In December, the California Air Resources Board adopted a cap-and-trade program covering approximately 85% of statewide emissions of greenhouse gases.  This regulation sets a limit on emissions of greenhouse gases and then allows trading of pollution permits by entities covered under the program.  The design of California’s system is both balanced and innovative, when considered in the context of other cap-and-trade regimes.  As such, the program has the potential to serve as a model for future federal legislation.

However, because of both its ambition and its scope, the California program is likely to be the place where the law governing state-level regulation of GHGs is clarified.  The new regulations will likely be challenged in court on a number of grounds - the recently enacted Prop 26, the impact that the regulations will have on interstate sales of electricity, and the fact that the EPA is taking steps to regulate GHGs under the Clean Air Act.  Resolution of these legal questions will ultimately determine whether California is allowed to assume the leadership role for climate change that it has historically played in the development of US environmental law and regulation. 

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• cap & trade
• clean tech
• economics
• energy and climate policy
• energy policy

Franklin M. ("Lynn") Orr, Jr. became the director of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford upon its establishment in 2009. He served as director of the Global Climate and Energy Project from 2002 to 2008. Orr was the Chester Naramore Dean of the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University from 1994 to 2002. He has been a member of the Stanford faculty since 1985 and holds the Keleen and Carlton Beal Chair of Petroleum Engineering in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering, and is a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. His research activities focus on how complex fluid mixtures flow in the porous rocks in the Earth's crust, the design of gas injection processes for enhanced oil recovery, and CO₂ storage in subsurface formations. Orr is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He serves as vice chair of the board of directors of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and he chairs the Science Advisory Committee for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and was a foundation board member from 1999-2008.

• battery storage
• bio-fuel
• cap & trade
• carbon sequestration
• climate change
• economics
• energy and climate policy
• energy efficiency
• geothermal
• greenhouse gases
• impacts
• modeling
• nanotechnology
• natural gas
• nuclear
• ocean energy
• oil shale
• petroleum
• renewable energy
• smart grid
• solar
• tar sands
• transportation fuel
• wind

Special Session
co-sponsored by Woods Institute for the Environment, Precourt Institute for Energy, and Global Climate and Energy Project

With 104 operating nuclear plants in the United States, and dozens more on the drawing boards, who is protecting the public and the environment? Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory B. Jaczko will discuss the simultaneous challenges of overseeing the existing fleet of reactors, managing in parallel multiple reactor design certification requests and multiple plant construction license requests, and overseeing the safety of and licensing an expansion of the nuclear fuel industry to support new plants, not to mention the storage of spent fuel.

Flier of Chairman Gregory Jaczko's Talk

• asia
• cap & trade
• economics
• impacts
• nuclear