In the News

Climate change is certainly on the top ten list of our planet’s biggest problems. Also on that list is the insufficient actions humans have taken to address climate change. The risks of increased global temperatures are great, as the IPCC’s recent report release shows, and too many nations, including the United States, have not properly heeded the warnings by taking serious steps to reduce their greenhouse gas output.

The next set of EPA rules also face legal uncertainty. The provision of the Clean Air Act used for greenhouse gas regulation has been rarely used before, and never for an area this far-reaching, said Michael Livermore, professor of law at University of Virginia and senior adviser at the Institute for Policy Integrity in New York.

There are two notable ironies here. One, as Richard Revesz, director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, points out, is that by regulating only new power plants, and not those that are already belching CO2, we risk polluting even more.

The administration has used “the most mainstream, the most well-validated, the most broadly accepted methodology for assigning benefits,” said Michael Livermore, a cost-benefit expert at the University of Virginia law school. He said “the entire process has been on the record.”

To tackle climate change without the help of Congress, the Obama Administration will have to estimate how much it costs society — in damaged crops, wildfires, floods, and a cascading list of other harms — when a ton of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere

“Valuing the environmental benefits here — it’s still a developing area,” said Denise Grab, a legal fellow for the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. Grab’s group is pressing EPA to broadly account for ancillary benefits in its cost-benefit analysis. “We know that there’s a tendency to underestimate these things and that costs are often overestimated,” she said, noting that EPA’s first stab at analyzing the benefits of post-construction stormwater controls in 1999 failed to account for major factors, such as decreased stream bank erosion and reduced water pollution because there would likely be fewer combined sewer overflows.

President Obama has been left little choice but to deal with greenhouse gases through the Environmental Protection Agency. To that end, his announcement that his administration will subject existing power plants to regulation is one of the best stand-alone actions he could take. By doing so, he corrects over 40 years of bad policy—not just environmental and public health policy, but economic policy as well, under which federal regulation of new sources did not generally extend to existing sources.

Richard Revesz, the director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, oversaw a comprehensive overview of 25 studies of the impact of environmental policy on employment in 2012 that largely indicated no net job losses from tougher regulations.

Court Ordered Bush Administration To Assign A Social Cost Of Carbon Above $0. New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity noted that a court chastised the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 2007 for assigning a social cost of carbon of $0 in setting fuel economy standards, and that “even NHTSA admitted that its $0 valuation was unsupported.” The Institute further noted that while the social cost of carbon is difficult to quantify, agencies also attempt to estimate the costs and benefits for variables such as traffic noise and energy security:

Jason Schwartz, legal director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, says the president’s remarks signaled that the regulations on existing power plants to be produced by the EPA will allow these states to comply using their efficient market mechanisms that produce GHG emissions at lower costs. “The single word we were most excited to hear in the president’s speech and his plan was flexibility,” he says.