This paper explores endangered species and water management in the San Francisco Bay Delta. Two endangered species, the Delta Smelt and the Winter-run Chinook Salmon, use the Bay Delta for crucial portions of their life cycle. At the same time, California's agricultural industry, as well as...

This article examines the consequences of a previously unnoticed difference between pollutant cap-and-trade and pollution taxes. Implementation of cap-and-trade relies on a forecast of future emissions, implementation of a pollution tax does not. Realistic policy designs using either regulatory...

Wildfires exacerbated by climate change are a growing issue in the US. However, the full economic implications of wildfires for the housing market are largely unknown. As a case study, we estimate the effect of changing wildfire risk perceptions on residential home sale prices in California. We...

The advent of distributed energy technologies, most notably, distributed solar energy, poses a competitive threat to the electric utility industry. Here I provide a comprehensive assessment of the U.S. electric utility industry's regulatory response to this threat over the past three years....

Recent dramatic and deadly increases in global wildfire activity have increased attention on the causes of wildfires, their consequences, and how risk from fire might be mitigated. Here we bring together data on the changing risk and societal burden of wildfire in the US. We estimate that nearly...

The world needs a new approach to achieving international progress on climate change. Despite prodigious diplomatic efforts over two decades aimed at limiting emissions of climate change pollutants, relatively little in the way of effective global governance has been achieved. In Part 1, I argue...

Last year, Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced S. 332, the Climate Protection Act of 2013. Based on a “fee-and-dividend” concept, the bill would levy a carbon pollution fee on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions starting in 2014 at $20 per metric ton of CO2, rising...

The economic literature supports the case that an emissions excise tax is one of the most cost- effective approaches to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun the process of regulating GHG emissions under section 111(d) of the...

We present a new method that enables users of the federal government’s flagship energy policy model (NEMS) to dynamically estimate the direct cost impacts of climate policy across U.S. household incomes and census regions. Our approach combines NEMS output with detailed household expenditure...