In the News

More broadly, the EPA under Trump (and administrator Scott Pruitt who, before taking that job, had sued the EPA multiple times) has dramatically cut its estimates of the long-term costs of greenhouse gas emissions as part of its effort to scale back an Obama administration rule limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. “After a few years out, basically we’re not counting any effects on any future generations of Americans,” NYU’s Jason Schwartz told S&P Global Market Intelligence.

This week, the public comment period closed on Secretary of Energy Rick Perry’s plan to keep uncompetitive, inefficient and highly polluting coal plants from retiring. If successful, his plan will enrich coal executives and investors at the expense of working Americans, while having pernicious public health consequences.

Jason Schwartz, legal director for the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said the Trump administration has “decimated” the social cost of carbon. The new analysis makes several key changes that Schwartz said are out of step with the thinking of economists. The new value has been narrowed to only consider the domestic impacts of carbon, while the Obama administration’s version also took into account the global impacts, Schwartz noted. And in contrast to the Obama administration, which assumed a 3% discount rate, the new value assumes a 7% discount rate that Schwartz said “virtually no economist surveyed or written in the literature supports using.”

Pruitt is taking other steps to soften the ground for the weak rule he is expected to issue. Many of them involve monkeying around with cost-benefit analysis to make carbon regulation look as bad as possible. For more on these cost-benefit shenanigans, see this excellent piece from Richard Revesz and Jack Lienke of the Institute for Policy Integrity and the original reporting from Politico’s Emily Holden on which it’s based.

The Trump administration in an awkward place. Even after straining to show the repeal of the Obama-era rules would boost the economy by baking into their plan financial assumptions that many experts dispute, their plan as written still doesn’t do much for the sagging coal industry. “In order to justify this, they do serious violence to established economics,” Richard Revesz, dean emeritus at New York University School of Law, said of the repeal. “The level of contortions and the attacks on standard economic principles are unprecedented.”

The Trump administration’s decision to repeal the Clean Power Plan — and promote coal use — is clearly bad for the planet’s far-off future, because it will aggravate climate change. But I think the most effective strategy for the opponents of repeal is to focus on the here and now. And unlike some anti-environmental policies, this one will begin to harm Americans very quickly. On this subject, Richard Revesz and Jack Lienke have written an op-ed in The Times carefully detailing how the E.P.A. has fudged the economic numbers to justify its policy.

The GOP offered years of lies and impossible promises, which have come due. In health care: Obamacare is a disaster; the GOP alternative will have none of its flaws. In climate: the CPP will crush the economy; the GOP alternative will lower emissions better. Yet a recent report from the Institute for Policy Integrity shows that the rapidly falling cost of renewable energy technologies, coupled with the stubbornly low price of natural gas, mean that CPP compliance is likely to be cheaper than anyone projected.

Conservative groups want the EPA to reconsider the endangerment finding. Even if the EPA were to replace the Clean Power Plan, that wouldn’t tie the agency’s hands on the finding, they said. Denise Grab, an attorney with New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, told Bloomberg BNA that any potential replacement rule issued by the EPA “wouldn’t really affect any position that the endangerment finding could be revisited.” But she noted that a replacement plan would have to rely on the endangerment finding, thus “re-endorsing it.” The EPA “could try later” to reverse the finding, she added, though said there is “still no basis for doing so.”

The agency fudged the numbers to prove Obama’s signature climate regulation wasn’t worth the cost and still came up short. Pruitt’s agency contends that the regulation could cost up to $33 billion a year by 2030, instead of $8.4 billion. But this is fuzzy, self-interest math, critics say: the agency is strategically leaving out huge savings that power companies would achieve from energy efficiency investments, according to a New York Times op-ed published by New York University law professor Richard L. Revesz and the Institute for Policy Integrity’s Jack Lienke.

The Trump Administration announced this week that it would repeal an Obama-era policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. We talk with a law professor, Richard Revesz of New York University, about what this news means for the future of energy policy in the country and the process for the repeal of the policy.