Chapter 30 Exercises

These exercises move from data-gathering to argument construction. Several connect to the running Democracy Audit project for your district. Several involve real federal data sources — most produced by the agencies the chapter describes — that you can access at no cost.

Exercise 1: Pull EPA emissions data for your state

The EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) tracks emissions from large facilities (facilities emitting more than 25,000 metric tons of CO2-equivalent per year). Visit the EPA's Facility Level Information on Greenhouse gases Tool (FLIGHT) at ghgdata.epa.gov.

  1. Filter to your state.
  2. Sort facilities by total reported emissions, descending.
  3. Identify the top 10 emitting facilities. What sector is each in (power, refining, cement, chemicals, etc.)?
  4. Compare the top emitter's reported emissions to your state's total inventory (available from EPA's State Inventory and Projection Tool). What percentage does the single largest facility represent?
  5. Look at the trend for your state's largest emitter over the past decade. Has its reported emissions risen, fallen, or remained roughly flat? What is the most plausible cause of the trend you observe (fuel switching, output change, efficiency, regulation)?

Write a 400–500 word memo summarizing what you found. Cite specific facility names and reported emissions figures.

Exercise 2: Analyze a recent EPA rule

Visit regulations.gov and find the docket for one of the following rules:

  • Standards of Performance for New, Reconstructed, and Modified Sources and Emissions Guidelines for Existing Sources: Oil and Natural Gas Sector Climate Review (the 2024 methane rule)
  • Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles (the 2024 vehicle rule)
  • New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions From New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units (the 2024 power-plant rule)

Once you have the docket open:

  1. Read the executive summary of the final rule (or proposed rule, if final has not been published).
  2. Read three substantive comments — one from an industry trade association, one from an environmental advocacy group, and one from a state government.
  3. Identify the specific points of disagreement. Are they about the rule's authority, its cost-benefit analysis, its specific provisions, or something else?
  4. Identify what the rule cites as its statutory authority. Does the major-questions doctrine seem likely to apply, given what West Virginia v. EPA held?
  5. Track whether the rule is currently in litigation, and at what stage.

Write a 500–600 word analysis of the rule's substantive content and the contested issues.

Exercise 3: Trace the Inflation Reduction Act in your state

The IRA's clean-energy investments have flowed unevenly across states. Several public datasets track the flow:

  • The Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office reports project announcements.
  • The Treasury reports tax-credit utilization at aggregate levels.
  • Climate Power and the BlueGreen Alliance (left-of-center sources) maintain project trackers.
  • The American Clean Power Association maintains industry data.
  • Research firms (Princeton's REPEAT Project, BloombergNEF, Wood Mackenzie) publish state-by-state analyses.

For your state:

  1. Identify the largest announced clean-energy or clean-manufacturing project of the past three years.
  2. Determine the IRA-related tax credits or other federal support that contributed.
  3. Identify the congressional district(s) where the project is located.
  4. Determine the partisan affiliation of the representative(s) and the senators.
  5. Examine whether those officials voted for or against the IRA in 2022, and whether they voted for or against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025 (which partially repealed the IRA).

Write a 400–500 word analysis. The interesting cases are usually those where a Republican district received substantial IRA investment.

Exercise 4: Steel-man permitting reform

Read three sources on permitting reform:

  • A progressive-coded source: Ezra Klein's Abundance (2025) or recent Klein columns; Jerusalem Demsas's The Atlantic essays on housing and infrastructure permitting; Robinson Meyer's Heatmap newsletter pieces on the topic.
  • A conservative-coded source: Tyler Cowen's columns and Marginal Revolution posts on state capacity; AEI work on environmental policy; National Review coverage of permitting.
  • A defender-of-existing-NEPA source: Sierra Club commentary; Earthjustice statements; academic work by environmental-law scholars (e.g., Michael Burger at the Sabin Center).

Write a 500–600 word memo that:

  1. Identifies the strongest substantive argument for streamlining NEPA review, in language a defender of NEPA would recognize as fair.
  2. Identifies the strongest substantive argument against streamlining, in language a streamlining advocate would recognize as fair.
  3. Identifies a specific design provision (page limits, time limits, scope rules, standing rules) where the two camps could plausibly converge.

Do not pick a side. The exercise is steel-manning.

Exercise 5: Democracy Audit — energy infrastructure in your district

Apply the chapter to your congressional district.

  1. Identify the largest power plant or other energy facility in your district. What does it run on? Who owns it? What was its capacity factor last year?
  2. Identify any pending energy-infrastructure projects in your district (transmission lines, pipelines, renewable-energy projects, etc.) using state public-utility-commission filings.
  3. Identify your representative's most recent vote on a significant environmental or energy bill. What did they say in their public statement explaining the vote?
  4. Identify any environmental enforcement actions in your district in the past three years (EPA's ECHO database is a starting point).
  5. Write a 600–800 word audit summarizing your findings and noting which institutions (federal, state, local) appear to have the most influence on energy outcomes in your district.

Exercise 6: Carbon pricing thought experiment

Assume Congress is considering a carbon tax of $50 per metric ton of CO2, rising 5% per year, with revenue rebated to households on an equal per-capita basis.

  1. Estimate the impact on a gallon of gasoline. (Burning a gallon of gasoline produces roughly 8.9 kg of CO2.)
  2. Estimate the impact on the price of natural gas-fired electricity. (Roughly 0.4 kg CO2 per kWh.)
  3. Estimate the per-capita rebate, assuming U.S. emissions of roughly 5 billion metric tons.
  4. Identify the income range at which a household would be roughly net-neutral on the policy (rebate equals incremental energy costs).
  5. Identify which voters would be net winners and which would be net losers, and the geographic distribution.

Write a 400–500 word analysis. This exercise is purely descriptive — calculate the numbers, do not advocate for or against the policy.

Exercise 7: The transition pace question

Some of the most contested questions in current climate policy are not about whether the energy transition is happening but about how fast it should happen and who pays for the speed.

Identify three published positions on the right transition pace:

  • A "rapid transition" position (e.g., from a major environmental NGO, a progressive think tank, or an IPCC scenario).
  • A "managed transition" position (e.g., from a centrist policy organization, a major utility's integrated resource plan, or a moderate think tank).
  • A "skeptical of mandates" position (e.g., from AEI, the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, or a fossil-fuel industry trade association).

Write a 400–500 word analysis of where each side agrees, where each side disagrees, and what specific policy choices follow from each position.

Exercise 8: Adaptation case study

Choose a region of the United States that is facing a substantial adaptation challenge:

  • Florida coast (hurricane and sea-level rise)
  • California wildland-urban interface (wildfire)
  • Phoenix metro (extreme heat)
  • Louisiana coast (subsidence and storm surge)
  • Vermont (inland flooding)
  • Alaska coastal villages (permafrost degradation)

For your chosen region:

  1. Identify the specific physical risk and recent trend data.
  2. Identify the relevant insurance market dynamics (private retreat, state-backed insurers, premium trends).
  3. Identify federal adaptation programs that apply (NFIP, FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grants, BRIC, USACE projects).
  4. Identify state and local responses.
  5. Identify the political contestation, if any, and which actors are aligned how.

Write a 500–700 word case study.

Exercise 9: The federal-lands pendulum

Federal-lands policy on extraction has swung substantially across administrations. Document the swings for one of the following resources:

  • Onshore oil and gas leasing on Bureau of Land Management lands.
  • Offshore oil and gas leasing on the Outer Continental Shelf.
  • Coal leasing on federal lands.
  • Timber harvest on national forest lands.
  • Critical mineral mining permits.

For your chosen resource, build a timeline covering 2009 (Obama) through the present, identifying:

  1. Major policy changes by administration (executive orders, secretarial orders, leasing schedules, rule changes).
  2. The total acres or volume affected by each policy change.
  3. Litigation that has tracked each change.
  4. State-level pushback or support for each change.
  5. The current state as of 2025.

Write a 500–600 word policy memo summarizing the pendulum and its costs in regulatory uncertainty. Note: this exercise is descriptive. It does not ask you to advocate a particular leasing posture.

Exercise 10: International climate accounting

The Paris Agreement uses Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) — country-level commitments to emissions trajectories. The U.S. NDC has changed across administrations.

  1. Find the current U.S. NDC commitment (if one is in force, given the 2025 withdrawal).
  2. Compare to the most recent prior commitment (the Biden 2021 NDC of 50–52% below 2005 levels by 2030).
  3. Find the current Chinese NDC, the Indian NDC, and the European Union NDC.
  4. Calculate the share of global emissions covered by countries with substantial 2030 mitigation commitments versus those without.
  5. Examine the IEA Net Zero Emissions Scenario or the IPCC AR6 Working Group III scenarios. Compare the implied 2030 emissions trajectory to what the current NDCs collectively imply.

Write a 400–500 word memo. The exercise is meant to give you a sense of the gap between the international policy framework and the physics of the problem.

Exercise 11: The transition's labor question

The decline of fossil-fuel employment has been concentrated in specific places. Choose one of the following coal communities:

  • Boone County, West Virginia
  • Campbell County, Wyoming
  • Pike County, Kentucky
  • Belmont County, Ohio
  • Mingo County, West Virginia

For your chosen county:

  1. Identify the peak coal-employment year and the current coal-employment level.
  2. Identify federal "just transition" programs that have flowed to the area (POWER Initiative, Build Back Better Regional Challenge, IRA energy-community bonus credits, etc.).
  3. Identify what alternative employment, if any, has emerged.
  4. Identify out-migration or population trends.
  5. Identify how the area voted in the past three presidential elections.

Write a 400–500 word analysis. The point of the exercise is to confront the gap between national policy aspirations and local economic reality.

A note on writing

Several of these exercises ask you to steel-man positions you may not personally hold. This is not a trick. The discipline of stating the strongest version of an opposing argument is the single best protection against the most common failure mode in political analysis — concluding that the people you disagree with are stupid, venal, or motivated by bad faith. Most of the time, on policy questions of any complexity, the people who disagree with you are responding to features of the problem you are not weighting, or holding values you do not share, or projecting consequences you do not predict. Your political analysis is sharper, not duller, when you can articulate their position so well that they would recognize themselves in it.

That discipline matters more in environmental and energy policy than in many other domains, because the stakes are large, the disagreements are real, and the temptation to dismiss the other side is strong on both sides. The exercises ask you to resist the temptation. The grade reflects how well you do.