In the News

Late last week, a federal court knocked down plans to expand coal mining in the Western US. The ruling fits a pattern of federal courts pushing back against agencies that are trying to gloss over their statutory climate change obligations. “We are more used to seeing decisions like this from the Ninth Circuit, which has been a leader on requiring accounting for climate change. It’s a sign that courts are recognizing the importance of this,” said Jayni Hein, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.

A major court decision dressing down the federal government for “irrational” consideration of the climate impacts of coal leasing stands to reverberate throughout the Trump administration. “This opinion is significant because it means that future federal agencies cannot just rest on these questionable assumptions and will have to do meaningful analysis as to the actual greenhouse gas emission effects from their leasing decisions,” said Jayni Hein, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity. “They can’t just conclude that there’s no net effect.”

President Trump is undermining efforts to improve air quality for Americans. His administration has attempted to delay the implementation of new ozone standards adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2015, and it is seeking cuts to the EPA’s budget that would severely compromise the agency’s ability to enforce all air quality standards. For Latinos, the Trump administration is compounding the problem even more, through its efforts to roll back healthcare and its aggressive deportation policies.

A Spanish-language version of this op-ed was published by Univision.

Burcin Unel, senior economist for Institute for Policy Integrity told Utility Dive the social cost of carbon was used in several of the calculations made by the NYPSC in its Track One Reforming the Energy Vision proceedings. With a social cost of carbon-based adder, “the generators’ bids reflect the external costs they impose on society,” she added. “It is technology neutral. Short-term, the price signal will impact the dispatch order. Long-term, it will drive investments that will more cost-effectively reduce carbon.”

A protracted delay in the Trump administration coming up with its own carbon-cost estimate could empower environmentalists pursuing legal challenges to mining, drilling or pipeline projects, said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals’ rulings against the FERC “show how President Trump’s executive order withdrawing support for the social cost of carbon is misguided and shortsighted,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, said in a statement. “The executive order gives federal agencies a false sense of security that they can ignore the cost of greenhouse gas emissions in their policy decisions.”

Trump’s Executive Order 13783 disbanded the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, withdrew IWG’s official valuations, and instead instructed agencies to monetize climate effects using “the best available science and economics.” Yet IWG’s estimates already are the product of the most widely peer-reviewed models and best available data.

The Institute for Policy Integrity in 2017 issued a fact sheet highlighting their conclusion that “regulations have little effect on aggregate employment or unemployment rates.” Since studies often rely upon models to predict effects on jobs, the fact sheet also emphasized that “job analysis models can easily be manipulated to predict either job losses or gains.”

The editorial board’s false alarm that coal plants will “starve” unless two Colorado mines expand into “pristine” forest deeply misunderstands the coal market, Economics 101, and climate change.

Independent agencies should mirror executive branch practices to overcome judicial scrutiny.