In the News

“It's tricky to know how it's going to play out until the Supreme Court decides another major questions case,” said Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity, which supports the Biden EPA's rules.
But Hankins said both the near-term rule and EPA’s forthcoming post-2027 regulation are extending strategies used in prior rules.
“EPA has been issuing these greenhouse gas regulations for almost 15 years at this point,” they said. “And every single rule, they've indicated that they expect increasing numbers of electric vehicles.”

Last month, the U.S. Forest Service decided to move forward with a logging project on the border of Yellowstone National Park without applying the new White House guidance, which would have involved a detailed projection of the resulting greenhouse gas emissions. “There’s no perfect way to contextualize greenhouse gas emissions,” said Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. “I think the ways that CEQ suggests—particularly, the social costs of greenhouse gases and considering carbon budgets and climate commitments—is really a thoughtful way to show what the emissions mean.” 

The Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, which had backed the Biden administration in the 5th Circuit litigation, celebrated the court’s ruling. “Louisiana’s lawsuit against the government’s climate-damage valuations was doomed from the start due to a lack of standing,” Max Sarinsky, senior attorney for the institute, wrote in an email. “Although the challengers briefly prevailed last year, the district court decision granting their requested relief was widely derided across the political spectrum for misapplying legal doctrines, mischaracterizing facts (including a Constitutional provision), and prioritizing unsupported allegations over Nobel Prize-winning economics.”

Two key Hill Democrats and a legal think tank are backing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) against fuels sector and GOP states’ legal claims that the agency improperly factored zero emission vehicles (ZEV) into its baseline for fuel economy standards, building on the agency’s defense in the suit. An amicus brief from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) builds upon NHTSA’s arguments that EPCA does not preempt accounting for ZEV deploying in the regulatory baseline.

In this episode, we attempt to illustrate what daily life could be like as the earth warms to 3°C.  Dr. Peter Howard of the Institute for Policy Integrity discusses some of the likely economic and societal changes.

Known as the Climate Change Super Fund, the legislation was included in the Senate’s one-house budget proposal, but didn’t make it into the Assembly’s proposition. Lawmakers are pushing for the bill to make it into the final budget due April 1. Rachel Rothschild, who provided legal research for New York’s superfund bill, said fossil fuel companies will most likely fight the legislation by claiming carbon emissions are an international problem, not a state issue.

A massive coalition of health, environmental and civic groups – including Environmental Defense Fund – laid out a full-throated defense of EPA’s clean car standards in a brief filed today in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Forcing oil companies to cover New York’s climate costs will not raise the price of gas or home heating. According to an analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law, because companies’ payments would be based on historical contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, oil companies would have to treat these as one-time fixed costs.

Environmentalists are bracing for the Biden administration to approve Willow. If it does, it’s unclear what difference a higher social cost metric would have made. “In theory — and this is what advocates have been saying — the agency could conduct some sort of weighing of costs and benefits,” said Max Sarinsky. “And there the social cost of carbon could factor prominently ... But right now, that's not what they do,” he added. “In most cases, that has meant ‘If there's an interest in fossil fuel development, we're going to approve it.’”

Environmental advocates have insisted for years on the need to robustly account for climate impacts when permitting fossil-fuel infrastructure. Courts and agencies are starting to listen. A recent decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and a new guidance document from the White House Council on Environmental Quality mark the latest developments in ensuring that federal agencies consider climate-change impacts before greenlighting fossil-fuel projects.