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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.

Our first episode of Connect the Dots Season 7 — Climate Win: Maryland’s Climate Solutions Now Act— takes us to Maryland for a major legislative win and its key elements to success. Verchick spoke with the Center’s Katlyn Schmitt, a senior policy analyst who helped steer the Climate Solutions Now Act into law last year.

There are ways to meet North Carolina's carbon reduction goals and protect ratepayers from catastrophic increases in the cost of electricity, but the regulatory system is set up in a way that makes it more difficult to get to this result.

Gone are the days when people thought little about energy policy — when little more was demanded than reliable access to electricity at affordable prices. Rather, more and more Americans are becoming aware how our energy choices are inextricably intertwined with other shared values. A new report from the Center for Progressive Reform looks at this growing awareness and more through the lens of energy democracy.

We’ve already started to hear claims that the Biden power plant rule falls under the major questions doctrine, which the U.S. Supreme Court used to strike down former President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Are those claims plausible?

Although the U.S. Constitution does not say so directly, the U.S. Supreme Court has said there are implied limits on state regulations that interfere with interstate commerce. This is known as the dormant commerce clause doctrine. State clean energy laws have been bedeviled by challenges based on this doctrine. The Supreme Court has just made it easier for states to fend off those claims.

Six years ago, Smithsonian Magazine was among those decrying the death of public intellectuals (“the egghead is dead”). Where are today’s Ralph Waldo Emersons or James Baldwins or Susan Sontags, they mourned. The article went on to offer a fascinating insight. History shows that “public intellectuals always emerged when the country was sharply divided: during the Civil War, the Vietnam War, the fights for civil rights and women’s rights.” In this moment of ever-deepening divide, it gives me great pleasure to announce that the Center for Progressive Reform welcomes five prominent academics to our network. The toll for the death of expertise may have been premature; long live public intellectuals!

Testifying before Congress, releasing new books, engaging with the news media — our Member Scholars packed virtually a year’s worth of advocacy on climate justice, clean air and water, and worker health and safety into the first three months of 2023.