Study: State-level adoption of renewable energy standards saves money and lives
In the absence of federal adoption of climate change policy, states and municipalities in the United States have been taking action on their own. In particular, 29 states and the District of Columbia have enacted renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) requiring that a certain fraction of their electricity mix come from renewable power technologies, such as wind or solar. But now some states are rethinking their RPSs. A few are making them more stringent, but many more are relaxing or even repealing them. To Noelle Eckley Selin, an associate professor in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and Emil Dimanchev SM ’18, a senior research associate at the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, that’s a double concern: The RPSs help protect not only the global climate, but also human health. Past studies by Selin and others have shown that national-level climate...