Blog

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. regulatory system is experiencing a welcome renaissance, changing the way agencies see their role in society and the relationship between policymaking and public participation. However, the regulatory process is still providing outsized opportunities for large, sophisticated "repeat players" to shape our public protections because of the “two-tiered” nature of public participation that currently exists.

Watch Center President Rob Verchick's interview on MSNBC with Richard Liu on record-setting heat, climate resilience, and his latest book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage.

On an episode of Connect the Dots, host Rob Verchick speaks with the co-founder of Navajo Power, Brett Isaac, about his commitment to increasing economic viability and energy reliability on tribal lands.

The main reason to control carbon is to protect the climate. But cleaning up the energy system has plenty of other benefits. Those benefits will flow to people in rural areas as well as urban ones, to national security and international development, and to nature itself.

This is the fourth in a series of episodes in season seven of Connect the Dots, the Center for Progressive Reform’s podcast on climate solutions. Subsequent posts will be posted throughout the summer. Episode four—“Climate Win: Bipartisan Support in Climate Legislation”—features guests Stacy Brenner, a state senator representing Maine’s 30th district, and Jack Shapiro of […]

This is the third in a series about episodes in season seven of Connect the Dots, the Center for Progressive Reform’s podcast on climate solutions. Subsequent posts will be posted throughout the summer. Episode three, “Energy Justice and Community Solar Power,” takes listeners to North Carolina and reveals how community solar has the power to lower […]

The federal Inflation Reduction Act and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) most recent power plant rules are big wins for climate and the environment. However, they both have their shortcomings, and one of them is their reliance on carbon capture and storage technologies to reach ambitious climate emissions goals. As a new Center for Progressive Reform report shows, carbon capture technologies are unproven and pose significant risks, especially to communities in states like Louisiana that are already overburdened by pollution.

When pollution from a neighboring freeway was seeping into the playground and classrooms of her middle school, Adah Crandall said enough was enough. She founded an Environmental Justice Club at her school and began protesting the freeway's proposed expansion, citing health hazards to children and an unsustainable future.

The scientific concept of net-zero emissions has quickly become an organizing policy paradigm, enshrined in the Paris Agreement and manifested in thousands of “net-zero” pledges developed by countries, states, cities, and private companies. Collectively, these pledges now purport to cover more than 91 percent of the global economy. If this figure sounds too good to be true, that’s because it likely is. Net zero is anti-democratic, inequitable, and imperial. For related reasons that I focus on in this post, it is also unlikely to work as a strategy to achieve the collective global aim of net-zero carbon emissions.