Agreement that climate change is happening and caused by human activity increasingly has become a partisan issue in the United States, along with support for wind and solar energy. Brian Kennedy, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, discusses similar findings from a recent survey of public opinion on climate issues—and patches of common ground—on this week’s episode of Resources Radio. “Broadly, what you see … is a shared concern about economic factors [related to climate and energy policies] among Republicans and Democrats, but differences in opinions in terms of how to use energy policy to keep prices low and improve job growth,” says Kennedy.
Areas of the American West with High Wildfire Risk Have Fast-Growing Job Markets
Wildfires are becoming increasingly frequent and intense in the United States, particularly in the West. Yet regions of the West that are the most prone to wildfire also are seeing disproportionately high job growth. In a recent report, RFF scholars Emily Joiner, Margaret Walls, and Matthew Wibbenmeyer discuss this trend, the six vulnerable regions with especially high rates of job growth, and the kinds of jobs that are most affected by wildfire risk. “Hazard mitigation and resilience planning isn’t something that can just apply to residential communities, but is also something that business and industry needs to be concerned about, too,” says Joiner in an interview with the Mountain News West Bureau. “It is up to policymakers to ensure that economic development and resilience policies are aligned so that new growth occurs in the safest locations,” says Walls in the press release for the report.
Examining Energy Storage on the US Electric Grid
Energy storage that is connected to the electric grid is becoming increasingly important as more electricity gets generated from renewable sources that provide variable amounts of energy throughout a day. When the supply of electricity from these sources exceeds demand, that surplus electricity can be stored and then provided to the grid later on. In a recent report, RFF scholars Molly Robertson and Karen Palmer and coauthor Omid Mirzapour provide an overview of factors that affect and potentially support the development of energy storage in the United States. “Economics, public policies, and market rules each play a role in making certain regions hospitable to storage investment,” the authors say. “Policies and market rules may over- or under-incentivize investment in energy storage and affect the fundamental economics of the technology.”
A Potential Cap-and-Trade System for Multiple Pollutants
In recent years, researchers have found that the total damages to human health from cumulative pollutants in a given area can be greater than the sum of individual damages from those pollutants. In a new working paper, RFF Gilbert F. White Fellow Justin Kakeu devises a policy option that would enable the regulation of multiple pollutants within a single, market-based framework—a cap-and-trade system, which historically has been used to reduce emissions of a single pollutant instead of multiple pollutants. “Traditional single-pollutant markets often overlook [interactions between pollutants], leading to inefficiencies and unintended consequences,” says Kakeu. “The multipollutant framework addresses this issue by designing permits that account for the combined effects of pollutants, ensuring that policies are both effective and equitable.”