In the News

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ratcheting up of greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles reflects the Biden administration's push to electrify the automotive sector, but the agency's aggressive approach will raise legal and practical questions. Not only are the proposed rules more stringent than the current standards that run through the 2026 model year, but the current ones are also largely undoing rollbacks by the Trump administration, said Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law who focuses on air quality and transportation.

The update to how agencies assess costs and benefits of proposed regulations will help ensure that economic analysis applies state-of-the-art approaches to a range of issues, from valuing future impacts to considering distribution and equity, according to Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. 

“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.”

Under its new administrator, Richard Revesz, OIRA issued draft regulations drastically revising Circular A-4 for the first time in 30 years, substituting more realistic methods for weighing benefits against costs. Revesz, a law professor and onetime dean at NYU, is highly qualified for the job, having long been one of the leading scholarly critics of the misuse of cost-benefit analysis.

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 a panel addressing how the FERC can incorporate environmental justice communities into their infrastructure permitting, Al Huang, director of environmental justice at the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said, “FERC needs to demonstrate a foundational commitment to environmental justice, and that means identifying who EJ communities are, engaging with them, providing support for them [and] building trust. Building that foundation can yield substantive advantages such as … identifying viable alternatives to opposed projects that can mitigate adverse impacts, and fully understanding the vulnerabilities that communities might face."

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.