In the News

Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity, said both the EPA’s $190 figure and the $51 interim figure from the interagency working group were developed through a rigorous process, so other agencies should be able to use either number without worrying about their trustworthiness. The EPA’s numbers are “the better choice moving forward,” Sarinsky said, because they draw on newer evidence than the working group’s.

No amount of hoarded wealth will save corporations from facing the disastrous consequences of climate change. The same is true for state legislators. New Yorkers have nothing to fear from the Climate Change Superfund Act. According to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law, these fees would not increase consumer gas prices. This is due to the fact that they are a fixed cost, rather than a current variable cost of production. Market forces of supply and demand discourage cost increase, which would lead consumers to bring their business elsewhere.

The Institute for Policy Integrity issued a letter in support of the rule proposal in June 2022 in response to criticism that they SEC rules are overrreaching. “Throughout its history, the SEC has repeatedly required disclosure of information that, while not financial on its face, is nevertheless relevant to investors’ assessment of a registrant’s future financial prospects,” the letter said.

Roughly 1,800 regulators and other energy professionals gathered for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ Winter Policy Summit last week where state and federal regulators had a lot to say about the clean energy transition, grid reliability and new EPA rules. On a panel with state public utility commissioners, EPA’s Air Office lead, Joseph Goffman, discussed how to navigate greenhouse gas pollution-reduction rules while maintaining adequate energy resources during the energy transition. He also listened to their concerns about the transition’s pace and scope.

According to a recent report from the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law: The assessments that have guided U.S. LNG export authorizations over the past half-decade of the industry’s startling growth are not capturing the full scope of climate harms those exports are causing — or the economic harms those emissions will create in the country or around the world... And these findings aren’t based on a novel methodology for calculating benefits and harms of the LNG industry, said Max Sarinsky, the report’s co-author... Instead, ​“we just took DOE’s existing analyses and had them talk to each other,” he explained.

Two thirds of economists specializing in climate change surveyed by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University put the cost of the ecological transition into perspective in the face of the future consequences of global warming. They were only 50% in 2015. (Translated from the original French)

EPA’s newly final Risk Management Program (RMP) update is facing criticism from all sides over its cost-benefit calculations, especially for novel mandates to consider climate impacts and safer technologies -- provisions that industry says will be unworkably expensive but which pro-regulatory advocates say carry even greater benefits than the rule assumes. For instance, Dena Adler, senior attorney at the environmental law group Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University, told Inside EPA in a March 4 interview that the final rule is an indication that EPA has improved its “awareness of the climate related hazards” facing chemical sites, and called it an “essential first step” in the agency’s efforts to address those dangers. However, she emphasized although she sees the March 1 RMP rule as a step in the right direction, the agency’s cost estimates still do not fully capture the “hard to quantify” costs of chemical accidents, such as potential health risks from chemical exposures in communities close to facilities, “lost productivity at affected facilities, emergency response costs,” and “environmental damage,” among others.

Gensler said the SEC has received over 15,000 comment letters on its proposal, the most ever received for a single proposal... “Throughout its history, the SEC has repeatedly required disclosure of information that, while not financial on its face, is nevertheless relevant to investors’ assessment of a registrant’s future financial prospects,” a letter jointly submitted to the SEC from The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law and the Environmental Defense Fund stated.

The White House Office of Management & Budget (OMB) is finalizing new guidance about how to weigh federal regulations’ effects on ecosystem services, defined as “contributions to human welfare from the environment or ecosystems,” with observers saying the guide will make EPA and other agencies less likely to overlook important benefits of rules. Institute for Policy Integrity senior attorney Max Sarinsky said that both the ecosystem guide and recently finalized A-4 guidance help to counter a historically flawed focus of regulatory analysis on easier-to-quantify compliance costs while ignoring benefits that can sometimes be harder to quantify.

In late January, the Biden administration announced that it was pausing new approvals for liquefied natural gas export terminals until it can reassess its review process. That decision hinges on a key question: Is continuing to expand the country’s already massive fossil-gas export capacity in the ​“public interest?” But amid much uncertainty and many contested claims over the issue, one thing appears clear, according to a recent report from the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law: The assessments that have guided U.S. LNG export authorizations over the past half-decade of the industry’s startling growth are not capturing the full scope of climate harms those exports are causing — or the economic harms those emissions will create in the country or around the world.