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In the News

  • Criticism of EPA’s Economic Analysis Sorely Misplaced

    A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) suggests that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should improve the way it analyzes regulations. Critics have been quick to trumpet the EPA’s “failure,” but in reality, the EPA deserves an A (or at least an A-).

  • Is the rift between Nordhaus and Stern evaporating with rising temperatures?

    The political task of enacting carbon taxes ­― and maintaining those in place ― has proven so daunting that questions of the tax’s appropriate level have gotten short shrift. Carbon tax advocates do not often discuss: How high is the optimal carbon tax? Along what trajectory should it increase over time? What, if anything, can climate science tell us about the right carbon tax to aim for?

  • Experts: Pro-Smog Pollution Report Is “Unmoored From Reality”

    Michael Livermore, senior advisor at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, explained that NERA’s analysis developed “an extraordinarily high and basically unrealistic picture of how expensive those costs are going to be” because they fail to account for the economic reality of businesses achieving low-cost ways to meet the standards.

  • Fracking and Methane: Regulators Must Look Upstream

    Methane’s interstate — and, indeed, international — impacts make it particularly well-suited to federal regulation. If lawmakers are serious about reducing risks from climate change, they will need to regulate fugitive methane emissions from “upstream” sources — the wells, pipelines and storage tanks used for gas extraction, processing and delivery.

  • EPA’s Legal Justification For Modified Power Plant GHG Rule Questioned

    A source with the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School notes “We’re in new territory here” so there is “no precedent” for whether a 111(b) rule for modified sources will or will not satisfy the 111(d) prerequisite. “Anyone who says that this is an impermissible argument has no authority to purport that statement.”

  • Facing the right costs would help us understand the value of reducing greenhouse gas emissions

    In a paper published on 10 April 2014 in the leading peer-reviewed journal Nature, Professor Richard Revesz from New York University and distinguished co-authors argue that current values reported for the SCC are underestimated, due to inherent assumptions that current climate-economic models make about the time-dependence of future climate change and limited proliferation of economic impacts.

  • US Congress hears constitutional experts on TSCA preemption

    Richard Revesz, professor of the New York University School of Law, said generally the federal government should set the floor for chemical regulations and allow states to set more stringent limits if they wanted to do so.

  • Rules for Methane Emissions From Fracking Needed, Panel Told

    Environmental Protection Agency performance standards are needed to constrain emissions of “fugitive” methane generated by hydraulic fracturing from upstream sources such as natural gas wells, pipelines and storage tanks, Richard Revesz said at a House subcommittee hearing today.

  • Conservative Justices Give the Government a Victory on Climate Change

    Though the opinion is a win for the EPA, environmental law expert Michael A. Livermore said Scalia’s opinion could sow confusion about who really won. That’s because, though Scalia handed a win to the EPA, the rhetoric in his opinion reads as a fiery reprimand of the agency for “laying claim to extravagant statutory power over the national economy.”

  • Obama’s EPA 2, Agency Opponents 0 at Supreme Court

    The decision doesn’t touch President Barack Obama’s more comprehensive climate-change proposal released June 2 to cut carbon emissions from existing power plants. No precedent was set that could alter that plan, said Ricky Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University.