In the News

Environmentalists should question any move by this Administration’s EPA to reform its cost-benefit analysis.

The Trump administration’s coal and nuclear bailout proposals wouldn’t truly protect customers from damaging electricity outages. Policymakers interested in serious, evidence-based resilience improvements already have the tools they need to act—including metrics for measuring resilience, a framework for evaluating improvements, and legal authorities to implement changes.

“When an agency wants to do something that’s harmful to the American people, it typically tries to hide it,” Richard Revesz of the Institute for Policy Integrity told Johnson. “What’s unusual here is that the EPA just comes out and says it.”

The Clean Air Act also requires the EPA to define the “best system of emission reduction” for existing facilities, such as power plants. But the EPA’s new plan “has identified a system of emission reduction that is, at best, mediocre, far from ‘best,’” Richard Revesz, a professor of law at New York University and an expert on environmental law, told E&E News this week.

Trump officials contend that their carbon approach better reflects the way the government has traditionally done cost-benefit analyses. Critics argue that this approach is inappropriate for global, multigenerational problems like climate change, and that newer research suggests the social cost of carbon may be even higher than the Obama administration estimated. Ultimately, the courts could decide which view prevails. “This will be part of the legal challenges to these regulatory rollbacks,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert in environmental law at New York University. “The reasons for why the Trump administration picked these numbers for the social cost of carbon are going to be scrutinized.”

“When an agency wants to do something that’s harmful to the American people, it typically tries to hide it,” said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. “What’s unusual here is that the EPA just comes out and says it.”

The projection of increased deaths and costs marks “what’s extraordinary about this proposal,” said Richard Revesz, dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law. “To their credit, they tell us directly, ‘We are doing something to cause great harm to the American people.’”

“In regulating greenhouse gas pollution, the EPA is legally required to use the ‘best system of emission reduction,’ not a mediocre or downright counterproductive system of emission reduction,” said Richard Revesz, dean emeritus at NYU School of Law and director of its Institute for Policy Integrity. “This proposal is an enormous step backwards, and it will have severe repercussions for public health and the climate.”

“In regulating greenhouse gas pollution, the EPA is legally required to use the ‘best system of emission reduction,’ not a mediocre or downright counterproductive system of emission reduction,” said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law. “This proposal is an enormous step backwards, and it will have severe repercussions for public health and the climate.”

Writing in The Hill, Bethany A. Davis Noll and Richard Revesz note that the scientific and evidentiary basis legally required for the Trump environmental regulations is largely absent. These legal deficiencies have led some experts to predict that the seeming revolution in regulatory policy will come a cropper, as federal judges on the D.C. Circuit and then the Supreme Court throw out the shoddy work. Courts to the rescue!