Climate Change Opinions
Members of Congress have offered a wide range of responses to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Synthesis Report, demonstrating the partisan divide over climate change. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) released a statement that the climate report would “cripple the global economy,” and Representative Eliot Engel (D-NY) emphasized that “irreversible problems” could result if the report’s findings were ignored.
While Democrats and Republicans may be divided in Congress, a new Resources article reveals that the American public largely supports taking action to mitigate climate change. RFF University Fellow Jon Krosnick of Stanford writes: “Our surveys suggest that Americans have been overwhelmingly ‘green’ on climate change issues for many years, despite a barrage of natural disasters, media events, and campaign speeches that one might have imagined would impact such opinions.
Clean Power Plan Impacts
Members of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), the utility-funded nonprofit regulator for US electricity distribution, say that the proposed timeline for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan “does not provide enough time to develop sufficient resources” to ensure the reliability of the electricity grid by the plan’s 2020 deadline. A report released by NERC suggests delaying the Clean Power Plan’s initial deadline to allow more grids to adopt “reliability enhancements.”
In an installment of RFF’s Expert Forum on the Clean Power Plan, RFF’s Dallas Burtraw comments on the ability of existing natural gas combined cycle units to increase their average capacity in order to meet the electricity demands of US grids as coal usage declines. Burtraw notes that increasing capacity to a 70 percent average—part of the Clean Power Plan’s building blocks— “could be more costly than what is revealed by recent trends for newer plants,” depending on where plants are located in the electricity system.
