Climate Policy

Forthcoming in Global Summitry (2017)

Drawing on California’s rich history of environmental policy, this article evaluates past and current efforts to build multilateral climate policy cooperation at the state level. California is at once a proactive outlier—a subnational government with the political will and regulatory capacity to rival even the European Union’s policy regime—as well as a microcosm of the broader climate mitigation puzzle, where the problem of implementing aggressive targets looms large.

Nature 548: 25–27 (2017) (with David G. Victor, Keigo Akimoto, Yoichi Kaya, Mitsutsune Yamaguchi, and Cameron Hepburn)

The Paris agreement offered, in theory, to reboot climate diplomacy by giving countries the flexibility to set their own commitments. The idea is that as each country implements its own pledge, others can learn what is feasible, and that collaborative global climate protection will emerge. That logic, however, threatens to unravel because national governments are making promises that they are unable to honor.

Energy Law Journal 37(2): 219–63 (2016) (with Andy Coghlan)

California's original climate law, AB 32, authorized the state's carbon market through the end of 2020. As state policymakers look to implement California's ambitious new 2030 climate target, they must confront the requirements of a 2010 ballot initiative (Proposition 26) that requires a 2/3 legislative supermajority to raise taxes on any citizen. We analyze the implications of Proposition 26 on the future of state climate policy and the role of carbon pricing in western electricity markets. 

The Electricity Journal 29(5): 7–14 (2016) (with Andy Coghlan)

For several years, California’s carbon market has cleared just above a quarterly auction price floor. Following an anemic February 2016 auction, however, secondary market prices fell below the price floor. At the May auction, 90% of available allowances went unsold—$880 million worth, if valued at the price floor. These developments suggest that a combination of allowance oversupply and uncertainty over post-2020 climate policy has destabilized the market.

Energy Economics 55: 303–318 (2016) (with Jordan T. Wilkerson, Michael Wara, and John P. Weyant)

We present a new method that enables users of the federal government's flagship energy policy model (NEMS) to dynamically estimate the direct energy expenditure impacts of climate policy across U.S. household incomes and census regions. To illustrate our method, we evaluate a recent carbon fee-and-dividend proposal introduced in the U.S. Senate, the Climate Protection Act of 2013 (S. 332, sponsored by Senators Barbara Boxer and Bernie Sanders). 

Communicating Climate Change and Natural Hazard Risk and Cultivating Resilience (Jeanette L. Drake et al., eds., 2016) (with Barbara Haya, Aaron Strong, and Emily Grubert).

Natural and social scientists are increasingly stepping out of purely academic roles to actively inform science-based climate change policies. We describe our participation in the public process surrounding the development of two new carbon offset protocols. 

UCLA Journal of Environmental Law & Policy 33(1): 1–41 (2015)

Many celebrate the link between carbon markets in California and Québec as a leading example of climate policy coordination. But California recently diluted its market regulations, raising questions as to whether California regulators alerted their Canadian counterparts and, if so, why the state's administrative record contains no such acknowledgment.

Boston Review 32: 15–16 (2007) (with David G. Victor)

Assuring ample energy services for a growing world economy while protecting the climate will not be simple. The most critical task will be curtailing emissions from coal; it is the most abundant fossil fuel and stands above the others in its carbon effluent.