In the News

According to prominent medical doctors, we are in the midst of “the biggest public health challenge of the 21st century.” But it’s not the one you think. The toll of the COVID-19 pandemic is enormous and devastating. But the public health impacts of climate change could be vastly greater. The medical profession is demanding that we recognize climate change for the health crisis that it already is, rather than the environmental catastrophe that it threatens to become. 

Multiple amicus briefs were filed in support of Attorney General Becerra’s challenge of the Trump Administration’s “Healthcare Refusal Rule." The Institute for Policy Integrity wrote that "It is difficult to imagine how a rule could cause more workers to assert a right to deny care without also causing an increase in denials of care. HHS cannot have it both ways."

In this episode of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State's podcast, Professor Caroline Cecot of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School discusses her new working paper, “Congress and the Stability of the Cost-Benefit Analysis Consensus,” with Executive Director Adam White and with Professor Ricky Revesz, NYU’s Lawrence King Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Ideological leaning could make the court even more favorable toward oil and gas interests and could come into play in environmental cases as the justices resolve disputes involving climate policy and Trump administration rollbacks of environmental regulations, experts said. Trump’s administration has faced lawsuits over its regulatory rollbacks and efforts to fast-track oil and gas projects, winning 22 such cases but losing 119, according to New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

As the prospects for a nationwide carbon price have waned, FERC has begun to change from a sleepy backwater to a central player in climate policy, said Jason Gundlach, a senior attorney at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity who co-authored a report on carbon pricing. “There’s a recognition that FERC is going to be a major fulcrum in any energy transition policy,” he said.

NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity found that Trump attempts to rewrite or revoke regulations had failed in court or been yanked after a challenge 84% of the time. In the process, an arrogant administration under the sway of a man who has said of the Constitution, “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president,” squanders political capital and breeds justifiable cynicism about every move it makes. Four years in, this is still a nation of laws.

As she did on judicial matters, such as her views on Roe v. Wade, Judge Barrett declined to state her thoughts on climate change in exchange after exchange this week. “I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial,” she concluded. But stating "I would not say I have firm views on climate change” in the face of so much evidence in daily life, as Judge Barrett did, is controversial. “She’s a smart and sophisticated person,” said Richard L. Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School. “If she didn’t want to associate herself with the climate denial perspective, she could have used different words."

In his first term, Trump repealed the Obama administration’s signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, and rolled back a host of other environmental rules. But the majority of the 100-plus domestic environmental regulations he rolled back remain in limbo, after successful challenges by states and green groups, according to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Integrity.

The idea sounds great on the surface: incentivize the delivery of clean energy when demand is highest. However, a recent study co-authored by researchers from Columbia University, New York University, and the clean energy non-profit WattTime challenges the effectiveness of such programs. The study found that “[t]he Clean Peak Standard provides weak incentives for pollution abatement” and that the policy in Massachusetts “is roughly as effective as a $1 carbon tax.”

A rational administration would look at the decline in demand for oil and gas leases and see it as an opportunity to hit pause and come up with a fiscally and environmentally smarter way to manage public lands. Instead, the Trump administration is rushing ahead with these lease sales, locking in more harmful greenhouse gas emissions while failing to earn a decent return for American taxpayers.