In the News

“I think there will be a lot of pressure from the oil and gas industry on the Trump administration to basically keep the hydrogen provisions but to make them more lenient and friendly toward fossil fuel interests,” Matt Lifson, an attorney with the Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law, told EHN.

President Biden’s term has been defined in large part by expansive action on climate change, including both legislative incentives for decarbonization efforts and regulatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Both the legislative and regulatory efforts are subject to repeal and rollback under the incoming Trump Administration, actions that would significantly slow progress towards a net-zero economy and potentially cost billions in long-term net benefits.

But even if it is true that change is achieved by writing even more rules, the first Trump administration wasn’t always effective at working within the system. Among the last seven U.S. presidential terms, it had the poorest record in court. About 57% of challenged major rules under his administration lost in court, which is the highest percentage since Bill Clinton’s second term, according to analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. 

The NYISO convened its Environmental Advisory Council (EAC) in late October to discuss timely issues associated with the state’s climate policy goals: grid reliability in the face of energy intensive economic development projects, and the continued need for additional investment in clean energy... EAC members in attendance were Dr. C. Lindsay Anderson, Dr. Burçin Ünel, Frank Murray Jr., Karen Palmer, Daniel Shawhan, and Daniel Zarrilli.

Those setbacks contributed to Trump’s poor win rate in court: Data compiled by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity shows that the administration prevailed in only about 30 percent of legal challenges against its major federal rules, compared with more than 50 percent during the Obama and George W. Bush years. “It’s too early to say whether we’ll see a similar trend in a second-term Trump administration,” said Dena Adler, a senior attorney at the institute. “But it is clear that environmental and public health regulations deliver enormous benefits, and those benefits cannot simply be ignored by a rule reversal.”

These costs won't fall back on consumers, according to economists including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and an analysis from the think tank Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law. According to experts, because Big Oil's payments would reflect past contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, oil companies would have to treat their payments as one-time fixed costs. "Regardless of market structures, oil companies are unable to pass on increases in fixed costs to consumers due to economic incentives and competition." Experts also argued that "beyond the design of the Act, oil companies would also be unable to retaliate against New York by raising retail gasoline prices in the state due to the interconnectedness of the national and global energy markets and existing U.S. antitrust laws."

Though the line between forcing technology and relying on what’s adequately demonstrated can be thin, Dena Adler of New York University’s Institute of Policy Integrity says Congress always meant for its seminal air law to solely protect public health, “not merely memorialize the status quo... And the track record for earlier power plant rules shows that industry has repeatedly been able to meet regulations much faster and much more cheaply than anticipated,” Adler said.

A study by the non-partisan thinktank the Institute for Policy Integrity, comparing how successive administrations fared when they introduced major new rules, found that the Trump administration was challenged legally at a far higher rate than any previous administration going back to Bill Clinton in the 1990s. When cases got to court, Trump’s record was even more abysmal. He lost 57% of the time. That was dramatically worse than Barack Obama’s average across his two terms – 31%. “The process of getting new rules out was flawed in many cases, as was the supporting analysis – so when they showed up in court they were getting dinged a lot,” said Don Goodson, the institute’s deputy director.

Under Trump’s first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, the Agency saw several legal defeats, which meant a delay in repealing many Obama administration rules. This resulted in several Trump replacement rules not being finalized until the end of his first term in office. Approximately 80 percent of Trump administration actions were legally defeated, according to The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

“There’s a reason that most administrators have a substantial background in high executive branch or state-level executive branch positions, or both,” said Jason Schwartz, a former senior adviser in the White House regulatory office under President Joe Biden. “It’s because EPA is a complex agency to run...” “If you’re rolling back a regulation, you need to explain why,” said Schwartz, who now serves as legal director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. “You need to explain why you’re changing position from what the agency just said on its review of all the scientific and economic evidence a couple years before.”