The Federal Register today published the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s proposed rule to repeal the agency’s portions Part 1 of the Trump administration’s Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule. In SAFE 1, NHTSA determined that California’s tailpipe carbon dioxide standards and zero-emission vehicle mandates are “related to” fuel economy standards. Consequently, those policies are preempted under Section 32919(a) of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act. The SAFE 1 Rule, also known as the One National Program Rule, is available here. NHTSA’s unnamed proposed ru ..read more

I am not usually a fan of the 9th Circuit, but this case includes a constitutional gem. The court observed that a state policy occurring in violation of a federal mandate is void ab initio (from the moment of its enactment or adoption). Cabazon Band of Mission Indians v. City of Indio (9th Cir. 1982 ..read more

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Proposed Policy Statement on Carbon Pricing in Organized Wholesale Electricity Markets (October 15, 2020 ..read more

The case, called Union of Concerned Scientists v. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, pits the State of California and its allies (petitioners) against the Trump administration and its allies (respondents). Petitioners are asking the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to vacate the administration’s One National Program Rule, which is also Part 1 of the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule. A joint product of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the One National Program Rule finalize two actions related to C ..read more

On September 24, 2020, the House Oversight Subcommittee on Environment held a hearing titled “Climate Change Part IV: Moving Towards a Sustainable Future.” The written statements of the four majority witnesses are posted on the Subcommittee’s Web page but not (as of 12:00 noon 9/25) the written statement of Heritage Foundation statistician and data scientist Dr. Kevin Dayaratna. I am posting it here.   You can watch the entire hearing on YouTube. Dr. Dayaratna’s oral presentation begins at 37:50.   ..read more

I pose this question because a recent report by the Rhodium Group describes the SAFE rule’s expected 1.5 percent annual increase in average fuel efficiency as a “roll back” from the 5 percent annual increase championed by the Obama administration. If by “rollback,” Rhodium simply means the SAFE rule standards are less stringent than those advocated by the Obama administration, that’s fine. But if the Obama standards for model years 2022-2025 were not lawfully finalized, then those standards are legal phantoms. That means the SAFE rule would establish first-ever greenhouse gas and fuel economy ..read more

I am posting here a rough English translation of the Dutch Supreme Court’s summary of its 20th December 2019 decision to uphold lower court rulings that the government must reduce the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The Summary is available here ..read more

As reported in the Washington Post and New York Times, Chapter 29 of Vol. 2 of the 4th U.S. National Climate Assessment claims that unchecked warming could raise global temperatures 8°C by century’s end, which in turn would reduce U.S. GDP by 10 percent. Those estimates are based on this chart from Hsiang et al. 2017:             The chart shows the probability distribution of global warming projections when the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report’s climate model ensemble, known as CMIP5, is run with the RCP8.5 forcing trajectory. On average, CMIP5 models hind-cast about twice as much warming in th ..read more