In the News

The scent of burning rubber is already in the air as Congress skids towards utter climate gridlock. And now, as EPA starts to unroll it’s next round of greenhouse gas controls, several legislators have promised to do everything in their power to jam up traffic in the agency. So it makes sense that many large environmental organizations are beginning to look to state capitals for leadership on climate change. But what will they find when they get there?

There has to be a balance between regulation to protect the people and rules so complex and strident that it discourages business development and improvement. Gov. Christie says he wants to loosen the rules. Here’s some ammunition for him: The Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law gave New Jersey a D grade, along with 14 other states, for its regulations.

“New Jersey features a truly dizzying array of required impact statements,” reads the report by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. Among the requirements that made researchers go wobbly: “a socio-economic impact statement, a jobs impact statement, a regulatory flexibility analysis, a state mandate flexibility analysis for small municipalities, an agriculture industry impact statement, a housing affordability impact statement, a smart growth development impact statement, and a cost-benefit analysis to support any rules that exceed federal requirements.”

A new report out this morning raises some interesting questions about the way West Virginia writes rules and regulations to govern everything from coal mining pollution to drug company marketing expenditures. The discussion of West Virginia rulemaking is part of a broader, national examination of rulemaking in states around the country. The report, 52 Experiments with Regulatory Review: The Political and Economic Inputs into State Rulemakings, was put together by the New Y0rk University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

On the same day the Florida Legislature is poised to pass a bill that will require lawmakers to put a giant roadblock before some of the state’s broadest regulations — by ratifying every rule that has a collective cost of $200,000 a year — a New York think tank has blasted Florida for its “bargain basement” regulatory structure and for “disproportionately focusing on costs while failing to adequately account for economic benefits.”

Most states are lagging when it comes to rulemaking procedures that include setting environmental and public health standards, according to a new report out today from the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law. The study assigns each of the 50 states a letter grade according to how well their regulatory systems promote sound and rational decision-making. No state got an A and most were in the D range. Iowa ranked the highest with a B+. The worst: Alaska, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas all scored a D-.

News of Lisa Heinzerling’s departure from her position as head of the EPA’s Office of Policy and Planning doesn’t need to mean the winding-down of aggressive action at the EPA.

Fuel economy standards and promoting electric cars are piecemeal policies that cost too much and gain too little. If fiddling around the edges of greenhouse gas restrictions is all we can hope for in the current contentious political environment, so be it, but for the biggest impact at the lowest cost, what is needed is a wholesale cap-and-trade on motor vehicle fuels.

Yesterday, the White House lambasted Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) for her hold on their nominee to head up the Office of Management and Budget. Her goal: to force the president to lift the offshore drilling moratorium put in place in the wake of the largest oil spill in U.S. history so that the regulations governing offshore drilling could be examined and overhauled.

The Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rules for net neutrality would do more to insure economic stability than the proposal from Google and Verizon, according to a new report from New York University think-tank.