. Instead, it went “beyond the fenceline” of the power plant to encourage non-fossil sources of electricity such as wind and solar power and shrink the fossil-fuel power sector.

The Clean Power Plan never went into effect because the Supreme Court stayed its implementation on February 9, 2016. The D.C. Circuit heard more than 7 hours of argument on the validity of the Clean Power Plan but never ruled on it because the Trump administration repealed it and replaced it with its own rule, which it called the “Affordable Clean Energy Rule,” and was limited to promoting efficiency measures at existing fossil fuel plants. The D.C. Circuit then heard 9 more hours of argument on this new rule, before striking it down on January 19, 2021. The court held that EPA’s authority was not so limited.

The Supreme Court granted certiorari to decide whether Clean Air Act §111(d) gives “the EPA authority not only to impose standards based on technology and methods that can be applied at and achieved by that existing source, but also allows the agency to develop industry-wide systems like cap-and-trade regimes.” The case is an important sequel in the Court’s lines of cases on how much deference executive agencies should receive to decide major questions of policy and whether Congress might authorize dramatic agency action from relatively obscure provisions—hiding an elephant in a mousehole.

The opinion can be found here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf

The Supreme Court emphasized that “the only interpretive question before” it was “narrow”: “whether the ‘best system of emission reduction’ identified by EPA in the Clean Power Plan was within the authority granted to the Agency in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act.” Some had thought it might explicitly limit the Chevron doctrine or return to the non-delegation doctrine. This is a narrower ruling, but may rule out some of the more aggressive steps the Biden administration might have considered to reduce sector-wide greenhouse gas emissions in areas such as utilities, refineries, and oil and gas development.

Build Up Before You Tear Down (or Subsidize): Easing New Energy Infrastructure

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As energy prices have risen over the past 20 months, there has been growing clamor for solutions to make our energy system more affordable and more secure. Unfortunately, these discussions are often sidetracked by debates about 1) proposals to subsidize energy use to reduce its apparent costs and 2) debates about how quickly we should transition to cleaner energy sources.

The latest proposal is President Biden’s plan to suspend federal taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel for three months. These taxes help pay for the infrastructure—highways and bridges—that drivers use. Unfortunately, waiving this tax may not help drivers much because many refineries closed down in the last twenty months and the remaining refineries are already producing as much fuel as they can and barely keeping up with fuel demand. This shortage makes it very hard for refiners to lower prices. If they lower prices, more Americans will purchase fuel and we may actually run out of fuel supplies.

Ultimately, prices will only fall when there is enough energy production to comfortably meet energy demand. Unfortunately, our current approach to encouraging energy supplies is too reliant on tax breaks and dollar subsidies for new energy sources. The problem with these subsidies is that like the proposed “gasoline tax holiday,” they simply bid up the price for energy supplies if there are other roadblocks that prevent energy production.

As I explain in a recent op-ed in the The Hill:

The current challenge is securing investment in energy sources that could quickly ramp up supplies of reliable, affordable energy. Unfortunately, clean energy funding alone will not accomplish this. Investor hesitation is often driven less by pure financial concerns than by slow permitting processes that can delay or stop new infrastructure. Think of the 2009 stimulus, which put a record $8 billion toward high-speed rail, yet nothing has been built in America because of permitting delays — something that is holding up so many infrastructure projects around the country. 

James W. Coleman, Biden’s Approach to Climate Action Drives Energy Conflict, Not Cooperation, THE HILL, Jan. 26, 2022 (suggesting Carbon Matching Commitments as an alternative method of encouraging climate action)

Instead, government should focus on removing the permitting roadblocks that are holding up so much energy infrastructure. Easing permitting would help lower the cost of both oil and cleaner sources such as natural gas and renewables because they are often held up by the same roadblocks. As I explain in another recent op-ed:

The problem with arguments about the pace of the energy transition is that an orderly transition has two parts: first building new energy infrastructure and then restraining, and eventually retiring, older energy infrastructure.

One of the main reasons for the current crisis is that the world has gotten these two steps out of order. Governments and litigants have developed legal tools to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure. Think of the demise of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, the Jordan Cove natural gas export facility, or the Constitution gas pipeline. But we have not built enough geothermal and nuclear power, or enough new power lines to bring renewable energy to market.

In fact, the legal tools developed to stop oil and gas projects, such as expanded environmental reviews and state permitting challenges, are now used to stop the infrastructure that could bring clean energy to market. The focus on further subsidies to renewable energy is beside the point when what these maturing energy sources really need is permission to build power lines to take them to market.

James W. Coleman, How America Can Survive Ukraine War’s Gas and Oil Crisis – and Build a Stronger Energy System, FOX BUSINESS, Mar. 9, 2022

The important debates about the pace of energy transition will continue, but for now the urgent priority must be making it easier to build all kinds of energy infrastructure. That is the only way to see the return of abundant energy supplies.

Energy Tradeoffs Podcast #22 – Leah Stokes

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Happy new year! For this week’s EnergyTradeoffs.com podcast interview, we have David Spence interviewing Leah Stokes, from the University of California – Santa Barbara about her research on “The Politics of Technology Transitions.”

Leah and David discuss politically sustainable methods of accomplishing an energy transition, focusing on Leah’s research on the history of policies supporting renewable and zero-carbon technologies. She traces a trajectory for transition that begins with subsidies to nurture new technologies until they are politically potent enough to take on incumbent industries. Leah and David also discuss Texas’s support for solar and wind power.

The discussion builds on three papers that Leah has recently published with co-authors: “The political logics of clean energy transitions,” “Politics in the U.S. energy transition: Case studies of solar, wind biofuels and electric vehicles policy,” and “Renewable Energy Policy Design and Framing Influence Public Support in the United States.”

The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: Apple | Google

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Energy Tradeoffs Podcast #6 – Sharon Jacobs

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For this week’s EnergyTradeoffs.com podcast interview, we have the University of Colorado’s  Sharon Jacobs talking with David Spence about her research on “Environmental Privileging.”

Sharon talks about how different actors privilege different values in energy policy and argues that scholars should be explicit about which values they are privileging. She takes the case study of privileging environmental values in energy policy and argues that while “privileging certain values and goals is not a problem,” it can create problems if it is “unacknowledged or hidden.” She shows how policymakers can be explicit about what values they are privileging and why they are doing so.

The Energy Tradeoffs Podcast can be found at the following links: Apple | Google

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The Energy Paradigm Has Shifted

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I am very pleased to welcome guest-blogger Joe Tomain, who is Professor and Dean Emeritus at University of Cincinnati College of Law. Joe is also co-author, with regular guest-blogger Alexandra Klass and three other scholars, of a new energy law and policy text.

By Joe Tomain

On June 2 of this year, the Obama administration announced its Clean Power Plan (CPP).[1] This announcement is a game changer and it shifts the energy paradigm. Those phrases are often overused, however, in this instance they are fully apposite for two reasons.

First, the federal government has linked energy and the environment in ways in which they have not been linked in the past. This bringing together of energy and the environment is an essential move towards an effective energy transition for reasons that I will develop below. The second reason that this is a game changing move is because for too long the word in the street has been that the federal government will not take the lead in climate change efforts. The Clean Power Plan refutes that tightly held belief.

In one sense, the promulgation of the CPP is not surprising. Indeed, over 40 years of energy policy studies indicates that a transition away from a fossil fuel economy is a desirable policy preference.[2] Early studies, such as Limits to Growth[3] in 1974 and Amory Lovins’ Soft Energy Paths[4] in 1977 were critical of the dominant model of energy policy that relied on large-scale, capital-intensive, centralized energy projects particularly those wedded to fossil fuels and nuclear power. Those studies were wary of continued reliance on dwindling oil and natural gas resources.

The next wave of energy studies was born out of necessity and reaction to the energy crises of the 1970s. The distorted natural gas market, the bollixed wage and price controls on oil, the Arab Oil Embargo followed by the Iranian Embargo, and the collapse of the nuclear power industry all in a few years, put energy in the news in ways that it had not been before. Not only was energy a matter of industry and economic concern, consumers were frustrated by waiting and gas lines and were frustrated with rising energy bills. Studies by the Harvard Business School, the Ford Foundation, and Resources for the Future urged the United States to wean itself from reliance on Middle East oil precisely because of the threat of further economic dislocations.[5] To be sure, the studies also touted resource and energy conservation but did not put forward an aggressive plan for renewable resources or for energy efficiency.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the next energy crisis – energy was out of the news for the last decades of the 20th century even though our dependence on foreign oil continued to increase through 2006. In the beginning of the 21st century, however, energy policy studies began to ramp up again. Bipartisan think tanks and nongovernmental organizations began publishing energy policy studies that continued warnings about dependence on foreign oil.[6] This new wave of studies, however, added a particular dimension to the energy policy discussion – the environment. A precursor for these studies was the UN report Our Common Future[7]that popularized the idea of sustainability for natural resources as well as for energy in order to improve the plight of everyone on the planet.

On the domestic front, the new energy policy studies concentrated on the environmental impacts of our traditional fossil fuel energy policy and began to highlight the challenges presented by climate change. In short, the policy community began to adopt a fairly wide consensus on the need for a transition to clean energy resources particularly renewable resources and energy efficiency.

The Clean Power Plan is of a piece with the trend to a cleaner future. More specifically, by linking energy and the environment, the CPP is breaking a barrier that has long existed between the disciplines of energy law and policy and environmental law and policy. It is a bit of an historic anomaly that the discipline of energy law was born in the mid-1970s in response to the crises noted above. The curiosity is that environmental law, particularly with the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and associated environmental laws, was created as a discipline at the dawn of the 1970s. So, then, even though these two disciplines were developed close in time, they not only acted independently of each other they relied a separate set of assumptions, vocabularies, and metrics.[8]

Even though, energy law became known as a discipline in the 1970s, it had its predecessors. The most immediate predecessor was public utilities regulation. Energy law also incorporated elements of oil and gas laws and natural resources laws. By examining that welter of law, one can see that state common law and statutory law focused on the exploration and extraction of the natural resources used to produce energy. Federal laws, then, focused on the transportation, transmission, and distribution of those resources and of the electricity produced from them. In short, energy law was about exploration, production, and transportation and was grounded in the core assumption that the more energy that was produced and consumed, then the greater and more robust the economy would be.

Environmental laws were not chiefly concerned about extraction and production of resources as such. Instead, environmental laws addressed resource protection and conservation. Additionally, environmental laws focused on ecology and the human and natural environments in order to create more healthy ecosystems. Consequently, the metrics for energy law dealt energy prices, economic productivity, and the like. Environmental metrics measured the cleanliness of the water we drink, in the air we breathe, and the number of species we preserve.

At a superficial level, given the fact that energy and environmental systems are complex, the fact that they are independent regulation makes some sense. However, the physical reality is that throughout the fuel cycle from exploration to distribution to consumption, environmental consequences follow each step of that cycle. Energy and environmental laws and regulations, then, are physically linked to each other and, therefore, should be coordinated. Until the CPP, they have not been so treated.

Thus, the first significance of the Clean Power Plan is to have these two disciplines begin to address each other and to find a common language. Linking energy and the environment is a necessary step toward a clean energy future.

The second significant development of the CPP is that the federal government is now assuming a leadership role as long urged. Several of the policy studies mentioned above, as well as more recent ones, emphasize the need for federal leadership if energy and climate change are to be addressed in any meaningful way. [9] In part, the call for federal leadership resides in the fact that the US consumes 25% of the world’s energy resources and emits about 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases. If any international progress is to be made on the climate front, then the United States must play a leadership role.

On the domestic side, federal leadership is desirable for any number of reasons including the fact that while state energy initiatives are valuable in and of themselves, interstate coordination can advance a clean energy transition. On the electric side, for example, transmission line siting, a coordinated market for renewable energy credits, effective cost allocation for the development of the smart grid, and a rationalized set of renewable portfolio standards could benefit from national leadership. On the natural gas side, uniform disclosure rules for fracking chemicals, national water standards, and the like may help alleviate many of the concerns surrounding hydraulic fracturing. Further, the matter of energy subsidies, for both fossil and clean fuels, should be addressed responsibly and uniformly and national leadership in this arena should yield beneficial official results.

Thus, the Obama administration’s CPP is an important as well as necessary step in moving away from a fossil fuel economy to a clean energy future precisely because it begins to merge energy and the environment and puts federal leadership in play.

 

[1] Carbon Pollution Emission Guideline for Existing Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units, Fed. Reg. June 18, 2014) available at http://www2.epa.gov/carbon-pollution-standards/clean-power-plan-proposed-rule.

[2] Joseph P. Tomain, Ending Dirty Energy Policy: Prelude to Climate Change chs. 3 and 4 (2011).

[3] Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome=s Project on the Predicament of Mankind ch. IV (1974).

[4] Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (1977).

[5] Robert Stobaugh & Daniel Yergin (eds.), Energy Future: Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School (1979); Ford Foundation, Energy: The Next Twenty Years (1979); and, Sam H. Schur, et al., Energy in America’s Future: The Choices Before Us(1979) (Resources for the Future study).

[6] See e.g. Energy Future Coalition, Challenge and Opportunity: Charting a New Energy Future (2003) available at http://energyfuturecoalition.org/Resources; National Commission on Energy Policy, Ending the Energy Stalemate: A Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America’s Energy Challenges (2004) available at http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/4000/ending_the_energy_stalemate.html; and,Natural Resources Defense Council, A Responsible Energy Plan for America (2005).

[7] World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (1987).

[8] Amy J. Wildermuth, The Next Step: The Integration of Energy Law and Environmental Law, 31 Utah Envt’l L. Rev. 369 (2011); Alexandra B.  Klass, Climate Change and the Convergence of Environmental and Energy Law, 24 Ford. Envt’l L. Rev. 180 (2013); Joseph P. Tomain, The Politics of Clean Energy: Moving Beyond the Beltway, 2 San Diego J. Climate & Energy L. 299 (2011-12).

[9] See e.g. Challenge and Opportunity, supra note 6; A Responsible Energy Plan for America, supra note 6; Ending the Energy Statelmate, supra note 6; Institute for  21st Century Energy, Energy Works for US: Solutions for Securing America’s Future 3 (2013) (Energy Works) available at http://www.energyxxi.org/energy-works-for-us;  William Norhdaus, Climate Casino (2013).

 

Energy Law’s Moment: Turning Points, A Growing Field, and the New Energy Law and Policy Book

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Intro: James Coleman, Guest Blogger: Alexandra Klass

Energy law is at a renaissance moment. Nearly every day, judges and regulators across the continent are making decisions on energy policy and infrastructure that will determine the energy future of the United States for decades to come. Increased production of tight oil and shale gas from the fracking boom and bitumen from the Canadian oil sands have created a strong demand for new modes of oil and gas transport. This demand has been matched by pushback from environmental groups seeking new legal tools to challenge these projects and avoid locking in fossil fuel infrastructure.

Electricity production is at the same kind of turning point. U.S. reliance on coal-fired electricity is being challenged by forthcoming climate and environmental regulations in tandem with cheap gas and falling renewable prices. Thus, forthcoming legal decisions are subjecting both the electricity and oil and gas sectors to substantial uncertainty, and the results will determine the future of energy markets in the United States. (See, for example, this recent post on state renewable energy standards, this post on forthcoming climate regulations on coal plants, and this one on the Keystone XL pipeline review.)

At the same time, energy law is one of the few bright spots for law students in a difficult legal job market. The Dean of Brooklyn Law School, Nicholas Allard, recently noted that, in contrast to nearly every other legal field, there has been an “avalanche of legal work in energy.” Student and scholarly interest has followed suit.

As a result, I’m delighted to welcome Alexandra Klass of the University of Minnesota Law School to Energy Law Prof blog. Professor Klass regularly publishes some of the most exciting scholarship in this fast-moving area of law. (See, for example, her forthcoming piece on optimal regulation of oil and gas pipelines in an era of increasing production.)

For Alex’s first post, I’ve asked her to discuss the new textbook, Energy Law and Policy, that she is releasing with four other eminent energy scholars: Lincoln Davies (Utah), Hari Osofsky (Minnesota), Joseph Tomain (Cincinnati), and Elizabeth Wilson (Minnesota—Humphrey School of Public Affairs). She informs me that book will be released in print and electronic versions on September 2, 2014, and if energy law faculty would like to have access to electronic versions of the chapters before then for teaching in the fall 2014 semester, you can contact her or any of the other authors.

 

Our New Book: Energy Law and Policy (Davies, Klass, Osofsky, Tomain, Wilson)

Alexandra Klass

Energy is one of the foremost issues of our time. The energy sector is immense—accounting for $15 trillion of GDP and touching every part of the economy and every one of our lives. At the same time, the energy policy conversation is changing. Climate change, energy security, and environmental responsibility mean that the energy law of the future must address the ecological consequences of unconstrained fossil fuel consumption.  However, much of the public dialogue about these important transitions is highly politicized, and fails to situate individual issues within the energy system as a whole.

In Energy Law and Policy, we break away from the traditional approach of looking at energy resources one at a time to try to provide that more holistic view.  The design of our book seeks to account for the complex, interrelated energy systems that buttress society, while addressing the grand energy challenges humanity faces today.

The book is organized into three parts that introduce students to the fundamental aspects of the energy sector, energy law, and the most pressing energy topics of the 21st century.

Part I presents an overview of energy resources and markets. It identifies the book’s primary themes: (1) the relationship between regulation, markets, and technological innovation; (2) the federalism issues that arise from the interaction of key regulatory actors; and (3) the transition to cleaner energy. This Part also introduces the major sources of energy and the evolving law governing their extraction.

In Part II, we discuss energy in terms of the electricity and transportation sectors that rely upon these energy resources. The U.S. energy profile can be roughly divided into oil for transportation and electricity for cooling, lighting and other uses. This Part introduces traditional regulation in both of these sectors, and the ways in which law and policy for transportation and electricity are now in transition.

Part III turns to the pressing energy challenges of the day. It presents case studies on the Smart Grid, the electrification of vehicles, the role of nuclear energy in a clean energy future, and new and expanding energy extraction technologies such as deepwater drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Energy Law and Policy thus seeks to provide a solid understanding of the current energy regulatory regime, and to equip students with materials to anticipate future challenges and opportunities.

The book contains cases, sample statutes and regulations, and pertinent excerpts from energy law and policy experts. These policy-oriented, often empirical materials offer the necessary building blocks for a public law course, particularly one that covers a rapidly transitioning field.

The book aims to provide an introduction to energy law and policy both for students who seek to practice in the field and for those interested in better understanding this fascinating, critical area of law. The book introduces the key jurisdictional actors that play differing roles in energy controversies and provides students with an understanding of the multi-jurisdictional approach to energy regulation pervasive in the United States.

Throughout, the book highlights the debate over whether and how society can transition to a clean energy future. Trillions of dollars of sunk costs, and current institutions bound by the multitude of laws that favor and support the dominant energy model, challenge any kind of energy law transition.

Our book seeks to orient students with the existing modes of energy regulation, while equipping them to address the challenges that will be faced by the energy lawyer of the future. We think it is critical for the next generation of energy lawyers to understand the energy system holistically and to think creatively about our options in this time of transition.