In the News

A coalition of the Environmental Defense Fund, Food & Water Watch, the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, and others was among the groups that commented on FERC's gas pipeline certificate policy. Their comments suggested that FERC use the social cost of greenhouse gases as the best approach to assessing impacts of a proposed project's emissions.

Some observers wonder why Democrats — many eager to sack four years of Trump policies — did not use the CRA on the laundry list of rules they have spent years condemning. Ricky Revesz, a New York University law professor, thought the entire narrative around the CRA has been mangled. He said it's significant that the Democrats used it at all — stressing this is the first time in history that a Democratic congressional majority has done so. He added: "The Biden administration has been very aggressive, moving quickly to undo some very pernicious regulations without resorting to the CRA."

FERC has yet to act on the 92.5-mile, 250 MMcf/d North Bakken Expansion Project, which would provide incremental firm capacity from six gas processing plants to a proposed interconnect with Northern Border Pipeline Company. Adding a possible hurdle in that docket, the Institute for Policy Integrity has faulted FERC's environmental assessment for a failure to project indirect GHG emissions or monetize emissions.

Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity and State Energy & Environmental Impact Center are hosting a May 27 webinar to examine state efforts to move away from natural gas appliances to lower-emitting products. “Navigating this transformation successfully will be a monumental endeavor--one that the federal government can support, but cannot undertake itself. It is a task for the states,” the groups say.

FERC almost never denies (pipeline) applications. As long as there’s a contract in place they approve it,” said Max Sarinsky, an attorney with New York University’s Institute for Public Policy. “They have an obligation to review the impacts of these pipelines, both beneficial and adverse, and that’s not something they’ve been doing with climate impacts.

At the Institute for Policy Integrity, a New York University think tank critical of Trump administration environmental policies, Director Richard Revesz said the forecasting requirements "sought to put a thumb on the scale in favor of deregulation and would have caused additional deaths, illnesses, and lost work days and decreased the overall welfare of Americans. The repeal of this rule is an important step to restore scientific integrity at EPA."

In a recent essay, Natasha Brunstein and Richard Revesz, who directs New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, charge that efforts by Republican state officials to use the so-called “major questions” doctrine in their nascent bid to reinstate the Trump-era Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule governing power plant GHGs should be met with “great skepticism” given the Trump administration’s distorted use of the doctrine for deregulatory purposes.

To shed light on the meaning that the Trump Administration ascribed to this doctrine, we reviewed the arguments in the briefs filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in federal appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the doctrine’s scope.

The Second Circuit got the law wrong when it dismissed New York City’s lawsuit seeking damages from fossil fuel companies for climate change harms. The ruling is not limited to climate suits and could thwart others from using the courts to hold those responsible for external harms inflicted on society.

The environmental law field has been slow to diversify and there is widespread agreement that diversity is critical to providing high quality work that has a deep and lasting impact. So this winter and spring, in partnership with Green 2.0 and the New York City Bar’s Environmental Law Committee, we set about to explore the best strategies for proactively addressing the disparity.