On the Issues: Protecting Coastal Communities, Electric Truck Infrastructure, and More

Matt Fleck, Ceilidh Kern, and Elizabeth Wason

Twice a month, we’re compiling the most relevant news stories from diverse sources online, connecting the latest environmental and energy economics research to global current events, real-time public discourse, and policy decisions. Keep reading, and feel free to send us your feedback.

Here are some questions we’re asking and addressing with our research chops this week:

How effectively do federal policies support and protect coastal communities that are affected by climate change?

The Biden administration recently announced $2.6 billion in new funding to protect coastal communities and ecosystems as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. The funds will go to communities that span the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast, financing habitat restoration, fisheries management, and climate resiliency projects, among other efforts. Coastal communities that are targeted by this funding have benefited from a more established law, as well, according to a new working paper from researchers at Resources for the Future (RFF). In a recent blog post, RFF Senior Research Associate and Geographic Information System Research Coordinator Alexandra Thompson discusses the researchers’ analysis of the Coastal Barrier Resources Act through the lens of geography, highlighting that the 1982 law has benefited communities even beyond the zones that the law designates for protection. “Creative and novel methods allowed the researchers to answer important questions about the impacts of [Coastal Barrier Resource System] designations, including on neighboring communities,” Thompson says.

What kinds of electricity infrastructure do we need in facilitating the widespread electrification of large vehicles like vans, trucks, and buses?

A startup in California has announced plans to build the state’s largest charging depot for electric big rig trucks to date. The depot will be able to simultaneously charge 96 big rigs with renewable energy. The depot could help achieve California’s goals for big rig electrification and is an example of the type of investment that would support a national transition to electric trucks and other large electric vehicles, according to RFF Fellows Nafisa Lohawala and Beia Spiller. In the final blog post of a three-part series on the electrification of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, Lohawala and Spiller discuss how investments in electricity infrastructure can facilitate the electrification of large vehicles. “From the local distribution grid to the power plants that generate our electricity, infrastructure investments will be necessary to ensure that reliable and clean power can be supplied to vehicles when they need it,” they say.

What regulations are coming up for energy and the environment from the Biden administration?

Last week, the Biden administration released updated timelines for federal regulations that currently are in the regulatory development process. The administration expects rules on air quality and electricity transmission, among others, to be finalized by summer 2024, and the US Environmental Protection Agency expects to finalize a recently proposed rule two months earlier than initially planned that would limit carbon emissions from coal- and natural gas–fired power plants. The release of the agenda follows a busy season of rulemaking at the Environmental Protection Agency. In a new article on the Common Resources blog, RFF Senior Fellow Karen Palmer and Staff Writer and Reporter Matt Fleck recap three rules that the agency recently announced, including the rule on coal- and natural gas–fired power plants. “The agency’s proposal has focused on strategies for reducing emissions that are achievable, cost-effective, and tailored to existing power plants,” they say.

Expert Perspectives

In Focus: The Evolving US Energy Mix

The rule on coal- and natural gas–fired power plants that the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed this spring has the potential to significantly reduce US carbon emissions if enacted. In the latest installment of In Focus, RFF Fellow and Federal Climate Policy Initiative Director Kevin Rennert discusses how the rule could affect the US energy mix and the flexibility that states could have in fulfilling the requirements of the rule.

Resources Roundup

Accelerating the Deployment of Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage is the only existing technology that can both achieve the net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and provide energy, but no holistic policy framework currently exists to guide the technology’s development. On June 27, RFF will host speakers from the Energy Futures Initiative to discuss the case for accelerating the deployment of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and how the technology compares to other methods of carbon dioxide removal. RSVP here to attend this RFF Live event in person or virtually.

How Much Do Households Value Electricity Reliability?

Power outages that are caused by wildfires and extreme weather events have elicited questions about the reliability of electricity infrastructure and potential solutions. In a recent episode of the Resources Radio podcast, David Brown, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, discusses how household purchases of backup energy technologies, such as solar panels and batteries, can provide information about the value that people ascribe to the reliability of electricity. “We find a really large increase in solar and storage adoption in outage-exposed ZIP codes, relative to ZIP codes not exposed to those power outages,” Brown says.

Incorporating Sociopolitical Factors into Climate Models

Models that project the potential success of climate policies in mitigating emissions and climate change don’t always consider the influence of sociopolitical factors on policymaking. Silvia Pianta, a junior researcher at the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment, joined the latest episode of the Resources Radio podcast to discuss how factors like dependence on fossil fuels, public opinion, and other sociopolitical dynamics can influence climate policy and climate models. “The idea is to just see what empirical data tell us about what’s happening in the world, and be able to capture these differences across different countries, and build some scenarios that incorporate these social and political dynamics a bit more by using existing empirical data,” Pianta says.

Improving Flood Resilience for Communities in Appalachia

Increased rainfall in Appalachia has highlighted the unique vulnerability of local communities to flooding. In the final episode of the Climate Hits Home series on the Resources Radio podcast, West Virginia University Associate Professor Nico Zegre discusses how the federal government and local and state governments in the Appalachian region can mitigate the risks and impacts of flooding, especially for disproportionately vulnerable communities. “High social vulnerability means that West Virginians are already starting, before disaster strikes, with little capacity to absorb the shocks from any kind of a disaster,” Zegre says. This episode wraps up the five-part Climate Hits Home series about the effects of climate change on US cities and towns and how local communities are addressing these effects. Catch up on the series here.

Will Land-Based Carbon Dioxide Removal Be Sufficient to Meet US Goals?

The United States aims to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the coming decades, as the nation works toward the goal of net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury. In a new report, RFF scholars David Wear and Matthew Wibbenmeyer estimate the extent to which land-based methods of carbon dioxide removal, such as using forests to sequester carbon, can contribute to this aim. They find that merely expanding land-based methods of carbon removal would be insufficient to achieve US goals. “Substantial investments in novel technologies and land/forest sequestration will be required,” they say.

Strategies for Decarbonizing the Global Economy

For global climate change to stay below 1.5°C of warming in accordance with the goal set by the Paris climate agreement, efforts need to accelerate toward minimizing greenhouse gases and creating a future of net-zero emissions. A new podcast episode covers this topic with RFF President and CEO Richard G. Newell, who speaks with host Tisha Schuller on the Real Decarbonization podcast. “Nobody controls global temperatures, and no individual country or company controls global atmospheric concentrations. But net zero is different,” Newell says. “It leads to the same destination, but it’s a decision concept that’s actionable at the global level; it’s actionable at the country level; it’s actionable at a company level.”

#ChartOfTheWeek

In communities that rely on oil and gas production for government revenue, climate policies and declining demand for oil and gas may disproportionately affect local economies and the ability of local governments to provide essential services. The chart above projects the percentage change in oil- and gas-related revenues for schools in oil- and gas-producing regions in Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado, and New Mexico under three climate policy scenarios. RFF scholars Brian C. Prest, Daniel Raimi, and Zachary Whitlock modeled how climate policies and future oil and gas prices could affect government revenues in these regions in a recent working paper.

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