The Cefa Brief

ComentáriosConstataçõesPerspectivasExplicativos

Tema

Environment & Climate

Emissions, adaptation, land and the permits that govern building on it.

6 textos

Textos

  • PerspectivaEnergy & Power

    The stages of an energy transition that have to come first are the ones the national record does not count

    The ten-year Treasury yield rose from 0.89 percent in 2020 to 4.29 in 2025 while crude ran from 39 dollars a barrel to 95 and back to 65, so both terms of a transition's first calculation moved in every year the plant was going up. The record that counts plant and vehicles closely does not count generation, transmission or interconnection at all.

  • ComentárioIndustrial Policy

    A facility count is not a pollution count

    Our environment dataset holds one number per state, the count of facilities reporting to the EPA Toxics Release Inventory. It is a measure of industrial density, the file says so plainly, and I am not going to chart it.

  • ExplicativoInfrastructure

    What a permitting timeline is made of

    A permit is the last document in a sequence, not a single decision. By the end you will be able to name the separate stages a permitting clock runs through, and say which of them a given reform would actually shorten.

  • ComentárioEnvironmental Permitting

    Whether permitting is slow can only be answered by counting the applications still waiting

    Housing units authorised by permit fell from an annual rate of 1734 thousand units in 2021 to 1431 in 2025, a drop of 303. That series counts decisions leaving the permitting system and never the applications sitting inside it, and a count of departures is consistent with any waiting time at all.

  • ComentárioInfrastructure

    The permit counts say permitting is not the binding constraint on American delivery

    Housing units authorised by permit fell in each of the four years to 2025, from an annual rate of 1734 thousand units to 1431, while spending on manufacturing plant rose from an annual rate of 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 in 2024. Neither series records a waiting time, so neither can show a queue; plant spending fell 29 billion in 2025, the year the policy rate came down.

  • ComentárioDevelopment Finance

    Adaptation keeps losing to mitigation because an avoided loss is not a cash flow

    The ten-year Treasury averaged 0.89 percent in 2020 and 4.29 percent in 2025, and at those rates a dollar of avoided damage arriving in thirty years is worth 76.7 cents and 28.4 cents. Turning that dollar into a cash flow needs a named obligor, and the party that funds a defence is rarely the party whose balance sheet it repairs.