In the News

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.”

“It would have a chilling effect on anything California would do,” said Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. “Any state that does something significant is going to have to worry about finding itself in the cross hairs of federal litigation.”

Just as there is a danger of climatic feedback loops, there is a danger of what Peter Howard and Michael Livermore (of NYU and UVA Law Schools respectively) call, in a recent Harvard Law Review paper, “sociopolitical feedbacks.” Prudence suggests acting aggressively while coordinated action is still possible.

“This court decision is very good news for public health in many parts of the country,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, said in a statement. Revesz said the Trump administration “has consistently flouted” a core obligation of the Clean Air Act, to protect the air quality of downwind states that suffer from excessive upwind pollution. “A number of related cases are pending and this decision may be the harbinger of further defeats for the EPA,” he said.