Emissions Standards

Since the EPA announced its regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, what EPA euphemistically calls the “Clean Power Plan,” states across the country have been working tirelessly to assess their options. Many have found they are in a lose-lose situation. No matter what they do, their state will be drastically impacted. Recently, Majority Leader McConnell wrote an op-ed and then a letter to all 50 Governors urging them to think twice about acquiescing to EPA’s overly...
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Last week, AEA's Dan Ziegler penned an op-ed discussing the need for free-market advocates to reframe the global discussion about our environment. The text of the piece  follows: We don’t have to wreck our economy to save the planet. The national environmental lobby has never been stronger. The federal government, led by President Obama and an army of bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is radically transforming how Americans use and consume energy. Meanwhile,...
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Laurence Tribe is a Harvard Law Professor who has described President Obama as “the best student I ever had” and donated to his political campaigns. It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that Professor Tribe also believes the foundation of the Obama administration’s anti-coal agenda is unconstitutional. Testifying before Congress this week , Tribe condemned the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed carbon dioxide rule for existing power plants as a...
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On Wednesday, February 25,  EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy will testify before a joint hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittees on Energy and Power and Environment and the Economy. This hearing offers lawmakers an opportunity to question the Administrator about her agency’s Existing Source Rule for power plants—also known as the “Clean Power Plan”—which EPA is promulgating under Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act. AEA offers the following questions as a sampling...
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Last month I wrote a post titled, “Climate Change Crowd Moves Goalposts—Again.” I was referring to the rhetorical strategy of de-emphasizing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a metric for gauging the impact of climate change. I speculated that this was because the climate change activists recognized that on the original terms of the debate—as staked out in the IPCC reports, for example—their case was quite weak. Somebody who knew how to actually read the latest IPCC report would see...
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Despite the brutal bipartisan legislative defeat in 2009 of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, there continue to be policymakers who want to impose a carbon tax. This time, the failures of current tax incentives and proposed regulations that attempt to lower our carbon dioxide emissions and encourage renewable energy are the impetus for the imposition of a carbon tax.  But as we have explained many times, carbon taxes are economically harmful, not matter how they are dressed up. ...
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A recent article in the LA Times by Jon Healey discusses the proposal by California State Senate President Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) to exempt fossil fuel producers from California’s cap-and-trade system, and instead impose a carbon tax on fuels. Even though this move (in theory) might make energy prices less volatile, it would still raise them, and thereby hurt California residents. Moreover, any carbon scheme (whether cap-and-trade or a straight tax) would do little to curb...
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Last month, the Obama administration published a proposed rule in the Federal Register that will effectively ban new coal-fired power plants. This greenhouse gas emission mandate on new power plants represents the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s plan to bankrupt the coal industry—and with it one of America’s most affordable, abundant, reliable energy sources. A bipartisan coalition in Congress, however, is fighting back. The Electricity Security and Affordability Act (H.R....
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Working through the auspices of the Regulatory Studies Program of the Mercatus Center, I have recently published a public comment on the Department of Energy’s proposed energy efficiency standards for residential furnace fans. Truly interested readers can follow the link and read the (brief) comment in its entirety, but in the present post I want to highlight some of the gaping holes in the government’s cost/benefit analysis to (attempt to) justify the regulation. The two takeaway...
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In my recent testimony to the Senate Environmental and Public Works committee, I explained that (among its other problems) the Obama Administration’s Working Group on climate change had explicitly ignored the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines stating that cost/benefit analyses had to be conducted using both a 3 percent and a 7 percent discount rate. Rather than following these instructions, the Working Group chose to report its estimate of the “social cost of carbon” at...
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