Floodplain land-use decisions are made by individuals in households, businesses, and local governments. Whatever the venue, the decisions made are the outcome of multiple interacting influences, with one being consideration of flood risk. The goal of a flood risk communication program may be to...

The Clean Power Plan (CPP) is the centerpiece of the US efforts to reduce carbon emissions, introducing regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants for the first time on a national basis. These regulations may interact with existing initiatives, for example, in California,...

Water quality trading programs envision regulated point sources meeting discharge control requirements and then being allowed to increase their nutrient discharge if they secure nutrient reduction credits from other pollutant sources in the watershed. Reduction credits can be created when...

In theory, how a fixed number of storable pollution permits are allocated in a cap-and-trade program should not affect intertemporal prices unless participants fail to receive permit endowments before they plan to use them. "Backloading" can create inefficiency; "frontloading" cannot. The...

US policy to limit greenhouse gas emissions is currently driven, in part, by the US Environmental Protection Agency's proposed Clean Power Plan, which seeks a drop in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil-fueled power plants — a “downstream” approach to regulation. Here, we consider...

Under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was required to establish standards limiting air toxics emissions from industrial plants. This paper examines the effect of five of the largest cost rules issued by EPA in the initial round of air toxics...

We critically review the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) assessment of the costs and benefits of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) as summarized in its regulatory impact analysis (RIA). We focus particularly on EPA's methods used to calculate the costs of the policy on the US fuel...

Recent changes to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards have created new opportunities for lowering the cost of meeting strict new standards through provisions for credit banking and trading. In this paper, we explore these new markets for reductions in both fuel consumption (fuel...

Information failures may help explain the so-called “energy efficiency gap” in commercial buildings, which account for approximately 20 percent of annual US energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Building owners may not fully comprehend what influences energy use in their buildings and may...

Carbon policies introduce potentially uneven cost burdens. Anticipating these outcomes is important for policymakers seeking to achieve an equitable outcome and can be politically important as well. This paper describes the details of a microsimulation model that utilizes the price and quantity...