In the News

In several news stories this summer, administration officials have floated various strategies for how they would justify repealing the Clean Power Plan without a replacement. One strategy is to say the EPA can’t regulate carbon from existing power plants. Another approach may be arguing that the EPA can only require small tweaks to efficiency inside the plants. “I expect the first thing we’ll see when it gets published is a straight repeal,” says Richard Revesz, a Clean Air Act expert at the New York University School of Law. “Both of [these arguments] are legally weak and neither will ultimately get upheld by the courts.”

State experimentation may be the only way to break the gridlock on environmental issues that now overwhelms our national political institutions. However, without a broad mandate from the federal government to address urgent environmental problems, few red and purple states will follow California’s lead. In my view, giving too much power to the states will likely result in many states doing less, not more.

“Pruitt’s willingness to play fast and loose has helped his anti-regulatory reputation soar,” Davis Noll and Revesz write in Slate. “But the brazen deficiencies in the agency’s work exposing the hollowness of Pruitt’s ‘rule of law’ rhetoric should give Pruitt’s supporters pause. Once the judicial challenges run their course, Pruitt may be striking out a lot more.”

“The methane rule was justified based on enormous benefits to the public,” Bethany A. Davis Noll, Senior Attorney at the Center for Policy Integrity, told VICE News, “It will be difficult to roll it back.”

Pruitt claims that his regulatory rollbacks represent a return to the “rule of law,” but he has pursued them in a lawless fashion, cutting corners and ignoring fundamental legal requirements. Now, failing to follow the rules of the game is catching up with him.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt last week said he would seek to bolster the agency’s lagging Superfund program, after the release of a report recommending ways to expedite the cleanup of the nation’s most egregious toxic waste sites. “The proposed EPA budget would significantly reduce the amount for enforcement, and without enforcement it might be harder to get companies responsible for the pollution to participate in cleanups and pay remediation costs,” Richard Revesz said.

Maryland and Connecticut have filed formal notices with the EPA that they intend to sue the agency for not responding to petitions they filed asking the EPA to force power plants in upwind states to curb their air pollution. “The agency has an obligation to act,” said Richard Revesz, director of New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, a regulatory think tank.

A significant concern of administrative law is the status of independent agencies—agencies that are insulated in some ways from direct presidential control. These institutional relationships are particularly important when the President and agency officials disagree over law and policy. In our recent article, The Genesis of Independent Agencies, we ask a core question of administrative law: When are agencies established with features that insulate them from direct presidential control?

Eliminating regulatory safeguards will erase tangible public health and environmental benefits, making the public worse off. Rather than analyze these societal costs, President Trump’s agency heads have suspended rules in a flurry of deregulatory actions, without calculating or even acknowledging the effects.

I’m tempted to call it the decade’s most important paper on the costs of climate damage. The paper, just published in Environmental and Resource Economics, by Peter Howard, economics director at NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity; and Thomas Sterner, professor of environmental economics at the University of Gothenburg, upends the long-prevailing approach for estimating the social cost of carbon, potentially laying the ground for putting the SCC into triple digits.