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Kevin Poloncarz

Kevin Poloncarz represents a broad range of clients on policy, regulatory, litigation, commercial, and enforcement matters involving air quality, climate change, and clean energy. He co-chairs the firm’s Environmental Practice Group and Energy Industry Group.

Mr. Poloncarz is ranked by Chambers USA among the nation’s leading climate change attorneys and California’s leading environmental lawyers, with sources describing him as “a phenomenal” and “tremendous lawyer.” He was named an “Energy & Environmental Trailblazer” by the National Law Journal in 2017 and was inducted as a Fellow of the American College of Environmental Lawyers in 2018.

He has extensive experience with California’s Cap-and-Trade Program, Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS), and is recognized as a leading advisor on carbon markets. He also assists energy-sector clients in obtaining and defending state and federal approvals for major projects throughout California.

Mr. Poloncarz also assists clients with the development and execution of legislative and policy strategies supporting decarbonization, including carbon capture and sequestration, low-carbon fuels, advanced transportation and energy storage, and is a registered lobbyist in California and Oregon.

Contact:Read more about Kevin PoloncarzEmail

This blog is the nineteenth in our series, “The ABC’s of the AJP.”

Increasing grid-scale energy storage in the United States is a critical part of infrastructure development.  President Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) would place investments in energy storage at the center of his goals of achieving a net-zero electricity sector by 2035 and making the electricity grid more resilient.  These investments would also support the Administration’s efforts to secure an end-to-end domestic supply chain for high-capacity batteries and the critical minerals that go into them.
Continue Reading Scaling Energy Storage Solutions and Securing Supply Chains

This post is the 17th in our series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

President Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) sends strong signals in support of carbon capture and sequestration as an important tool to achieve the President’s ambitious decarbonization objectives.
Continue Reading Qualifying Carbon Capture and Storage under 45Q: How Biden’s Infrastructure Plan and Congressional Action May Provide a Realistic Role for CCS in Achieving Net Zero

This blog is the twelfth in our series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

Power lines, strung between high-voltage transmission towers, are etched across the American landscape. Yet the United States’ current transmission infrastructure is outdated and inefficient, plagued by bottlenecks and weak interconnections across regions, which limit the grid’s ability to integrate renewable generation and its overall resilience. Improving and expanding the Nation’s transmission infrastructure is therefore central to the American Jobs Plan’s (AJP) grid modernization, decarbonization and job-creation goals.
Continue Reading Lines, Labor and Leveraging Capital: How the AJP Would Upgrade Transmission Infrastructure

This is the tenth in our series on “The ABCs of the AJP.”

Jobs, unsurprisingly, are at the heart of the Biden Administration’s ambitious, multi-trillion dollar infrastructure plan.  After all, the plan also goes by the name The American Jobs Plan (“AJP”).  Each of the sweeping goals of the AJP—from addressing climate change, to developing a resilient electricity grid, to competing with China over clean energy supply chains—promises to create thousands of new jobs.
Continue Reading Jumpstarting A Cleaner, More Resilient Economy With Jobs

This blog is the eighth in a series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

The latest Energy Transition technology now attracting massive investment and policy attention is “green hydrogen” produced using renewable energy to separate hydrogen from water that can be used both for bulk energy storage and then used to fuel gas-fired power plants or hard-to-abate sectors such as manufacturing, shipping and long-haul trucking.   President Biden’s American Jobs Plan matches that level of investment and attention by proposing 15 decarbonized hydrogen demonstration projects in distressed communities and by including hydrogen among an additional $15 billion increase in funding for climate R&D priorities.  The AJP also includes an expansion of production tax credits for energy storage, that has led to the introduction of at least one bill — SB 1017 – endorsed by the American Clean Power Association proposing a $3/kg tax credit for green hydrogen. …
Continue Reading Hastening the Hydrogen Economy

This blog is the fifth in a series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

President Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) would mobilize $2.2 trillion in investment to address climate change and create jobs for Americans. According to the White House, “unlike past major investments, the plan prioritizes addressing long-standing and persistent racial injustice,” in part by “target[ing] 40 percent of the benefits of climate and clean infrastructure investments to disadvantaged communities.” These investments would give life to the President’s “Justice40 Initiative,” established by his January 27, 2021, Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad (EO). …
Continue Reading Ending Environmental Injustice with Infrastructure Investment

This blog is the third in a series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

An animating principle of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) is the urgency to address climate change.  But a cross-current is competition with China.  This comes through not as subtext, but as the stated purpose.  According to the White House, “the President’s plan will unify and mobilize the country to meet the great challenges of our time: the climate crisis and the ambitions of an autocratic China.”…

Continue Reading The Climate Crisis and China

Today, on Earth Day, the United States made a bold move to resume international leadership on climate change by announcing the United States’ new target to achieve a 50 to 52 percent reduction in economy-wide greenhouse gas pollution from 2005 levels by 2030.  The President announced the target on the first day of the Leaders Summit on Climate, which he is hosting to raise ambition and set the stage for a successful United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) later this year in Glasgow.
Continue Reading The United States’ New Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) and the ABCs of the American Jobs Plan (AJP)

On March 25, 2021, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act (“GGPPA”), which establishes a national pricing benchmark for greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions. Reference re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, case numbers 38663, 38781, and 39116. Several provinces challenged the law, arguing that it was unconstitutional and that it imposed unlawful taxes. In upholding the constitutionality of Canada’s federal pricing program, the decision is a strong affirmation of the need to impose a uniform price on carbon emissions across jurisdictions and has some significant “upshot” implications for businesses and policymakers in the United States.
Continue Reading Canada Given Green Light to Carbon Pricing: The Supreme Court of Canada Upholds the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act

The Biden Administration has promulgated interim figures for the social cost of carbon (SCC), which will support key policy efforts in the next year until a final, revised figure can be established.
Continue Reading Biden Issues Interim Social Cost of Carbon, Paving the Way for A Climate Agenda