In the News

The U.S. government could learn important lessons on offshore leasing from financial markets and oil companies.

U.S. wildfires cost as much as $125 billion annually, but climate change could add as much as $60 billion to the bill by 2050, the study said. The projected cost increase is attributed to an expanding area in which wildfires burn — estimated to be 50% to 100% larger by 2050.

The rising price of wildfires due to climate change should be included in the U.S. government’s future estimates of the social cost of carbon emissions. This is the argument in a report released today by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Fires continue to rage in many parts of the country, threatening hundreds of homes, creating emergencies in National Parks and residential areas, and straining government budgets — Washington State’s wildfire season is already six times more damaging than average. And we may be in for much worse in the near future if climate change is not contained.

Is the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management acting illegally on the approval of new offshore lease sales? During today’s OnPoint, Michael Livermore, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and a senior adviser at the Institute for Policy Integrity, discusses his recent argument before the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia on a case pertaining to the economic analysis used by the Interior Department in its sales of new leases.

“Interior fails to give the same treatment to environmental and social costs and gives no explanation for the different treatment,” CSE’s counsel Michael Livermore said during Thursday’s oral arguments.

The anti-regulatory crowd wasted no time in launching its next AutoCorrect attack: A new suit asks the D.C. Circuit to nix the president’s biggest climate-change initiative—EPA’s “Clean Power Plan”—due to a 25-year-old mistake in the text of the Clean Air Act.

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-).

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?

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.