Environmental Policy & Law

If Robert Klee is daunted by the challenge that lies ahead as the state’s next Department of Energy and Environmental Protection commissioner, he doesn’t show it. The agency’s former chief of staff under then-Commissioner Dan Esty, Klee views his pending ascendancy to DEEP’s top job as an opportunity to remake Connecticut at a historic juncture. During an 90-minute interview last week at his office, Klee said the state is on the verge of seismic shifts in terms of energy, solid waste and recycling as well as reuse of brownfield properties across the state.

Switzer Fellows Evan Hansen and Mike Wilson testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works about how we might prevent chemical threats and improve safety at facilities across the country.

Different patterns of urban development may have widely varying long-term effects on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To investigate such effects, we used UPlan geographic information system–based software to model three 2050 urban-growth scenarios for Yolo County, a predominantly agricultural area near Sacramento, Califor- nia. Two scenarios correspond to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s A2 and B1 storylines.

Despite decades of discussion and implementation, conservation monitoring remains a challenge. Many current solutions in the literature focus on improving the science or making more structured decisions. These insights are important but incomplete in accounting for the politics and economics of the conservation decisions informed by monitoring. Our novel depiction of the monitoring enterprise unifies insights from multiple disciplines (conservation, operations research, economics, and policy) and highlights many underappreciated factors that affect the expected benefits of monitoring.

The oil and natural-gas industry probably won't ever get a thank-you card from President Obama, but he has a few big reasons to be grateful for the fossil-fuel boom. America's vast resources of oil and natural gas have enabled Obama to move forward on aggressive policies, including tougher environmental rules and Iranian oil sanctions, which he would not have been able to do nearly as effectively without them.

Ninety health, environmental and sportsmen’s groups asked the federal government Thursday to clamp down on the release of methane gas by the petrochemical industry, asserting that the United States cannot reach its goal for reducing heat-trapping emissions without addressing the issue.

We believe that the process of unconventional fossil fuel development including shale tight oil and gas development in the Monterey Shale formation using hydraulic fracturing, acidization, and other forms of well stimulation will exacerbate many of these environmental threats, particularly climate disruption, local air and water pollution, and resource consumption. Thus, the decisions you make about the development of unconventional oil and gas production from shale in California will hold important consequences for California and the state’s future.