In the News

What is the cost of our carbon footprint — not just in dollars, but in lives? According to a paper published on Thursday, it is soberingly high, and perhaps high enough to help shift attitudes about how much we should spend on fighting climate change. Richard Revesz, a professor at New York University School of Law, praised the new work, which extends research that he and others have done to view the social cost of carbon as the beginning of an understanding of the costs of climate change, not the full cost.

Richard Revesz said the proposal to ramp up annual requirements from 3.7% to 5% positions the administration for future carbon reductions. “A tightening of the standard over the next few years is productive because it will require a less big leap — a big leap — but a less big leap after 2026,” he said. “Starting there and moving up is in my mind a reasonable approach, but we can’t stop there. We have to keep moving forward.”

The rule process is specific, technical, and tedious, which did not exactly fit Trump’s style. Some experts say Trump’s agencies wrote their rules carelessly, failing to provide good explanations for what they were doing. “​​You do have to explain why you’re making the change you’re making and give some good reasons for it. And you have to respond to criticism from the public,” Jack Lienke, the regulatory-policy director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, told me. “And the Trump administration often didn’t do that.”

The agencies are not expected to meet this week’s deadline, and questions are swirling about the scope of a cars rule that could play a central role in cutting emissions from the nation’s biggest source of CO2. “Is the proposal going to reinstate the Obama standards, is it going to embody the agreement California reached with auto companies, which was less stringent, or will it be somewhere in between?” said Richard Revesz, a professor at the New York University School of Law.

While FERC’s new climate reviews are useful and a step in the right direction, failing to determine the significance of a project’s emissions could open the door to more lawsuits, said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law. “The bigger question is, what do you do now that you know what these emissions are? How is that going to affect your decisionmaking process?” Sarinsky said. “So far, FERC hasn’t shown that it will.”

Legal arguments that curbed several of the Trump administration’s most far-reaching executive actions could be used to slow President Joe Biden’s most ambitious climate and environment plans. The Trump administration had a 23% win rate in court challenges to its agency actions, according to data from the nonprofit Institute for Policy Integrity. That number is a stark contrast to the average 70% win rate of previous administrations, said Bethany Davis Noll, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center and an affiliated scholar at the Institute of Policy Integrity.

In Biden’s first two weeks in office, he took 16 executive actions directly reversing one or more of former president Donald Trump’s policies. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, of the nearly 260 deregulatory and other actions of Trump’s administration that were challenged in court, three-quarters were either struck down or withdrawn by the agency in question after it was sued.

The Institute for Policy Integrity, a regulatory think tank based at New York University, says in July 6 comments that OMB should “detail sustainable methodologies and procedures that agencies can implement,” and identifies four principles to guide such action.

A coalition of 16 states is urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to not reinstate a waiver allowing California to implement its own carbon emissions standards. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, from 1967 to 2018, the EPA granted more than 50 waivers for California alone, fully denied one in 1980, which was subsequently reversed, and revoked zero.

The Institute for Policy Integrity wants the FTC to weigh in on drip pricing, the hidden fees revealed later on in the purchasing process.