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  • Trump Administration Declines to Tighten Soot Rules, Despite Link to Covid Deaths

    The Trump administration on Monday declined to tighten controls on industrial soot emissions, disregarding an emerging scientific link between dirty air and Covid-19 death rates. “Given the deadly nature of this pollutant, my advice to the new administration would be to very quickly embark on the process to make the standard more stringent,” said Richard Revesz, an expert on environmental law at New York University.

  • Biden Can Use the GSA for Climate Policy, Not a Power Grab

    Federal investments and procurement choices can either reinforce the status quo, or provide a template for a broader societal shift toward a low-emissions economy. Improved GSA policies could reduce emissions across the entire federal government.

  • Trump Administration Pushes ‘Midnight Regulations’ After Breaking Records for Final-Year Rulemaking

    Rushing the process could make the rules more vulnerable to legal challenges. A number of Trump administration rules that were finalized remain in court, where the administration has failed to successfully defend the majority of its policy changes, according to the Institute for Policy Integrity.

  • ‘Reading the Tea Leaves’: The Future of OIRA Under Biden

    "I don't think cost-benefit analysis is something that can just be washed away," said Ricky Revesz, a New York University law professor whose name has been mentioned as a potential Biden OIRA administrator. Jason Schwartz, who works at NYU Law's Institute for Policy Integrity, added, "What we've seen from courts in recent years is almost a requirement: If you haven't meaningfully considered cost and benefit in some way, we are going to look at that very skeptically."

  • California Might Matter More than Biden for EV Sales

    The Golden State could steer the country toward an electric future regardless of whether President-elect Joe Biden takes aggressive steps to promote clean cars. "You could see significant progress through a California waiver request and then the piggybacking on California standards by Section 177 states," said Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity and an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law.

  • How Biden Can Put the U.S. on a Path to Carbon-Free Electricity

    Congress enacted a law in 2005 that granted the Department of Energy the authority to designate “national interest electric transmission corridors” where new lines are needed, and it gave FERC authority to override state inaction on lines in these corridors. But this law has been ineffective, largely failing to speed up expansion of transmission lines. As shown in a report about to be issued by Columbia’s Center for Global Energy Policy and New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, the law can and should be revived.

  • Reviving Regulatory Rationality

    For decades, there has been a bipartisan consensus that federal agencies should base their decisions on evidence, expertise, and analysis. But under the Trump Administration, inconvenient evidence has often been ignored, experts have been sidelined, and analysis has been misused to intentionally obscure important truths. In this episode, we talk to Prof. Michael Livermore (University of Virginia School of Law) and Prof. Richard Revesz (New York University School of Law) to discuss current challenges as well as considerations for the road ahead. Their new book, Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health, offers analysis on critical aspects of the regulatory process and calls for the reinstatement of expertise, sound cost-benefit analysis, and the rule of law in public administration.

  • SCC Experts Back Environmentalists’ NEPA Appeal

    Two amicus briefs -- one from Ricky Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University, and another from University of Chicago economics professor Michael Greenstone -- were submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which is hearing environmental groups’ appeal seeking to vacate the NEPA review by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation & Enforcement for failing to use the SCC to assess the coal mine’s climate harms.

  • Unglamorous White House ‘Prune’ Job Critical to Biden Agenda

    Without strong backing in Congress to carry out his campaign promises, Biden will need expert leadership over the little-known White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. There are few people with the economics and policy expertise to take on the role. The likely candidates mentioned by academics and congressional staff for Biden’s OIRA administrator are familiar faces in the regulatory community, including Richard Revesz at New York University.

  • Early Test for Biden: Car Emissions Rules

    As one of his biggest steps to tackle climate change, President-elect Joe Biden is expected to undo President Trump's rollback of clean car standards and set new auto emissions rules. But experts have one pressing question for the former vice president: How aggressive will the new tailpipe rules be? "The big-picture question for me is what the eventual standards will look like," said Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law.