In the News

After years of bottlenecks for renewables, new transmission projects are moving forward in New York in a move that observers say could be a model for other states and the Biden administration. Pushback could be a challenge nationally given that interregional transmission lines may pass through states with different policy priorities, a problem New York has mostly been able to avoid so far, said Justin Gundlach, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

Legal experts say they expect these kinds of filings will happen more regularly in coming months. “There will be lots of them,” says Ricky Revesz, director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI). “It’s not an unusual pattern. The same thing happened in the beginning of the Trump administration. Parties that were already intervening on the side of the Obama administration took the role of defending the Obama regulations that were now being attacked by the Trump administration.”

Supporters of a stronger SCC are defending the Biden administration’s process to date and suggesting that the current interim SCC estimates -- $51 in estimated per-ton CO2 control benefits in 2020 -- could at least double by January 2022 following the White House’s planned update to the tool. “I would expect that come January, the [SCC] number will be at least $125 a ton,” New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) director Richard Revesz tells Inside EPA’s Climate Extra.

Justin Gundlach explained that the New York Public Service Commission is in a tough spot—coordinating the decline of the gas system is deeply complicated, and the state is still in the midst of a process to determine what, exactly, that decline should look like. 

Richard Revesz is interviewed about the social cost of carbon and its crucial role in crafting smarter energy and climate policies. Justin Gundlach and Peter Howard discuss how the SCC can be further improved.

This kind of bot would help catch human errors and help make regulations more accurate. Language processing tools could analyze a proposed rule to determine its subject matter area, then crawl through related academic research to find and submit relevant scientific studies to the agency. This could help improve the government’s analytical basis for its policy choices.

Conflating economic problems has led FERC to implement inappropriately broad rules without grounding its decisions in rigorous economic analysis. The Expanded MOPR was based on a faulty premise and unsupported by economic theory. Ending the snipe hunt for state exercises of market power in capacity markets is a critical first step toward empowering stakeholders to craft durable economic solutions that allow markets to work.

Advocates of the newly formed Initiative on Climate Risk and Resilience Law (ICRRL) are advocating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) bolster climate change protections with the finance industry. The ICRRL is a joint initiative that includes the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, and the Vanderbilt Law School.

The Biden administration intends to revive federal environmental protections for millions of streams, marshes and other bodies of water across the country. By starting early to revise the policy, the Biden administration stands a greater chance of defending it against the legal challenges that are expected to come, said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. “That makes it much more likely it will stick,” Mr. Revesz said.

Local governments in the U.S. have instead tried to use common-law nuisance claims to force companies to pay the costs of adapting to the effects of climate change. Most of those cases are pending. Should a case end up at the Supreme Court, the conservative-leaning panel could be skeptical of allowing cities to get involved in regulating global matters, said Rachel Rothschild, a legal fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.