In the News

There is no “short cut” for President-elect Donald Trump to roll back environmental regulations but the incoming administration still could target Obama era rules, a former Justice Department official said Nov. 15.

The situation in Standing Rock shows the difficulty of fighting for a right to use land in a way that does not yield short-term profits. “By using economics to show just how wasteful under-regulation can be,” Richard Revesz wrote in 2008, “cost-benefit environmentalism can be the key to creating the political coalition necessary to make America richer by regulating more wisely.”

Over the course of the D.C. Circuit hearing, the Clean Power Plan’s opponents made several legal and factual assertions that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Our research helps set the record straight.

You probably thought that last week’s only notable debate was the one between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at Hofstra University, but, on Tuesday, supporters and opponents of EPA’s Clean Power Plan had a high-stakes showdown of their own in Washington, D.C.: a seven-hour oral argument before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The proceedings may not have spawned an SNL sketch, but in the wonky world of environmental law, they were a very big deal.

The Clean Power Plan ruling was extremely unusual, especially as the Circuit Court had unanimously declined to issue a stay; as Richard Revesz, a professor at the New York University School of Law, recently told my colleague Jeffrey Toobin, “It was totally unprecedented for the Supreme Court to step in.” The 5–4 vote on the stay seemed, to put it mildly, to bode ill for the plan.

Richard Revesz shares his take on yesterday’s Clean Power Plan oral arguments, and why the strength of EPA’s arguments came through clearly.

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s law school, said the suing states were exaggerating the regulatory reach of the EPA. “The Clean Power Plan, while certainly a very important rule, is not the boundary-breaking behemoth that the petitioners make it out to be,” Revesz said.

In the summer of 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a long-awaited regulation aimed at combating climate change, requiring electric power plants to sharply reduce their emissions. “It was probably the most important environmental regulation in history, since power plants account for about half of the carbon-dioxide emissions in the country,” Richard Revesz, a professor at New York University School of Law, said.

In a critical federal court hearing this month, challengers of the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s signature climate change policy, will characterize the Plan as an “enormous and transformative expansion” of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regulatory power.

A recent federal court ruling may have opened a new chapter in U.S. climate and energy policy. Now that the Seventh Circuit has formally endorsed the use of the social cost of carbon, it could become one of the primary tools used to shape policies on environmental regulation, energy efficiency, natural resource leasing, and environmental impact quantification.