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News focused exclusively on financing for
energy efficiency and renewable energy
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Cascading decisions from Washington in July led us to shout more than once: "Get me a public servant energy lawyer!" We've got one as Guest Editor now.
Robert Klee, known around campus as Rob, runs clean energy programming at CBEY. He also teaches in Yale's Law School and School of the Environment, coordinates our Planetary Solutions internships and the lunchtime lectures that go with them, and knows the coordinates for hundreds of brooks, mountaintops, beaches and refuges in his beloved Connecticut.
In this installment, Rob brings his past experience as Connecticut's commissioner of Energy and Environmental Protection to read the tea leaves from Washington, DC. You may want clarity on what to do from the Supreme Court's ruling that limits what the United States' federal agencies can do to spark the energy transition. You may want a clear investment signal out of the new federal law that finally addresses the climate transition. Keep reading.
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Robert J. Klee
(M.E.M. '99, J.D. '04, Ph.D. '05)Job:
Lecturer at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) and the Yale Law School. Managing Director of Clean Energy Programming at CBEY. Acting Director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy.
What that means I do:
First, I teach (and love doing it) throughout Yale on innovative energy and environmental law and policy. I also lead the policy module CBEY’s Certificate Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy for working professionals. I serve learners at all stages of their academic and professional careers – and find ways to connect them to one another (more on that below).
Where we can collaborate:
I am always looking for opportunities to connect current students to recent graduates and practitioners. One launchpad might be my bi-annual spring semester climate solutions capstone course, where small student teams consult to outside clients I try to highlight the role of subnational actors – states, cities, corporations, and institutions – in deploying clean energy and tackling the climate crisis. I also serve as mentor and supervisor to students undertaking independent research projects in clean energy law, policy, and deployment. In the summer, I manage CBEY’s new Planetary Solutions in Clean Energy Internship and Fellowship Program, with a focus on equitable deployment of clean energy. If you have an idea for a semester-long student project or are interested in hosting a student for the summer (with financial support from CBEY), just let me know!
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What Strengthened Me On This Journey
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Throughout my academic and professional career, I have immensely benefited from (and owe a serious debt of gratitude to) a series of unbelievable mentors. I have fond memories of my weekly walks with my mentees around historic Bushnell Park in Hartford, from my time in public service at the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. I hope my mentees learned something from me, but I learned from them invaluable lessons about working with people and work-life balance. I am proud to mentor YSE students and alumni, and I fully embrace CBEY’s love of and investment in mentorship.
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A Policy Innovation You Should Know Inside and Out
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We have just witnessed a tectonic shift in federal administrative law from the recent Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA (in the flurry of monumental decisions at the end of this term). I can hear some of you saying to yourself a version of Chief Justice Roberts’ famous line from his confirmation hearing, “Wait a minute, I thought judges just ‘call balls and strikes.’ ” Turns out that the federal courts in general – and the Supreme Court in particular – can dramatically alter the policy landscape, in this case through the “major questions” doctrine.
The conservative 6-3 majority of the Court, in formulating and applying this doctrine, sought to address a “particular and recurring problem” in the modern administrative state, namely “agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.” The majority opinion’s application of this doctrine boils down to requiring a reviewing court at the outset of its analysis to determine whether an administrative agency’s actions “raise an eyebrow” because the agency appears to be stepping outside of its normal lane.
West Virginia built upon two recent pandemic cases, where the Court struck down CDC’s eviction moratorium (because the CDC doesn’t usually venture into housing policy), and OSHA’s vaccine or mask and test mandate (because OSHA doesn’t usually venture into public health). Here the Court used the major questions doctrine to knock down EPA’s Clean Power Plan with its best – i.e., most efficient and effective – system of emissions reductions achieved through load shifting from coal to cleaner natural gas or much cleaner renewables. The Court thought this was a major question because EPA usually doesn’t venture into energy dispatch decisions.
Now, West Virginia was about a rule that never went into effect, whose goals were met in the intervening years by market forces. But a handful of Republican state attorneys general essentially asked the Court to constrain the Biden Administration from even thinking about regulating greenhouse gases in certain areas and with certain tools. This is not normal. There are long-established doctrines that judges should not give advisory opinions, and other matters of jurisprudence, which until very recently would have kept this case from the docket.
The rapid ascendance of the major questions doctrine – which up until this year was not much more than a few passing comments in footnotes and dissenting opinions – now provides a plausible legal argument for striking down any attempt at federal regulation that tries to do big and bold things that will impact our economy and society. At a minimum, this ruling should give everyone pause who still believes in the “all of government” federal approach to the climate crisis. At its maximum, the trans-substantive elements of this decision will reshape the functioning of the entire federal administrative state, and shift the balance of power among the three branches of government from the Executive to the Courts and Congress.
We all know how effective Congress has been in recent years: other than the 2016 update to the Toxic Substances Control Act, Congress hasn’t touched our major environmental laws in over 30 years. Congress’ Constitutional power of the purse could stimulate meaningful climate action through tax policy and investments in clean energy. Writing on August 1 with an eye on the news, I sincerely hope the recently announced deal between Senators Manchin and Schumer holds.
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What Sticks With Me Over Successive News Cycles
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Relying on Federal Action Gets You Only So Far. Cities Bring Lots of Climate Action.
Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, DC have joined a growing movement of cities banning fossils in new buildings on the road to electrifying everything. One of CBEY’s Planetary Solutions in Clean Energy fellows, Pratima Garg, spent her summer working with Luis Aguirre-Torres, a CBEY FDCE alum, on Ithaca’s plans to become the first city to fully electrify all of its building stock, while centering justice and equity through their Justice50 initiative. For more on city-scale climate action, be sure to follow Amy Turner from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, and read her terrific “Cities Climate Law: A Legal Framework for Local Action in the U.S.”
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Cities Make Major Climate Moves, and States Take it From There - Now More Than Ever.
Whenever I feel down about the situation in Washington DC, I look at the level where I used to work: American states. Take, for example, Illinois’ late-2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act or CEJA (pronounced “cee-jah”). This nearly 1,000-page statute, highlighted in a CEFF article, provides a comprehensive blueprint for Illinois’ transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy by 2050, with a phase-out of most coal and oil by 2030, and natural gas by 2045. The Act includes massive near-term investments in wind and solar, support for existing nuclear, a green bank, and utility regulatory reform through performance-based ratemaking. Illinois built the Act on equity. This means expansions of their Solar for All program, retiring fossil generation based on proximity to environmental justice communities, and significant investments in clean energy jobs and just transitions for coal communities. One of CBEY’s Planetary Solutions in Clean Energy fellows, Marc Gonzalez, spent his summer working with Chicago-based Elevate Energy, to better understand how CEJA came to be, and how it might be replicated elsewhere.
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In the Vanguard, Corporations Have Gotten the Memo and Started On Transition Pathways.
My weekly news diet includes a steady stream of stories of corporate climate action and net-zero targets, and I have a particular interest in net-zero healthcare. But, I am also seeing an increasing number of stories highlighting squishiness in corporate net-zero goals or missed goals. That’s where standard setting comes into play, to make sure that corporate climate action is real and ambitious. The Science-Based Targets Initiative has developed frameworks for companies to self-regulate their net-zero targets, and the SEC’s proposed climate risk disclosure rule may shed more light on corporate targets and efforts in the coming months.
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This All Hinges On Treating Energy Equity and Justice as Essential to Investment Plans.
Communities of color, low-income and indigenous communities bear a disproportionate burden from our current fossil fuel-fired power plants. According to the EPA, 63% of fossil power plants in the United States are in communities that have higher than average low-income populations or higher than average people of color populations, or both. Energy insecurity – the inability to meet basic energy needs – affects the health and well-being of most low-income households, particularly those households that identify as Black and Hispanic. And deployment of solar and efficiency has largely occurred in white neighborhoods. But policy choices and business models can improve clean energy adoption in low- and moderate-income (LMI) communities. Marcus Mauney, one of CBEY’s Planetary Solutions in Clean Energy fellows, spent his summer working with Ben Healey at PosiGen LLC, on ways to help bridge the participation gap for LMI households, through innovative marketing and outreach efforts. Be sure to follow Dr. Tony Reames, DOE’s new Deputy Director for Energy Justice (who is on leave from the University of Michigan and his Urban Energy Justice Lab) for the latest on what the federal government is trying to do in this space.
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| | Something Longer I Value (and Would Love to Discuss)
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I am intrigued by the Net-Zero America Project from Princeton and the Andlinger Center for Energy + the Environment. The 75-page Summary of the Final Report and the nearly 350 pages of the full Final Report are presented in “slide deck” format, chock full of graphs, charts, and infographics on what it would take for the U.S. to achieve an economy-wide target of net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. Each time I dive into the report, I find a new nugget of information on the physical infrastructure, capital investments, land area consumed, job implications, and health benefits of this monumental – yet plausible – transition. Jesse Jenkins is worth a follow, and his team at the ZERO Lab and the REPEAT Project have been modeling in nearly real-time the greenhouse gas reduction effects from the recent (Senator Manchin-induced) roller coaster of climate policy developments in DC.
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| | The Book That Keeps Coming Back to Me (and Why)
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II often go back to one of my favorite nonfiction books, Basin and Range, from a master of the genre, John McPhee. In this first book of his five-book geology series Annals of the Former World (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999), McPhee takes readers on a road trip across the mountainous regions of the American west, from the Sierra Nevadas in California, east through Nevada to Utah. But McPhee adds temporal and geographic detours to the early days of geology as a science, including tales of how James Hutton observed angular unconformity in Scotland – where younger horizontal layers of sedimentary rock sit on top of older, tilted, and eroded layers of sedimentary rock. Hutton’s theories of how long it would take to create an angular unconformity helped introduce the world to geologic time, set up a reckoning with Biblical time, and planted the first seed that eventually grew into the general theory of plate tectonics. My personal connection to this comes from my former professor, Ken Deffeyes, who McPhee (accurately) describes as having a “tenured” waistline and hair flying behind him like Beethoven’s. McPhee wonderfully captures Deffeyes’ exuberance for taking a rock hammer and banging on a rock to see what you can learn from the crystalline structures inside. And McPhee gives fair and accurate warning about the risks of having a passionate geologist behind the wheel of a school van, with both hands waving out the window, giving a 60-mph lesson in mountain formation as the van veers dangerously close to the highway roadcut.
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CEFF will resume regular job listings with our next student-driven newsletter on August 17.
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