Growing opposition to data centers is beginning to expose divides in both parties. Last week, POLITICO reported that progressive challengers in battleground House primaries in Tennessee, Indiana, Virginia, and Maine are backing a national moratorium on datacenter construction.
Affordability has quickly overtaken climate change as the primary focus of energy policy. One reason may be that the climate policies adopted over the past decade are finally starting to bind, imposing added costs at a time of rising electricity demand and, in some parts of the country, higher power bills.
As the Iran war continues, oil prices keep rising. Gasoline has climbed to over $4 per gallon for the first time in four years. The ripple effects are spreading across the economy as markets that depend on affordable crude begin to absorb the disruption of roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas that normally passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Everything from airline tickets to groceries is seeing upward pressure as the prices of jet fuel, diesel, and fertilizer all rise.
The war with Iran has sent oil prices, and then gasoline prices, sharply higher. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude, the main U.S. oil benchmark, rose from the mid-$60s per barrel in late February to around $100 on March 19. U.S. gasoline prices have followed suit, with the average price increasing from a pre-war level of under $3.00 per gallon to over $3.70 by mid-March.
For the past two decades, U.S. climate policy has been driven more by legal and administrative maneuvering than by legislative consensus. The result has been regulatory inefficiency, policy whiplash between administrations, and little progress toward a durable, politically sustainable framework for managing climate risk.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s recent decision to temporarily stop assigning dollar values to the projected health benefits of reducing fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone has sparked renewed controversy over air pollution regulation. As I discussed last week, the agency framed the move as a response to persistent uncertainty in estimating PM2.5 health effects, not as a withdrawal from regulating air pollution or considering public health impacts.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) recent decision to stop monetizing the health benefits of reducing fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, has refocused attention on a long-running debate over air pollution regulation.
Last week, the Trump Administration announced its intention to withdraw the United States from several landmark international climate institutions, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In practical terms, the move is largely symbolic: U.S. participation or non-participation in these bodies has relatively little direct effect on domestic climate policy or near-term global emissions outcomes.
Last year, in one of his first actions on inauguration day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to stop using the social cost of carbon (SCC) when weighing the costs and benefits of regulations. The decision prompted predictable outrage from many environmental activists, climate scientists, and economists, who argued that abandoning the SCC would strip climate regulations of their scientific grounding.
A new climate change lawsuit filed last week in Washington State takes a novel approach by arguing that the fossil-fuel industry is responsible for rising homeowners’ insurance premiums. The plaintiffs, two Washington residents, claim their costs have increased because of a growing number of climate-related natural disasters.
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