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The Trump administration’s estimate of the social cost of climate change is seven times lower than the amount used during the Obama administration, according to a Tuesday report by the Government Accountability Office. Richard Revesz, Lawrence King professor of law and dean emeritus at NYU School of Law and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, said the GAO’s documentation of “ignoring the best science available” will weaken the Trump administration’s efforts to uphold its environmental deregulation in court. “This is yet another example of how the administration is ignoring science and economics in its policy decisions,” Revesz said. “Pretending that climate change will have virtually no impacts on Americans is completely disingenuous, and the resulting policy failures could have terrible consequences.”

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity and professor of law and dean emeritus at NYU School of Law, suggested the GAO's findings provide "yet another example of how the administration is ignoring science and economics in its policy decisions."

“I think all of this will come back to haunt Trump,” says Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. “By making very aggressive use of tools to dismantle the policies of the prior administration, Trump has made it easier for the next administration to do the same. Once the norms are broken, it's easier for the next administration to follow what looks like the new normal.”

Recent groundbreaking legal and business decisions mark a turning point for longstanding advocacy against pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. And while they don’t represent any sort of change of heart in the federal government, they can be understood as examples of the laws we already had on the books working—and working particularly well in the face of incompetence. They also serve as a harbinger of future costly outcomes, especially when agencies and project proponents cut corners rather than fully analyze environmental effects and engage the public in decision making.

The rulings showed that in key instances Trump's administration has been unable to craft high-profile policies that will stand up in court. The administration has lost 79 out of 85 cases involving federal agencies on deregulatory or policy issues tracked by the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank connected to New York University School of Law.

A mysterious group has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to kill net metering. FERC should say no – not because net metering should last forever, but because states, not the feds, have the tools needed to reform it.

Richard Revesz of NYU’s School of Law and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity filed the amicus brief on behalf of Maryland and Delaware. He said the ruling made clear the EPA is obligated to prevent states from harming the air quality of their neighboring states when emissions travel downwind and “can’t cite cost as a reason to ignore the law altogether.”

The vanishing of the daily commute has brought to light the burden of cars and trucks on health and the environment. As an intentional effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, at low cost to society, policymakers and businesses should continue to encourage working from home for jobs that allow it, even after the coronavirus crisis has receded.

Looking at three proceedings, completed within weeks of one another, exposes the shameless analytic opportunism of the Trump EPA. The result is a slate of deregulatory actions that put thousands of lives at risk each year, cause serious adverse health impacts on many more, and impose net harms on the American people. A heedless commitment to dangerous deregulation is the only logic that explains its actions.

Senate Republicans are worried that BlackRock could take climate change–related financial risks into account in making its securities purchase recommendations, as the firm has pledged to do when shaping its own investment strategies. If BlackRock is going to make the best decisions for American taxpayers, it must be allowed to assess these climate risks as it does for other clients.