In the News

On Jan. 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law. Six months later, he proposed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, which opened for business in early December. And on Dec. 31, he capped off the year by signing the Clean Air Act, which was then—and still is—our nation’s most important environmental law.

When it comes to climate change, there’s broad consensus among economists that the potential economic impacts will be serious, widespread and more severe than previous estimates have indicated. At least, this is the conclusion of a new survey, published Monday by the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity — and experts say we should be listening to their warnings.

It turns out there have been very few systematic surveys of economists’ opinions on the subject of climate change, and the few that have been done suffer from methodological shortcomings. Now the New York-based Institute for Policy Integrity has tried to remedy that situation with just such a large-scale survey of economists who have published work on climate change.

“There are some things a Republican president might to do try to undermine the CPP, but his discretion might be limited in significant ways,” Revesz tells me.

The report, which was published on Thursday by the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, calculates that other nations’ existing climate policies, by lessening the impacts of climate change, have already benefited the United States to the tune of more than $200 billion, and additional pledges for future action could save the country more than $2 trillion by the year 2030. This number could rise above $10 trillion by mid-century.

Last Friday, moments after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) formally published its Clean Power Plan, which regulates carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector, opponents of the rule filed suit to strike it down, and, in the meantime, to stay its application. In the press and in last week’s congressional hearing (disclosure: one of us was a witness at this hearing), the EPA’s critics continued to make unwarranted claims about overreach, economic catastrophe and unconstitutionality. They’re hoping that this clamor will provide cover for state policymakers who want to resist complying with the rule.

“The arguments against the Clean Power Plan are going to be the ones we’ve already seen,” said Richard Revesz of New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

The U.S. Department of the Interior announced last week that it is canceling future lease sales in federal Arctic waters off Alaska’s northern coast, a decision that places future Arctic offshore drilling on ice.

As the Obama administration makes strides to reduce downstream greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, the Department of the Interior should also take steps to account for the upstream costs of coal mining on federal lands.

Coal companies should be charged as much as five times what it costs them for surface mining on federal lands, according to a new report. “In some cases, it’s gaming the system, in other cases, it’s using the rules to the best of their advantage,” says Jayni Hein, the study’s lead author and policy director at the NYU School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, which released the report this week. “There’s no reason these companies should be able to lease coal for the same price they were able to decades ago.”