In the News

The Treasury Department’s implementation of new and expanded clean energy tax credits is providing a fresh venue for debates about the carbon accounting for federally backed hydrogen projects, with a think tank seeking “rigorous” rules that account for upstream emissions and ensure integrity of any renewable energy offset credits. The pitch by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI), in comments submitted earlier this month, tracks closely with arguments to the Department of Energy (DOE) as it develops a clean hydrogen production standard (CHPS) for directing grants for hydrogen “hubs” under the 2021 infrastructure law.

The Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law examined the question, “How Do We Know if Hydrogen is Clean?” and noted that "the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act includes “major incentives for ‘clean’ hydrogen. Now agencies need to decide what counts as clean.” The institute gave the Department of Energy, which is charged with developing a standard for clean hydrogen, a series of recommendations.

EPA has led the way in crafting these types of metrics in the past, said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. The agency began working on the social cost of methane and integrated it into some rulemakings before the Interagency Working Group undertook its own work. "The approaches that EPA took and that of the Interagency Working Group ultimately were consistent with each other — if that's any indication of what might be happening here," Sarinsky said.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 9-2 on Wednesday afternoon to report favorably out of committee Richard Revesz’s nomination to be administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees the regulatory process across the government, approves government information collections, establishes government statistical practices and coordinates federal privacy policy.

The “Major Questions Doctrine” will hang over every regulatory decision made by the Biden administration and may slow their production of new regulations. This slowing is particularly important because, as President Biden’s nominee Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Richard Revesz, has noted, it now often takes two terms for presidents to implement their regulatory agendas.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday approved the nomination of Richard Revesz to lead the White House regulatory review shop. The committee voted 9-2 for Revesz, who founded the New York University-affiliated Institute for Policy Integrity 14 years ago, to direct the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The bipartisan vote means Richard Revesz is almost certain to be confirmed.

Democrats’ projected hold on their slim Senate majority in the next Congress could give the party and the Biden administration additional flexibility to confirm dozens of judicial picks and remaining nominees at EPA and other agencies that are important to their environmental policy agenda. President Joe Biden has tapped Richard Revesz to serve as the administrator of the White House Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs that oversees EPA and other agencies rules, and the Senate environment committee has scheduled a Nov. 17 hearing to consider two Biden picks to serve on the Chemical Safety Board.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) is being roundly urged to set clearer metrics and be more transparent in the scorecard it is developing to track EPA and other agencies’ progress implementing the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative, with dozens of groups submitting comments in response to CEQ’s August request for information (RFI). Al Huang, who directs the EJ program at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU’s School of Law, tells Inside EPA that the scorecard creates goals in three buckets: educing disproportionate burdens in communities; ensuring agencies fulfill their Justice40 spending obligations; and establishing EJ infrastructure and creating systems within agencies to confront EJ issues. However, Huang notes there are “a lot of question marks” about how the administration will collect data, what role, if any, EJ communities will have in contributing to the scoring, and whether the flow of money alone will be considered a benefit to EJ communities regardless of how it is used.

EPA is issuing a draft update to the social cost of carbon (SCC) metric that floats significantly higher estimates of the climate-related damage caused by greenhouse gases than the Biden administration’s interim values, as well as a new dynamic approach to setting the “discount rate” used to reduce the value of future benefits from curbing emissions. In response to EPA’s release of the draft estimates, Peter Howard, economics director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said they “will contribute to better policy choices. These metrics ensure that the benefits of climate action are accurately reflected in government decisionmaking. The revision is long overdue, as it has been almost a decade since the last comprehensive update and five years since [NASEM] laid out a roadmap.”

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will vote this week on Richard Revesz's nomination to lead the White House's regulatory review office. Revesz, an environmental law expert and New York University professor, testified before the panel in September. At that hearing, he struck an institutionalist tone while speaking of his reverence for cost-benefit analysis and government transparency.