Trackers

Research Topics

All Topics

About EELP

Latest News

CleanLaw Podcast

No content

EELP Resources

In the Media

Recent press on our faculty, staff, research, and analyses

Latest

  • Audobon News

EPA’s Recent Rollbacks Raise Public Health Worries for Vulnerable Americans

That interpretation could leave not only the mercury standards, but also other regulations that promote public health, vulnerable to legal challenges from the fossil fuel industry, says Joseph Goffman, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University and a former EPA official. “I think this has a little bit less to do with this particular set of emissions standards and more to do with a much bigger project the agency and the administration have, which is to essentially sabotage or manipulate cost-benefit analysis so that it always comes out to show that the costs of regulation outweigh the benefits,” he says.

April 27, 2020
  • Yale Environment 360

How the Laws That Earth Day Inspired Have Benefited Us All

In fact, the cost came in far lower than anyone expected — just $500 million to $2 billion a year, by current estimates. But the real surprise was that the benefits were so large, between $59-$116 billion a year. Moreover, these benefits had far less to do with reduced acid rain than with unpredicted corollary effects on human health from reducing air pollution. At the time, the paradigm was that “like politics, all pollution is local,” says Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, who helped write the original legislation as an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. The soot and other pollution that made a difference for human health was thought to come from nearby sources.

April 22, 2020
  • E&E News

‘Mysterious’ group pushes FERC to end net metering

A Massachusetts-based nonprofit that took down a biomass subsidy in New Hampshire last year has set its sights on upending net metering nationwide. The New England Ratepayers Association filed a petition last week asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to effectively curtail net metering, a practice that requires utilities to pay rooftop solar owners for the extra electricity they generate and send to the grid. The petition calls on FERC to place the widespread practice under federal jurisdiction. The move away from state regulation could significantly cut the rates paid to rooftop solar owners and other on-site power generators. But the group says placing net metering under federal authority would lower electricity costs for ratepayers…Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, immediately slammed the petition in a series of tweets. “This is a petition filed by this mysterious group calling themselves New England Ratepayers Association,” he told E&E News. “Nobody knows who funds them, and they cite no new case law. There is absolutely no reason to raise this issue now.” …While FERC has always considered energy procured by utilities through net metering a retail sale that falls under state authority, NERA argues that net-metering transactions constitute “sales for resale,” which it says should be treated as a wholesale power market transaction that falls under FERC jurisdiction. Peskoe dismissed this idea, noting that FERC only has jurisdiction over wholesale sales in interstate commerce. “An energy transfer effectuated through a state-regulated net-metering tariff is neither a wholesale sale nor a sale in interstate commerce,” he said.

April 22, 2020
  • Law360

EPA Gives Utilities A Headache With Mercury Rule Revision

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency opened a Pandora’s box for utilities with an about-face on the justification underpinning an Obama-era rule limiting coal-fired power plants’ mercury emissions, including the potential that ratepayers will try to claw back what they paid for utilities to comply with the rule. Experts say that at best, the EPA’s finalized cost-benefit analysis of its Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule is an empty gesture to utilities. The EPA said it’s not “appropriate or necessary” to regulate hazardous air pollutants from coal and oil-fired plants under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act, but the rule remains in place and utilities have already spent billions to comply with it…EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said Thursday that the agency is prepared to defend in court its decision to keep the MATS rule — which was enacted in 2012 and required utilities to comply by 2015 — in place…Experts say the EPA could have really cut the legs out from under the MATS rule by also removing power plants from the list of pollution source categories subject to regulation under Section 112, but ultimately decided not to. “Although there is still some chance that the coal industry will challenge the standards on the grounds that the appropriate and necessary finding is gone, their prospects for success are dimmer now,” said Joseph Goffman, an Obama-era EPA official who is now the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.

April 22, 2020
  • Utility Dive

Secretive group’s petition to FERC could ‘end net metering as we know it,’ lawyers say

The technical feasibility of such a shift is not clear, Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. told Utility Dive. Most rooftop solar would likely fall under the jurisdiction of PURPA as a qualifying facility, and therefore be priced based on the avoided cost of generating that power, argued the petition.

April 22, 2020