Energy Transitions in the Trump Administration and Beyond

This Essay evaluates U.S. transitions in the energy sector between 2016 and 2020 against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s stated priorities regarding energy policy and the administration’s successes and failures in implementing those policies. Specifically, this Essay details President Trump’s policies and regulatory actions with regard to the electricity sector, the transportation sector, energy development on public lands, and federal approvals of energy infrastructure projects. It ends on a somewhat hopeful note, recognizing that while the Trump administration certainly slowed the pace of a U.S. clean energy transition, the transition continued to make forward progress as a result of countervailing trends in economics, technological advances, private sector preferences, and policy development at the state and local levels. Thus, a foundation exists for the Biden administration to accelerate that transition, hopefully in time to minimize U.S. contributions to global climate change and create the clean energy economy we urgently need

Tax Benefits, Property Rights, and Mandates: Considering the Future of Government Support for Renewable Energy

This essay explores the history of tax benefits, property rights benefits, and mandates for energy development for the purpose of gaining insights on how such incentives can best be used to encourage the development of renewable energy. Part I describes some of the tax preferences and other financial incentives the U.S. government has historically provided to the energy sector, including to fossil fuel development, renewable fuels (particularly ethanol), and renewable electricity sources. It compares and contrasts the varying types and levels of support for these energy sectors, and concludes that the tax preferences and other financial support provided to date to renewable electricity do not provide the same level of continuity for investment purposes and long-term growth as the support provided to the fossil fuel and biofuels industries. Part II turns to property rights incentives, and discusses the long-time property rights benefits states have conveyed to oil, gas, and other natural resource developers as well as to electric utilities to encourage the development and use of energy resources. This Part suggests that policymakers should use caution in conveying new property rights incentives to renewable energy developers to avoid upsetting existing certainty in property law and also to avoid a situation where the burdens of such changes fall too heavily on a small and discrete number of landowners. Part III considers mandates in the energy industry. These include: (1) state renewable portfolio standards (RPS) for renewable electricity; (2) the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) that benefits the biofuels industry; and (3) California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard regulations that mandate use of an increasing amount of fuels with lowered GHG emissions each year in the state. It compares the federal RFS for biofuels with the lack of a similar mandate at the federal level for renewable electricity, and discusses the potential benefits associated with a federal RPS for electricity. Finally, Part IV considers the important role certainty and continuity play in efforts to support renewable energy development. Ultimately, this essay concludes that the continuity and relative certainty associated with certain types of tax benefits and mandates may be the best means of providing long-term support to renewable energy markets. Property rights incentives, on the other hand, should be used more sparingly to provide benefits to particular energy sectors or markets, but may be best used to create the nationwide, physical networks such as electric transmission grid expansions necessary for those markets to exist. tax policy, natural resources, energy policy, production tax credit, PTC, renewable fuel standard, low carbon fuel standard, climate change, renewable portfolio standards, eminent domain, split estate, biofuels, ethanol, wind energy, solar energ

Future-Proofing Energy Transport Law

The U.S. energy system is critical to every aspect of the nation’s economy and daily life. That energy system, in turn, is completely dependent on U.S. energy transport infrastructure—the oil pipelines, natural gas pipelines, electric transmission lines, and import and export facilities that transport and distribute the energy resources that power the country. This Article explores how the law can influence the billions of dollars in private sector energy transport investments necessary to meet current energy needs as well as respond to the significant technological, market, and policy developments in the energy sector. In doing so, it develops criteria policymakers should consider in creating laws and regulations to govern energy transport infrastructure that focus on federalism principles, flexibility in the location and amount of energy resources, and clean energy goals. It then applies these criteria to two of the nation’s most pressing energy transport debates: (1) whether to transfer more siting authority for interstate electric transmission lines from the states to a federal or regional authority and (2) whether to transport new sources of North American oil primarily by an upgraded rail system or by expanded pipeline infrastructure

Public Utilities and Transportation Electrification

This Article examines the rapidly evolving role of the nation’s electric utilities in developing the network of public electric vehicle (“EV”) charging stations across the country required to facilitate the growth of EVs. As EV adoption in the United States continues to rise, the roles that governmental entities, electric utilities, and market actors will play in deploying the EV charging stations necessary to support transportation electrification remains a central question. This question raises a multitude of issues relating to consumer demand for EVs, competitive markets, utility rate design, government mandates and incentives, policies to reduce carbon emission and other air pollutants, and equity concerns. This Article focuses specifically on state public utility commissions, which will review and approve electric utility proposals to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in EV charging infrastructure that would be paid for, in most cases, by utility customers through cost-of-service ratemaking. This Article considers how state approaches on this issue may differ, at least in the short term, depending on varying state environmental policies, politics, geography, and utility regulatory structure. One constant among the states, however, is the range of rulemaking, investigatory, and adjudicative processes available to state utility commissions to consider these proposed utility investments. This Article concludes that utility commissions in each state should focus on using their investigative and adjudicative authority to create a robust administrative record for EV charging-related decisions—both general rulemaking decisions and individual utility proposal decisions. These investigative and adjudicative proceedings can support decisions today regarding short-term utility pilot programs, as well as form the basis for broader, far-reaching policies to govern development in the long term. Notably, there are good reasons for state utility commissions to be central players in this process. State commissions, acting in their adjudicative capacity, can be more nimble than state legislatures, allowing for experimentation over different utility rate proceedings, serving an information gathering function for subsequent legislative action and commission rulemaking, and facilitating early investment in EV charging, where appropriate

Punitive Damages after Exxon Shipping Company v. Baker: The Quest for Predictability and the Role of Juries

This Symposium Essay considers the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Exxon Shipping Company v. Baker on the ability of juries to award punitive damages in a manner that comports with the law. In that case, the Court continued its two-decade crusade to place federal limits on punitive damages awards. The Exxon case was a federal maritime case arising out of the 1989 grounding of the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, Alaska, resulting in arguably the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history. In its decision, the Court for the first time identified “unpredictability” as the fundamental problem with punitive damages today. It then set out to make those damages more predictable by reaffirming the need for very low ratios, in this case 1:1, between punitive damages and compensatory damages. In this Essay, I argue that the Court’s quest for predictability has resulted in reviewing courts being forced to rely too heavily on the facts of other cases involving similar claims in order to determine if the punitive damages award in the case at bar is constitutional. Such a system is fraught with error and, more importantly, creates a situation where juries cannot possibly render punitive damages verdicts that meet due process requirements because the very evidence they need to assess predictability – the facts and damage awards in other cases – cannot be made available to them. Part I provides a brief discussion of punitive damages generally and the Court’s recent effort to place federal constitutional limits on those damages. Part II discusses the Exxon case itself and highlights the Court’s focus on “unpredictability” as the fundamental problem with punitive damages. Part III shows how lower courts have applied the Exxon case. This Part reveals that even though courts recognize that the Exxon case is a federal maritime case rather than a substantive due process case, courts have embraced the call for predictable awards by ensuring punitive damages awards are in line (both as a matter of ratio and as an absolute dollar amount) with other similar cases. Part IV illustrates how the quest for predictability requires information on other similar cases that cannot be given to juries, and how the premium now placed on predictable damages awards makes it difficult, if not impossible, for juries to arrive at constitutional verdicts. punitive damages, due process, ratios, Exxon Valdez, oil spill, deterrence, predictability, retribution, jurie

Modern Public Trust Principles: Recognizing Rights and Integrating Standards

The public trust doctrine has a long history from its beginnings as an obligation on states to hold lands submerged under navigable waters in trust for the public, to its resurgence in the 1970s as a protector of natural resources, to its influence on state statutory and constitutional law as the public embraced environmental protection principles. However, many have argued that the public trust doctrine has not lived up to its potential as a major player in environmental and natural resources law. This article proposes a new framework for the public trust doctrine as a state tool for environmental protection that relies heavily on state constitutional law and environmental statutes to give additional content and power to this ancient common law doctrine. By using this new theoretical framework based on recent judicial trends, the statutory, constitutional, and common law manifestations of public trust principles can all become mutually reinforcing rather than remain trapped in the “either-or” dichotomy engrained in prior scholarship