In the News

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.”

Social welfare would almost certainly be higher with an even tighter ozone standard.

Energy subsidies have become a hot topic on the presidential campaign trail. Jeb Bush recently called for an end to all subsidies–those that support fossil fuels as well as those aiding renewable energy. Most Democrats in the presidential race support ending tax breaks for fossil-fuel companies, but believe that subsidies for renewables are needed to help these newer industries grow rapidly. Both policy proposals are economically inefficient.

By regulating methane emissions, the EPA compels companies to act in the best interests of the public and to reduce emissions, even if individual controls aren’t immediately profitable.

It’s time for the federal government to stop leasing land to gas and oil companies, a new report argues

This is not easy to answer. Assigning a monetary value to environmental harm is notoriously tricky. There is, after all, no market for intact ecosystems or endangered species.

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan has rightly been hailed as the most important action any president has taken to address the climate crisis.

C. Boyden Gray, who helped to draw up the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments as counsel to the first President Bush, and now represents many energy-industry clients as an attorney in private practice, told me in June, after the initial case was dismissed, that there were many legal arguments to be made against the EPA carbon regulations — but he wasn’t convinced by Tribe’s. “You look at Revesz,” he says, “and you say, ‘My God, that is pretty persuasive.”

Brian Lehrer and Martha Bergmark, Executive Director of Voices for Civil Justice, discuss legal aid and the findings of a recent report from the Institute for Policy Integrity. (Audio begins at 2min 45sec.)