The Trump administration’s fundamental hostility to government is by now plainly apparent. The President issued an executive order requiring agencies to get rid of two regulations for each new one that is adopted. He appointed administrators who have been extraordinarily hostile to the missions of the departments and agencies that they now head, such as Scott Pruitt at EPA and Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education. And he has proposed deep budget cuts for regulatory agencies. Instead of the touted “reforms,” the administration is committed to a regulatory agenda that affirmatively and aggressively seeks to frustrate the normal operations of government as part of a “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

Throughout U.S. history, government regulation has generated a wide variety of public benefits including safer workplaces and food, cleaner air and water, traffic safety, and greater protection for civil and political rights. These regulations …

As President-elect Donald Trump continues to shape his cabinet, we are seeing plenty of indications of how agencies like the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and even the State Department will approach energy and environmental policy. Trump's stated policy preferences and those of his nominees threaten to upend decades of progress toward a clean energy future as they exacerbate the politicization of and polarization around energy development and our environment.

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, U.S. energy policy was largely bipartisan and focused on nonrenewable sources. Federal legislation created an energy policy dominated by fossil fuels and nuclear power. Even today, with the increased use of renewable resources, fossil fuels and nuclear power account for 89 percent of U.S. energy production.

Things change, albeit slowly. Bipartisan legislation since the energy crises of the 1970s has encouraged and required …

This blog post is based on the Introduction to my forthcoming book, Clean Power Politics: The Democratization of Energy (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

One year ago, 195 nations met in Paris and signed what has been hailed as an historic climate agreement.1 To date, 116 parties have ratified the convention, and it went into force on November 4 of this year.2 President Obama acknowledged the talks as a "turning point, that this is the moment we finally determined we would save our planet."3 The signatories pledged to reduce carbon emissions with the intent of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius while pursuing the more ambitious target of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels. Although the 11-page agreement does not set legally binding emissions limits, the parties committed themselves to a regime that requires them to report on the …

Two of the most important aspects of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) are the flexibility afforded states as they design compliance strategies and the plan’s openness to all energy resources. A state can satisfy its emission-reduction targets through the use of cleaner or more efficient coal-fired generation, natural gas or nuclear power as well as through increased use of renewable resources and energy efficiency. Regardless of this flexibility and openness, investor-owned utilities (IOUs), which have dominated the electricity market for more than a century, tend to resist the imposition of additional environmental regulations. Some resistance is predictable as utilities have sunk trillions of dollars of investments into the construction of generation, transportation and distribution networks..

While this resistance may be understandable, there are two significant rebuttal arguments to it. First, utilities have demonstrated remarkable resilience, particularly over the last three or more decades, to dramatic challenges …

The essence of the argument that a new energy and environmental politics is needed is based on the idea that our traditional energy path (as well as its underlying assumptions) has outlived its useful life; the traditional energy narrative is stale. Cheap, but dirty, fossil fuel energy has played a significant role in contributing to economic growth and to the political authority of the United States for most of the 20^th century.  By the end of the century, however, the fundamental economic assumption of traditional energy policy has proven to be seriously flawed. Fortunately, a new narrative about a more democratic energy and environmental future can be constructed that can empower us to critically assess traditional policies as well as re-evaluate existing legal and political structures.

How, though, does a politics of a clean power future connect with democracy?  The central democratic principle is to promote …

Natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina,¹ Superstorm Sandy,² and the typhoon that devastated Fukushima,³ as well as technical weaknesses that caused the Northeast blackout in October 2003,⁴ and regulatory failures that ended California electric industry restructuring efforts⁵ share two commonalities.  First, they all affect the energy system at enormous costs in economic losses and in disrupted lives.⁶ Indeed, severe weather events are the leading source of electricity grid disturbances in the US with 679 widespread power outages between 2003 in 2012. Those outages have been estimated to cost the US economy between $18 and $33 billion each year during that decade.⁷ Second, the economic and social costs of such disasters are so significant because the centralized structure of electricity generation and distribution guarantees concentrated losses upon such occurrences. 

Consequently, as weather impacts continue and increase⁸ in severity and occurrence …

The EPA’s June 2, 2014 announcement of a Clean Power Plan is momentous. On the surface, its scope, complexity, potential for myriad legal challenges and, not to mention, the difficulty of gathering reliable cost and benefit data, make it so. Mothers should advise their children to grow up to be energy lawyers, not cowboys.  However, what makes this proposed rule more significant are the below the surface core principles and concepts that make the Clean Power Plan a game changer for the practice areas of environmental and energy law and policy.

It is a historical curiosity that the field of environmental law preceded energy law in the 1970s. It is also a historical curiosity that these two disciplines developed largely independently of each other, even though they are naturally connected by the physical fuel cycle.  Environmental consequences follow the fuel cycle from the exploration and extraction …

Recently, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report entitled Energy Works for US: Solutions for America’s Energy Future.  The data and references in the report are largely accurate, as far as they go, and the report promotes energy efficiency, which is a welcome step.  Ultimately, though, the report is unreliable because it has too narrow a vision of the energy future.  It inaccurately characterizes government regulation and neglects the environmental consequences surrounding the production, use, consumption, and disposal of our energy resources.  Instead, Energy Works is more of a political polemic rather than a useful white paper.  While it may well serve the Chamber’s political agenda, Energy Works for US fails to recognize the complexities and challenges necessary to fashion our energy future.

Our energy future is as important a policy matter as any that now confronts the United States. Any discussion of …

In his 2013 book, The Bet, Yale historian Paul Sabin uses Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon as foils to explain today’s dysfunctional and polarized politics surrounding energy development and environmental protection. In 1980, Ehrlich and Simon bet each other on the price of five minerals (chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten.) Ehrlich, a neo-Malthusian, and father of Zero Population Growth, believed that thoughtless and unconstrained consumption of natural resources by an ever-expanding human population would literally doom the planet.  Ehrlich posited that by 1990, world population growth would exacerbate the scarcity of natural resources and, therefore, resource prices would rise.   

Simon, by contrast, took the position that population growth was an overall benefit to society and that innovation and market pricing would cause resource prices to fall.  Simon argued further that the human creativity that population growth entailed would spur economic growth and increase human well-being …