I’m guest hosting Your Call’s Media Roundtable this morning at 10am PT. First, we’ll discuss the media coverage of Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker of the House this week, initiated by eight far-right members of his own party. McCarthy’s 269-day reign as speaker was ended by a 216-210 vote.
How is the media covering the extremists’ power play within the GOP? We’ll hear from:
- Mark Jacob, freelance writer, former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune and Sunday editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, and author of the website Stop the Presses
- John Nichols, national-affairs correspondent for The Nation and the co-author of It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism
Then we’ll talk about the new session of the Supreme Court, which started Monday. The justices will examine important cases on major issues such as free speech, gun rights, abortion, voting rights, and a case that could threaten the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and potentially numerous other federal agencies, among others.
Joining us to discuss will be Chris Geidner, award winning legal journalist, author and publisher of the website Law Dork.
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT. What comments or questions do you have for our guests? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
On today’s edition of Your Call’s Media Roundtable, we’ll discuss the latest developments in Sudan. On October 25, Sudan’s military seized power in a coup, arrested leading civilian politicians and declared a state of emergency. Since then, 42 people have been killed in mass anti-military protests. Hundreds have been arrested.
Joining us to provide the latest will be:
Isma’il Kushkush, a freelance Sudanese American journalist.
Plus, we’ll cover the future of abortion rights in the United States, as the Supreme Court heard arguments on Wednesday over a Mississippi abortion law that could gut or overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade landmark decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
We’ll be joined by:
Alanna Vagianos, Gender Reporter at HuffPost
Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for the Nation
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT. What comments or questions do you have for these reporters? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was a conservative justice, yet he occasionally voted with the four more mainstream justices on environmental issues. Presumably, his successor (if confirmed by this Republican-majority senate) will be more conservative. If that’s the case, here are three issue areas where a new Supreme Court could directly affect climate and energy progress:
- Federal Clean Power Plan: Kennedy was the crucial fifth vote on Massachusetts v. EPA, which held that the federal Clean Air Act required U.S. EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a pollutant. As a result of that ruling, the Obama Administration eventually proposed the Clean Power Plan, which would have compelled states to reduce carbon emissions from their power sectors. The regulation is tied up in litigation and likely to come before the U.S. Supreme Court. A new court could potentially overrule Massachusetts v EPA entirely or narrow EPA’s authority so much that it’s essentially meaningless. Notably, I believe the latter possibility would have been likely even with Kennedy on the bench.
- California’s waiver authority to regulate emissions beyond federal standards: the federal Clean Air Act allows California to set more aggressive standards than federal ones, provided EPA approves a waiver for the state to do so. Waivers were historically issued almost automatically, until George W. Bush came along and delayed approving one for California’s tailpipe emission standards. Now the Trump Administration is mulling going a step further: revoking previously granted waivers, such as the one to allow California to set tailpipe standards (which were harmonized with strong federal fuel economy standards under Obama, but since reneged on by Trump’s team). The U.S. Supreme Court will likely have to rule on EPA’s authority to revoke existing waivers, if Trump’s EPA chooses that course. The implications would be huge for California’s efforts to boost zero-emission vehicles.
- Regional grid management to promote clean technologies: the federal government has jurisdiction over wholesale power markets that cross state lines. So grid operators that seek to promote clean technologies, like renewable energy, energy storage, or demand response, often need federal agency approval. And the U.S. Supreme Court will occasionally hear cases on appeal. While the scope of these decisions is often narrow, they can affect regional efforts to reduce emissions from the power sector. A new court could potentially seek to undermine these efforts (although as E&E News describes [paywalled], these cases so far have been wonky and not subject to close partisan rulings by the justices).
Other cases could also affect climate policies, such as those involving federal agency regulation of methane emissions from oil-and-gas operations, as well as regulation involving other short-lived climate pollutants (described in E&E news [also paywalled]). But these three loom large for me.
Overall, Kennedy’s retirement is not good news for those who care about environmental protection, as I told the San Francisco Chronicle. But on the flip side, most of the action on climate right now is at the state and local level. Any federal progress will have to come from Congress, not from the courts. And that dynamic is now even more true now with Kennedy’s departure.
The future of a clean electricity grid will require more decentralization based on clean technology, like solar and energy storage. Large industrial customers are investing in these technologies and also signing up to moderate their electricity demand in response to larger grid needs (i.e. reducing usage when electricity becomes expensive and dirty to produce). Smaller users like homeowners can become part of a bundled, aggregated group that can produce the same effect as a single large user through automated software and payments that encourage reduced demand at key times.
Under an important federal regulation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) back in 2011, clean tech companies sell this aggregated change in demand (called “demand response”) to regional grid operators as a package deal. The reduced demand that these companies bundle helps to alleviate strain on the grid, lower economic costs on the wholesale power market, and reduce pollution in the process.
But as I wrote in October, the future of this arrangement was in doubt, with the Supreme Court considering a major challenge to the legality of FERC’s order 745, which enabled this aggregated demand response. The issue is that states control their in-state retail market, while the federal government through FERC can only regulate the wholesale power market across state lines. When FERC allowed clean tech companies to bundle changes in user demand through retail price signals and then sell that aggregated change in demand to regional grid operators in the wholesale power market, opponents argued that FERC was overstepping its bounds into areas under state jurisdiction. Think of it like a commerce clause challenge to FERC authority.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court decided today in a 6-2 vote (Alito recused himself, with Scalia and Thomas dissenting) that FERC’s order was a legitimate regulation under the agency’s wholesale interstate market jurisdiction. As Justice Kagan wrote:
It is a fact of economic life that the wholesale and retail markets in electricity, as in every other known product, are not hermetically sealed from each other. To the contrary, transactions that occur on the wholesale market have natural consequences at the retail level. And so too, of necessity, will FERC’s regulation of those wholesale matters.
The court found that FERC can regulate in areas that directly affect the wholesale power market, as in this demand response arrangement, and that a scheme to provide payments for users to moderate demand and then sell it on the wholesale power market does not constitute a direct setting of in-state retail rates, which would otherwise be under state jurisdiction.
The implications of this decision are critical not just for demand response but for other clean technologies as well. As states look to broaden their clean technology base outside of their boundaries, they’re going to need federal regulations to enable interstate coordination, sometimes grounded at the local level. For example, just as customers can aggregate their retail demand changes to sell to the wholesale power market, they may want to aggregate their on-site energy storage such as using the Tesla PowerWall battery. Or they may want to aggregate power they return to the grid from their plugged-in electric vehicles. Or they may want to share surplus solar power from their roofs across state lines.
The possibilities are myriad and all indispensable to a technology-driven approach to decarbonizing our grid. With the Court’s decision today, this innovation can continue, leading to further economic and environmental benefits for all electricity ratepayers.
