In the News

Efforts to filter carbon dioxide from the air and oceans will rapidly expand in the coming decades — but not enough to reach net-zero emissions globally, according to a landmark survey of carbon removal experts. That means global warming would be unlikely to remain below the 2-degrees-Celsius limit set by the Paris Agreement, which would require the world to offset more emissions than it produces by midcentury, the New York University School of Law study found. The study, published Wednesday by the law school's Institute for Policy Integrity, is likely the largest expert study of its kind.

“The D.C. Circuit’s opinion is clear and unequivocal,” said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. Danis penned a “friend of the court” brief on behalf of the project’s opponents.

To achieve the CLCPA's climate and justice goals, sectors other than electricity also require sustained focus and accountability, as well as incentives and dedicated funding. Placing a modest regulatory cost on harmful activities, like traffic congestion and climate pollution, can help fund cleaner, more beneficial alternatives fairly and efficiently.

However, the Trump administration’s attempt to deregulate was also often thwarted by the courts. All told, the Trump administration lost 57 percent of cases challenging its environmental policies, a much higher rate of loss than previous administrations, according to a database maintained by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

Project 2025 urges the agency to “revise guidance documents” for the so-called social cost of carbon, while another chapter proposes ending its use altogether. Co-benefits — a rule’s health and environmental advantages that aren’t tied directly to reducing a targeted pollutant — have been persona non grata with conservatives for years. But the Trump EPA did count them in its climate rules — which showed minuscule benefits due in part to low social cost values for greenhouse gases. Jason Schwartz, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, said sidelining benefits could make rules less legally durable. “I think that the courts have been clear in a number of cases that it would actually be arbitrary for an agency to ignore — or to really treat differently — co-benefits or indirect costs,” he said.

The state commissioners’ objections to FERC’s order likely would not be the case to introduce the claim to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals because their rehearing request to FERC was limited to factual questions about the agency’s statutory interpretation, said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “That is not to say that other Order 1920 suits might not invoke Loper Bright or Chevron’s demise more squarely, and I suspect that many will try arguments related to that out for size,” Danis said in an email.

Jason Schwartz, the legal director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, said the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks often ignored congressional statutes or inflated the costs of regulations on industry. Mr. Trump’s allies have presumably learned from those missteps, experts said.

The number of restrictions in the Code of Federal Regulations, a proxy for the intensity of regulation in America, was basically unchanged under Mr Trump. What is more, his administration was stymied by the courts. It was unsuccessful in nearly 80% of litigation over its use of federal agencies, according to the Institute for Policy Integrity, a research group.

The DOE’s recent pause on LNG export licenses is a prudent step to gather the type of record that courts would need to see after the Chevron decision, said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director for the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. The ruling in Loper Bright offers terms that can grant agencies flexibility when phrases such as “reasonable” or “appropriate” are in the statute, Danis said. The Natural Gas Act standard for DOE to determine whether LNG exports are consistent with the “public interest” is “such a standard that evidences Congressional intent to leave this to agency discretion,” she said.

I have noted that according to decades’ worth of studies compiled by Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, federal agencies have historically prevailed in about 70 percent of the legal challenges to their regulatory actions. But Noll’s study reviewing 278 Trump-era agency actions (48 involving immigration) found that federal agencies prevailed only 23 percent of the time. As to appeals, Noll reported that “[o]f the appeals that the government took, agencies lost on appeal 38% of the time, … won reversal … in 12%, ... [and] another 48% … were pending.”