In the News

“My immediate reaction is that these states should have a very hard time convincing a judge that a President asking his agencies to work together, to engage with the public and stakeholders, and then to follow the best available science and economics to evaluate the consequences of their decisions, is somehow illegal,” Jason A. Schwartz, legal director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, told Bloomberg Law.

Twelve states filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, accusing President Joe Biden of exceeding the executive branch’s power in restoring Obama-era values for an analytical tool called the social cost of greenhouse gases. “My immediate reaction is that these states should have a very hard time convincing a judge that a President asking his agencies to work together, to engage with the public and stakeholders, and then to follow the best available science and economics to evaluate the consequences of their decisions, is somehow illegal,” Jason A. Schwartz, legal director for New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

Some supporters of the Trump “transparency” policy attributed the loss to judicial bias, and the environmental groups’ move to file their challenge in a state, Montana, which has no Trump-appointed federal judges. But Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School, said that the Trump administration’s legal errors were “sufficiently egregious that it’s likely that any judge would have struck it down.”

In one of his last acts in office, then-Administrator Andrew Wheeler denied CBD’s petition and other similar requests for GHG rulemakings under various sections of the air law. He rejected most of a February 2013 petition from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity that sought to regulate GHGs under the air law's section 115 that governs international air pollution, though Wheeler left in place portions of the petition asking EPA to regulate GHGs under section 111’s new source performance standards, the Title II mobile source program and the Title VI stratospheric ozone program.

The SEC announced that the new climate focus would not be limited to its Division of Corporate Finance—the SEC has created a new Climate and ESG Task Force in the Division of Enforcement. A recent report from the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU and the Environmental Defense Fund contends that Corporate Finance has failed to use the review process to elicit more disclosure.

Because Democratic administrations tend to use regulation more than Republican ones, they are more vulnerable to this movement. But many legal scholars say the courts’ higher bar on regulation is nonpartisan. Mr. Trump’s regulatory initiatives were nixed by judges—sometimes those who were his appointees—at a much higher rate than former President Barack Obama’s, according to a tracker run by New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

Collective resumes highlight Biden’s intention to reinstate old-school policymaking amid a global pandemic and slew of other coalescing national crises. The courts struck down a number of Trump health, immigration, and environmental rules—including after he left office—because staff violated the law that governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations. One analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, a non-partisan research group focused on governmental decision-making, found that the administration lost more than 80% of its legal attempts to undo regulations or write new rules.

The Biden administration has reverted to an Obama-era method for calculating the social cost of greenhouse gases, which will be key in evaluating government actions affecting climate change. NYU Law Professor Richard L. Revesz examines the change and says some related actions, including updating the discount rate used to evaluate future consequences, need to happen in the coming months.

The cost of greenhouse gas emissions was calculated to be $1 per ton under the Trump administration. The Biden administration is increasing it to $51 per ton. Professor Richard Revesz explains what that could mean in practice and the rationale behind it (at 01:14:52).

In the last four years, that highly devalued, flawed SCC number was used in numerous regulatory processes. UCS worked closely with a coalition expertly led by the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU to file comments in as many of these regulatory dockets as possible, getting on the record each time why the Trump admin SCC was so deeply flawed, so out of line with science, and how it needed to be fixed.