Renewable energy costs have plunged to an extent few people realize. If cellphone prices had dropped as fast since 2010 as the cost of solar power, you could buy a new iPhone for about thirty bucks today ..read more

In light of President Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race yesterday, we thought it was appropriate to update this piece about the climate legacy of the Biden-Harris Administration. In his four years in office, Donald Trump rolled back essentially every existing federal policy to limit climate change. The picture under the Biden Administration has been a dramatic reversal, enacting lots of environmental protections and starting to spend tens of billions of dollars. By one count, Biden has overturned more than two dozen of Trump actions affecting the fossil fuel industry. And we ..read more

There’s a big, important tax debate looming next year—one with opportunities and risks for climate policy, particularly the idea of a carbon tax. It can be hard to see this debate thanks to the daily churn of the 2024 presidential election, but it’s there on the horizon if you squint. For one thing, we’ll likely close out this year as the new “hottest year on record” just before the next President of the United States takes office. Then by the end of 2025, much of the Trump tax cuts, known officially as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, will expire. And shortly after that, in January 2026, the Euro ..read more

The first efforts to use of wind to generate electricity was 134 years ago, and the photoelectric effect was discovered six decades earlier. So in a sense, these are old technologies — about the same age as the very first internal combustion engines. But the scientific and technological advances that made these technologies competitive with fossil fuels are much more recent.  One thing you’ll notice is the importance of government-funded research and deployment incentives in helping to launch the solar and wind sectors. 500-900. Early windmills developed in Persia. Persian experts were s ..read more

This post is the last in a weeklong series on the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Loper Bright case. The ruling caused much rejoicing among conservatives who foretold the death of the administrative state. Among liberals, there was much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. No one focused on the nuanced doctrine that the Court created to replace Chevron. In this week’s blog posts, I have argued that the legal effect of the decision is likely to be incremental rather than transformative. In the first post, I argued that the new test applying to agency regulations uses different languag ..read more

One thing about the Loper Bright decision is obvious: it overruled Chevron.  So much for past law. What about the future? How should courts review agency regulations now that Chevron is gone?  As I discuss in a later post, regulations that were upheld by the courts during the Chevron era have some protection, but new regulations will be fully subject to Loper rather than Chevron. The  general refrain in the Loper opinion is “Skidmore deference.” What does that mean and when does it apply? Skidmore was decided eighty years ago.  The issue was whether a company’s f ..read more

After much anticipation and deliberation, the California legislature approved a $10 billion climate bond measure just before the summer recess began on July 3, 2024. California voters will now have the opportunity to approve or reject the bond measure on the November ballot. The bond measure will now be referred to as Proposition 4 on the upcoming ballot, but it began as SB 867, the Safe Drinking Water, Wildfire Prevention, Drought Preparedness, and Clean Air Bond Act of 2024. Senate and Assemblymembers approved SB 867, sending it to the Secretary of State to be added to the ballot. Propositi ..read more

One thing about the Loper Bright decision is obvious: it overruled Chevron.  So much for past law. What about the future.? How should courts review agency regulations now that Chevron is gone? This post tackles a key paragraph in the Loper opinion where the Court discusses congressional delegation of authority to agencies.   The Court discusses three types of statutes, and it will be crucial for judges in future cases to identify which type is present. The first type involves legislative grants of definitional powers. Many of these should be relatively easy to identify. Th ..read more

As the U.S. Supreme Court has moved into an era of second-guessing federal administrative agencies to an extent that we have not seen in 80 years, it has delivered yet another blow to reliance on accurate facts. When I served as an administrative law judge for California’s state utility regulators, my job in each proceeding was to develop a clear and complete factual record to guide the agency’s ultimate decision. My recommended outcome had to be based entirely on the formal record in the proceeding. Where there were contested material issues of fact, parties had the right to a public hearing ..read more

Four years ago, President Trump announced that “with the tremendous progress we have made over the past three years, America is now energy independent.” And he was right that the U.S. had reached the point that it produced more energy than it used.  But the kind of energy independence he trumpeted (or should I have said TRUMPeted?) is a chimera. Admittedly, Trump was not the first to prioritize this kind “energy independence.”  (Nor has he been the last to achieve it — it remains true under Biden that we’re producing more energy than we use.)  Every President since at least Geo ..read more