In the News

The Institute for Policy Integrity recently hosted a webinar titled “Tribal Energy Transitions: Impacts, Opportunities, and Research Ethics.” The panel brought together leading researchers and policy professionals to discuss the challenges and opportunities that the energy transition presents for tribes.

The D.C. Circuit recently endorsed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's climate change review of a massive liquefied natural gas export project, but agency watchers question how much the decision will crack a current commissioner stalemate over weaving climate into FERC's gas infrastructure approval policies. Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, discussed the implications of the case.

Last year, the Supreme Court sided with West Virginia in rejecting a different (Obama-era) EPA plan. “The West Virginia decision left intact EPA’s obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that endanger public health from the power sector,” says Dena Adler, an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, in an emailed statement. The 2022 ruling left pathways available to the EPA, she says, and “the agency has carefully walked those lines in this proposal.”

Several attorneys and FERC watchers see an ambiguous directive in the law governing FERC’s oversight of LNG. The language was last updated in 2005, at a time when virtually no natural gas was being exported from the continental U.S. While the law — the Natural Gas Act — directs FERC to “issue or deny” applications to site LNG import and export terminals, it gives the commission “absolutely zero guidance” for how to make that decision, said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Through its approach to discounting, distribution, and transboundary effects — as well as numerous other updates — a proposed update to Circular A-4 would modernize regulatory review to be consistent with the latest available research and President Biden’s regulatory priorities.

A Supreme Court ruling that overturns the legal doctrine Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council could have wider implications for existing federal regulations, said Don Goodson, a senior attorney with New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity. "It would pose another practical difficulty in how much relitigation that would open up," Goodson said in an interview. At the same time, Goodson noted that Congress clearly intended to give agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission broad jurisdiction over areas such as interstate sales and transmission of electricity.

This coming Friday, April 28, is more than just another Friday. It is Workers Memorial Day, the day when people around the world pause, recognize, remember, and honor those workers who have paid the ultimate price—suffering, dying, or becoming disabled as a result of injuries and illnesses related to their jobs.

EPA has previously set standards that require industries to invest in new types of pollution controls, said Dena Adler, an attorney with New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “The history of the Clean Air Act is filled with regulations where technologies were projected to be very expensive,” she said. “And after the regulations came down, industry figured out how to install these control technologies better and cheaper.”

The upcoming rule from the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to depend on rarely used technology for capturing power plants’ greenhouse gas pollution. It will have to survive the conservative Supreme Court that hobbled the EPA’s regulatory powers just 10 months ago. An EPA standard based on carbon capture would be “entirely different” from the Obama regulation’s demand that utilities switch to cleaner fuel sources. Capturing pollution at the source “is really the bread and butter of the Clean Air Act and the type of regulation that EPA has been issuing for decades,” said Dena Adler, an attorney with New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity. 

An ambitious Biden administration’s plan to clean up emissions from a heavily polluting transportation sector will face industry litigation, but environmental lawyers see the rule holding up during eventual challenges. But the rule is not as transformative as some claim, which provides it with insulation from future claims that the rule raises “major questions,” according to Meredith Hankins, an attorney for the Institute for Policy Integrity, who said the action is rooted in tried-and-true Clean Air Act authority. The Clean Air Act has always been “technology-forcing,” and electric vehicles are squarely in the same vein as catalytic converter emission controls were when they were first mandated for vehicles, Hankins said.