In the News

Increasingly it appears that Presidents only have two years to make policy if they want it to last. This is the thesis of a forthcoming article by two legal experts who argue that President Donald J. Trump made aggressive use of a set of policy-reversing tools during his term and that President Joseph R. Biden has followed suit. The article’s authors—Bethany A. Davis Noll, the executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at the NYU School of Law, and Richard L. Revesz, AnBryce Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at the NYU School of Law—contend that Presidents can combine these tools to roll back recent policy, making any regulations issued in the last two years of the previous presidency vulnerable to repeal.

MATS's issuance capped a two-decade regulatory tug of war that originated with the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. Based on EPA projections of the expected health gains, tens of thousands of Americans had their lives cut short by toxic power plant pollution in the interim. One of MATS’s lessons is that “there are real costs to delay,” said Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the liberal-leaning Institute for Policy Integrity, based at New York University. “And real benefits to the people who would rather that the rules not be issued at all.”

A federal court in Louisiana heard oral argument Dec. 7 in a case brought by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (R) that is gaining national attention. The case seeks to prevent federal agencies from considering scientific estimates of climate change impacts. It could have profound consequences, but not the ones Landry suggests. While Landry’s lawsuit is cloaked in hyperbole about federal takeovers and taxes, no such risks exist. But the suit does threaten to upset settled, bipartisan principles of administrative law.

Policy Integrity’s comments make two categories of recommendations: (1) improving public participation, and (2) improving analysis.

Getting greener mail trucks would help combat climate change — and all of the Postal Service’s competitors are doing it.

But what would serious distributional analysis look like? As we explained in our recent comments on EPA’s Draft Strategic Plan for 2022–2026, serious distributional analysis requires that an agency consider the distributional consequences of multiple regulatory alternatives.

TGP representatives themselves project annual emissions from the East 300 project at more than 2.34 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. The Institute for Policy Integrity, a non-partisan organization at New York University School of Law, used a federal government model to calculate that the project would be responsible for damage of more than $131 million per year.

Unlike most executive orders that undergo a lengthy and sometimes fractious regulatory process before they are enacted, procurement rules can take effect almost immediately, said Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. He called the executive orders “very significant.”

A group of watchdogs recently asked the FTC to issue new rules that would ban drip pricing. You can let the FTC what you’d like to see them do with this request by sending them a message here.

By changing the underlying risk profile of certain insurance products, climate change threatens insurers’ business model. At the same time, insurers also face risk as investors, as insurers’ assets may be overvalued due to unassigned climate risk. Improved data, research and resilience planning can contribute to a more robust and more equitable insurance system, while improving financial disclosure requirements can limit investment risk.