In the News

Forcing oil companies to cover New York’s climate costs will not raise the price of gas or home heating. According to an analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law, because companies’ payments would be based on historical contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, oil companies would have to treat these as one-time fixed costs.

Environmentalists are bracing for the Biden administration to approve Willow. If it does, it’s unclear what difference a higher social cost metric would have made. “In theory — and this is what advocates have been saying — the agency could conduct some sort of weighing of costs and benefits,” said Max Sarinsky. “And there the social cost of carbon could factor prominently ... But right now, that's not what they do,” he added. “In most cases, that has meant ‘If there's an interest in fossil fuel development, we're going to approve it.’”

Environmental advocates have insisted for years on the need to robustly account for climate impacts when permitting fossil-fuel infrastructure. Courts and agencies are starting to listen. A recent decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and a new guidance document from the White House Council on Environmental Quality mark the latest developments in ensuring that federal agencies consider climate-change impacts before greenlighting fossil-fuel projects.

Top Hill Democrats are backing the Biden EPA’s legal defense of its light-duty vehicle greenhouse gas rule, asserting that challengers’ claims the standards violate the “major questions” doctrine ignore “explicit direction” from Congress and “would severely limit the ability of Congress itself to craft effective legislation” if affirmed. Other amicus briefs backing EPA filed by a March 3 deadline include filings by the Institute for Policy Integrity.

University of Virginia law professor Michael Livermore explains the significance of the Biden administration's proposal to increase its estimate of the social cost of carbon, which federal regulatory agencies use to measure the economic consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. Livermore's 2022 article in the Yale Journal on Regulation, Costs, Confusion and Climate Change, coauthored with Justin Gundlach of New York University School of Law, looked at the SCC's effectiveness as a cost-benefit analysis tool.

Environmental groups are largely supporting EPA’s draft update and urge the agency to use even lower discount rates than it floats. For example, a large coalition of groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University say in Feb. 13 comments that the report “faithfully implements the roadmap laid out in 2017” by the National Academies of Science, Engineering & Medicine“ and applies recent advances in science and economics on the cost of climate change.

Federal government contractors are detailing a host of legal and technical criticisms of the Biden administration’s proposed requirements for large contractors to disclose various types climate information, even as environmentalists say the plan would save taxpayer funds and protect against climate risks. New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, for instance, says the Federal Acquisition Regulation Council should be careful not to “understate baseline levels of climate risk in disclosure (and thus overstate the incremental compliance costs of the Proposed Rule.)”

Policy Integrity research helped spur a novel climate bill introduced by New York state lawmakers: the Climate Change Superfund Act. The Act would establish a climate change adaptation fund by requiring the fossil-fuel companies most responsible for climate damages to pay $30 billion to the state over 10 years. This blog post highlights the key takeaways from Policy Integrity's legal and economic research on the Act, establishing its legal basis and economic viability.

“Many anticipated actions have been delayed amid an evolving judicial landscape and legislative developments that bear influence on regulatory design," said Dena Adler. "The administration recently rolled out an updated regulatory agenda with many actions scheduled for release over the next year, which we have not yet had the chance to evaluate. This year will be a critical period for the administration to propose and finalize regulations as well as implement the IRA.”

A study released by New York University in 2021 found carbon trading would lead to deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and lower the cost of complying with the law.