In the News

In Utah v. Walsh, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk crisply and correctly rejected the plaintiffs’ farfetched attempt to rely on the major questions doctrine. Hopefully other lower courts will follow suit and apply the major questions doctrine only as set forth in the Supreme Court’s opinions, not as poorly summarized by litigants looking for an easy victory. Doing so should have the result the Supreme Court intended of applying the doctrine only in “extraordinary cases,” not in every run-of-the-mill challenge to federal agency action.

Supporters of a conference on capacity accreditation approaches for grid resources include Southern California Edison, Advanced Energy United and the Colorado Public Utilities Commission chair.

Breaking the law soon could get more expensive for companies and people who violate U.S. environmental regulations. That’s based on a White House directive from last month that looked at a complex calculation known as the social cost of greenhouse gases. Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, co-wrote a 2021 report that said basing penalty calculations in part on the social cost of greenhouse gases “internalize the climate-related harms from noncompliance, thereby punishing violators based on the damage caused and efficiently deterring future violations.” Sarinsky told E&E News in an interview that agencies may not be confined to considering traditional factors such as inflation when setting penalties.

Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, says that the problem is going to take a lot to be solved. "Drip pricing is really not good for anyone. It creates a race to the bottom, where all ticket sellers feel like they have to advertise deceptively low fees or they'll lose out to those who do," he said.

Mark Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, also applauded the White House's move, but pushed the administration to update its carbon cost estimates. Agencies "must be aware that the current federal metrics have grown outdated and grossly underestimate the true cost of climate pollution," Sarinsky said in a press release.

“It’s a way to balance climate effects against other economic effects,” said Max Sarinksy, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. For example, he said, the “social cost of carbon offers even stronger support for the purchase of electric vehicles because you would add the climate cost savings to the budgetary cost savings.”

Jack Lienke, IPI's regulatory policy director who moderated the panel, recalled the group's conference last fall — held just after the IRA's passage and a few months after the Supreme Court's decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which cited the major questions doctrine to block EPA power plant rules premised on shifting to cleaner generation. At that point, "the conventional take seemed to be — the era of regulating has ended, the era of spending has begun; goodbye neoliberalism, hello industrial policy, etc.," Lienke said.

The GREET model will also need retooling to manage the broader complexities of measuring the greenhouse gas emissions of hydrogen production, many commenters to the Treasury Department have noted. For example, the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law has asked the Treasury Department to work quickly with DOE to develop a successor model that can accurately assess the ​“marginal emissions” impact of electrolyzers using a mix of clean and dirty grid power. 

Today, the safe transportation and storage of carbon dioxide is shaping the public debate. “There aren’t many sequestration projects that exist yet,” Derek Sylvan, with the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, told Jean. “So, it’s especially important for the next wave of projects to get extra scrutiny until all the necessary safety precautions are well understood.”

“I think that this is a really critical juncture,” said Derek Sylvan, strategic director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. “There aren’t many sequestration projects that exist yet. So, it’s especially important for the next wave of projects to get extra scrutiny until all the necessary safety precautions are well understood.”