In the News

It is impossible to ignore the incongruity of the Trump administration’s latest attack on environmental protection with the dire effects of climate change now being felt around the world. Thousands have fled burning towns in Australia and California, helpless in the face of catastrophic wildfires, and Arctic sea ice is declining at an unprecedented rate. Rather than develop even modest solutions to this grave crisis, the Trump administration has focused its efforts on a newly unveiled proposal to weaken the United States’ bedrock environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act, enacted in 1970.

Trump’s efforts to cut regulatory red tape have been praised by industry. But they have so far largely backfired by triggering waves of lawsuits that the administration has lost in court, according to a running tally by the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

The White House on Thursday will introduce the first major changes to the nation’s benchmark environmental protection law in more than three decades. Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, said he did not believe the changes would hold up in court. In fact, he argued, it is more likely that federal agencies will be sued for inadequate reviews, “thereby leading to far longer delays than if they had done a proper analysis in the first place.”

When a cost is placed on CO2 — either explicitly, through a tax or cap-and-trade system, or implicitly, by subsidizing clean competitors — the result is a more effective market, not a “distorted” one. Externalities have been internalized. It is the companies that aren’t being charged for CO2 pollution that are distorting the market. (The Institute for Policy Integrity has a good report on Capacity Markets and Externalities.)

The Trump administration said the decision to exit the Paris agreement was made because of its “unfair economic burden” on the U.S. economy. These dire predictions about the costs of addressing climate change have been a mainstay of the administration’s rhetoric since its beginning. Yet at times when it was convenient to take the opposite position, the administration has argued that climate regulations in fact impose no costs on the economy. These contradictory efforts have been used to protect the coal industry at the expense of the American people

Policy makers and regulators around the country are trying to figure out how to rapidly decarbonize the electricity sector. There are debates about what renewable goals states should have, by when, what should count as clean energy, and how much energy efficiency states should invest in. These debates overlook the most important tool we can rely on to achieve our clean-energy goals: markets and price signals.

New York’s economy could stand to gain more than $3 billion if the state’s electric grid operator adopts a simple policy change: putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. This is the conclusion of a new study released by the New York Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s electricity grid.

When companies produce and sell harmful products, even if the full extent of the danger isn’t initially clear, they should pay to help remedy the damage done. Whatever challenges are involved in arriving at those solutions shouldn’t be mistaken for reasons to let fossil-fuel companies off the hook.

“The Trump administration is on very weak footing in its attempt to revoke the waiver,” said Richard L. Revesz, an environmental and regulatory law expert at New York University’s law school. He added that the “action is unprecedented” and that the Clean Air Act “does not contemplate the possibility that the federal government would revoke a waiver that had already been granted.”

When the Trump administration finalized its repeal of the Obama-era Clean Water Rule last month, it also quietly updated an economic analysis of the repeal’s costs and benefits. Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, faulted the new analysis for only focusing on how the repeal would affect individual states, instead of looking at how varied levels of state waterway protections could lower water quality in states with strong protections if they are downstream of those that are more lax.