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Full-Text Articles in Law
Decarbonization In Democracy, Shelley Welton
Decarbonization In Democracy, Shelley Welton
Faculty Publications
Conventional wisdom holds that democracy is structurally ill-equipped to confront climate change. As the story goes, because each of us tends to dismiss consequences that befall people in other places and in future times, “the people” cannot be trusted to craft adequate decarbonization policies, designed to reduce present-day, domestic carbon emissions. Accordingly, U.S. climate change policy has focused on technocratic fixes that operate predominantly through executive action to escape democratic politics — with vanishingly little to show for it after a change in presidential administration.
To help craft a more durable U.S. climate change strategy, this Article scrutinizes the purported …
The Quiet Undoing: How Regional Electricity Market Reforms Threaten Clean Energy Goals, Shelley Welton, Danny Cullenward
The Quiet Undoing: How Regional Electricity Market Reforms Threaten Clean Energy Goals, Shelley Welton, Danny Cullenward
Faculty Publications
In a series of largely unnoticed but extremely consequential moves, two regional electricity market operators are pursuing reforms to make it more difficult for states to achieve their clean energy goals. The federal energy regulator, FERC, has already approved one such reform and ordered a second market operator to go farther in punishing state-supported clean energy resources than it had initially proposed. In this Essay, we bring to light the ways in which the intricate, technical reforms underway in regional electricity markets threaten state climate change objectives and the durability of FERC’s regional market constructs. If FERC allows private market …
Electricity Markets And The Social Project Of Decarbonization, Shelley Welton
Electricity Markets And The Social Project Of Decarbonization, Shelley Welton
Faculty Publications
Decarbonization is the process of converting our economy from one that runs predominantly on energy derived from fossil fuels to one that runs almost exclusively on clean, carbon-free energy. If pursued on the scale that experts believe necessary to prevent dangerous climate change, the infrastructure changes required to decarbonize the United States will have significant social and cultural implications. States aggressively pursuing decarbonization have adopted policies reflecting their under-standing that decarbonization is a social project implicating numerous value choices. Various state decarbonization policies combine the aim of decarbonization with job promotion, economic development, income redistribution, urban revitalization, open-space preservation, and …