In the News

A large oil spill would likely hurt our economy according to Michael Livermore, an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Law.

The economic benefits of cutting back on smog far outweigh the costs. In fact, the benefits are so great that an even more stringent rule would be economically justified.

In an amicus brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Jan. 30, the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University of Law argues that ever since the current version of Section 111(d) was enacted in the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, Republican and Democratic administrations have interpreted a so-called Section 112 exclusion in a way that is consistent with the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide.

But is 111(d) language ambiguous or flatly contradictory? As Jack Lienke noted in a Grist post last year, the Supreme Court faced a similar dilemma in a case last session called Scialabba v. Cuellar de Osorio, which dealt with contradictory statutory language. Kagan, Ginsburg, and Kennedy invoked Chevron and deferred to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the executive agency charged with implementing the statute.

The agency’s consistent and longstanding interpretation of the Clean Air Act is due deference, particularly in the context of the proposed Clean Power Plan, the Institute for Policy Integrity told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a Jan. 30 brief. The institute filed an amicus brief in support of the EPA.

The EPA announced that it will regulate methane emissions from the oil and gas sector directly, rather than relying on voluntary programs or regulating associated pollutants. This a commonsense action that reduces a very potent greenhouse gas while directing valuable natural gas back into the supply chain. The rules, which will be unveiled this summer, will apply to all new oil and natural gas wells, but they will not address emissions from existing sources.

“EPA’s announcement marks incremental progress, but thus far, the agency fails to regulate existing oil and gas sources, which are projected to be responsible for up to 90 percent of emissions in 2018,” Jayni Hein, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law, said in a statement. “This is a major concern in states like North Dakota, where oil production is booming, yet methane capture technology remains far behind.”

“Results like this should give a pause that maybe we should start being more cautious,” Peter Howard, an economist at NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity, told VICE News. “Maybe this doesn’t happen, but if it does it could be quite costly, and we should take this risk into account.”

The price of gasoline today is wrong. It does not include the cost of carbon dioxide pollution from burning it. This is the baseline case for taxing carbon emissions. Without it, fossil fuels are underpriced, argues law professor Michael Livermore at the University of Virginia

While critics of climate regulations often complain that the costs of pollution controls are too high, directly regulating methane would buy time on climate change and redirect natural gas back into the supply chain, at little net cost, due to the commercial value of the captured gas.