Chapter 30 Further Reading

The following annotated bibliography covers the major substantive areas in environmental and energy policy. The selection deliberately includes voices across the political spectrum. Readers should sample widely; no single source covers the field.

Energy transition and policy analysis

David Roberts, Volts (Substack newsletter and podcast). Roberts is a left-of-center journalist who has covered energy and climate for two decades, first at Grist, then at Vox, now independent. Volts is detailed, technical, and policy-oriented. He is opinionated, but he engages with technical and policy questions seriously and is willing to argue with allies as well as opponents. Particularly useful for grid issues, transmission, electrification, and policy design.

Robinson Meyer and Heatmap News (heatmap.news). Meyer is a journalist, formerly at The Atlantic, who founded Heatmap as a dedicated climate-and-energy publication. Heatmap covers policy, technology, and markets with an emphasis on the political-economic constraints on climate action. Center-left orientation but engages with conservative views. Subscription required for some content.

Inside Climate News (insideclimatenews.org). Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit investigative journalism on environmental issues. Particularly strong on EPA enforcement, state-level developments, and corporate accountability. Center-left orientation; rigorous reporting.

Vox climate coverage. Solid policy-focused journalism, generally left-of-center but engages with policy trade-offs.

Bloomberg Green and BloombergNEF (bnef.com). Bloomberg's climate coverage is data-heavy, market-oriented, and generally neutral. BloombergNEF research on energy markets is widely cited across the political spectrum.

David Spence, Climate Policy: Hard Questions and Toxic Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Spence is a regulatory scholar at the University of Texas. The book examines the political economy of climate policy with substantial attention to regulatory design, federalism, and the trade-offs between different policy instruments. Centrist orientation; deeply informed by both political science and regulatory law.

Michael Burger and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law (Columbia University). The Sabin Center maintains comprehensive databases on climate litigation, regulatory developments, and state legislation. Their reports and the Climate Law Blog are essential references for anyone tracking legal developments. Generally pro-regulation orientation.

Jonathan Adler at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law. Center-right environmental-law scholar who has written extensively on the Clean Air Act, judicial review of agency action, and the major-questions doctrine. Useful counterpoint to the Sabin Center on regulatory law questions.

Climate science communication

Yale Project on Climate Change Communication (climatecommunication.yale.edu). Anthony Leiserowitz and colleagues have run the Climate Change in the American Mind surveys for more than a decade, producing the gold-standard data on American public opinion on climate. Their "Six Americas" segmentation (Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful, Dismissive) is widely used. Politically neutral; methodologically rigorous.

Andrew Dessler, Introduction to Modern Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, latest edition). Standard textbook treatment of climate science by a Texas A&M climate scientist. Accessible to non-specialists. Mainstream-consensus orientation.

Steven Koonin, Unsettled (BenBella, 2021). Former Obama administration Department of Energy undersecretary and physicist who argues that climate-change framing in policy and media has overstated certainty on specific points beyond what the IPCC literature supports. Koonin's status is contested: critics note that he often misreads or selectively cites the IPCC literature; defenders argue he raises legitimate questions about how climate science is communicated. Read with the understanding that climate scientists working in the field have largely rejected his framing while engaging with some of his specific points; included here so readers can engage with the strongest version of skepticism rather than caricatures.

Conservative and right-leaning sources

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution (marginalrevolution.com). Cowen is a center-right George Mason economist whose work on state capacity is directly relevant to permitting reform and infrastructure. He is willing to argue with conservatives as well as liberals. Particularly useful on the tension between environmental protection and infrastructure buildout.

American Enterprise Institute (aei.org) environmental and energy work. Benjamin Zycher, Mark Perry, and others publish AEI work on climate and energy policy. Generally skeptical of large-scale federal climate intervention; supportive of nuclear and natural gas. The strongest version of conservative arguments about climate policy design — particularly on cost-benefit analysis and federalism.

Roger Pielke Jr. Independent scholar (formerly at the University of Colorado-Boulder) focused on climate and disaster policy. Center-right; argues that climate policy has often relied on overstated extreme-weather attribution. His work on disaster economics is influential and contested. Read with attention to the methodological debates.

Bjorn Lomborg, False Alarm (Basic Books, 2020) and Best Things First (2023). Lomborg argues for adaptation focus and against high-cost mitigation policies, on cost-benefit grounds. His framing is contested by mainstream climate economists; his specific empirical claims are sometimes accepted and sometimes disputed. Useful for the strongest version of the "spend less on mitigation, more on adaptation" position.

Specific topic areas

On the Inflation Reduction Act: Princeton's REPEAT Project (repeatproject.org) provides the most cited modeling. The Rhodium Group provides commercial analysis. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the BlueGreen Alliance, and Climate Power provide left-of-center tracking. The American Petroleum Institute, the National Mining Association, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce provide industry tracking.

On permitting reform: Ezra Klein, Why We Can't Build, The Ezra Klein Show podcast, and the 2025 book Abundance (with Derek Thompson) provide the progressive case. Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic covers housing and infrastructure permitting. Eli Dourado at the Abundance Institute publishes useful policy work. The Niskanen Center publishes centrist-to-conservative permitting work. The Sierra Club and Earthjustice articulate the strongest defense of robust environmental review.

On nuclear: Breakthrough Institute (breakthroughjournal.org) provides eco-modernist analysis. Third Way provides centrist policy work. Nuclear Energy Institute (nei.org) provides industry perspective. Union of Concerned Scientists provides a conservation-environmentalist perspective that is now generally pro-existing-fleet, contested on new builds.

On federal lands: High Country News (hcn.org) covers Western land issues with substantial depth. Center for Western Priorities provides progressive analysis. American Lands Council and the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) provide more conservative perspectives.

On environmental justice: Robert Bullard's Dumping in Dixie (1990) is the foundational text. The EPA's environmental-justice office publishes data and reports. The Environmental Justice Foundation, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and similar groups articulate the policy advocacy case. Christopher Foreman's The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice (Brookings, 1998) remains the most rigorous critical analysis.

On climate adaptation and insurance: First Street Foundation (firststreet.org) publishes property-level climate-risk data. Risky Business Project produced influential early adaptation reports. Carolyn Kousky at the University of Pennsylvania is a leading scholar on flood insurance and climate finance.

Primary sources

  • EPA (epa.gov) — regulations, enforcement data, scientific reports
  • EIA (eia.gov) — energy statistics, the Annual Energy Outlook
  • DOE (energy.gov) — programs, loan office reports
  • Interior (doi.gov) — leasing data, federal-land statistics
  • NOAA (noaa.gov) — climate data, weather attribution
  • IPCC (ipcc.ch) — global scientific assessment
  • IEA (iea.org) — international energy data
  • regulations.gov — rulemaking dockets, public comments
  • Federal Register — published rules and notices
  • GovInfo (govinfo.gov) — congressional documents

How to read this literature

Climate policy is a domain where strong priors influence what people read and what they conclude. The most useful discipline for a serious reader is to follow at least one source on each side of the political spectrum, plus at least one centrist or technical source, plus the primary data. If your readings all point the same direction, you are missing something. If your conclusions never shift, your reading is not engaging the strongest counter-arguments. The chapter's recommended discipline is to steel-man the position you find least congenial — and to update your views, however slightly, when the strongest version of that position is more compelling than you expected.