In the News

Some legal and regulatory experts are skeptical that EPA’s methane rules — once they are finalized — could be the best path for the red states to reinvigorate their challenge to the Biden administration’s emissions metric. "I don’t think EPA would have much to worry about on the social cost of greenhouse gases front," said Richard Revesz, a law professor and director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. But he noted that any EPA rule of "any consequence" is going to be challenged in court.

Critics of PJM’s minimum price argued that it increased costs to consumers by imposing a barrier for renewable energy. Wind power has been able to bid well below other sources of electricity in competitive markets. “[The] indiscriminate treatment of all state policies as inefficient and uneconomic was both legally inappropriate and economically unsound,” said Sarah Ladin, an energy attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill clarifies FERC’s authority by giving the commission the ability to overturn state objections, transmission analysts said. “This clarifies the scope of preemptive authority available to FERC,” said Justin Gundlach, a senior attorney at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “In my corner of the world it is a meaningful policy change.”

The new methane rule goes beyond merely undoing the damage of the Trump years. The proposal is broader than its Obama-era predecessors, and once finalized, will apply to hundreds of thousands of previously unregulated emission sources, like wells, storage tanks, and compressor station. That is because unlike the prior standards, Biden’s rule will cover equipment of all ages. 

We support the SEC’s plan to propose a rule requiring standardized climate risk disclosures. Doing so would further the Commission’s mandate to protect both investors and the public interest. Our forthcoming paper in the N.Y.U. Journal of Legislation and Public Policy provides several recommendations for how the SEC should build its institutional knowledge as it designs and enforces a climate risk disclosure regime.

Adding to the uncertainty is the US Supreme Court's recent decision to hear a sweeping challenge to EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases from stationary sources, although legal experts expect the court will focus on novel aspects of a since-abandoned 2016 rule that created a cap-and-trade-like system for CO2 from power plants. "That issue is not present in the methane rule," New York University School of Law professor Richard Revesz said.

Justin Gundlach, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity, a New York University think tank, said the decisions are likely to set a precedent and steer planning in New York’s power sector by “tamping down expectations” about whether the future promise of clean hydrogen can justify the development of natural gas plants today.

New York regulators are, for the first time, denying Clean Air Act operating permits for two proposed new natural gas-fired power plants over climate change concerns after regulators determined that the projects would violate a new state law to cut greenhouse gas emissions. According to Justin Gundlach, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, this is not the first time the state has cited the CLCPA to deny a permit, having rejected water and pipeline permits already, but it is the first denial of air permits, in this case Title V operating permits under the Clean Air Act.

“Fossil fuel-powered appliances ubiquitous in residential and commercial buildings collectively emit almost three times more smog-forming nitrogen oxides than the nation’s gas-fired power plants, and almost as much planet-warming carbon dioxide,” IPI says in an Oct. 25 statement announcing a new report that makes the cases for such regulation.

Richard Revesz, a New York University Law School professor who was discussed as a possible Biden pick for EPA administrator, said one option would be for EPA to roll out several rules as an “umbrella proceeding." “Typically EPA has done [rulemakings] sort of one at a time and the government has done them one at a time, but one could sort of think of this as a whole-of-government package so that the power sector could be regulated in an intelligent way that reduces the cost of the regulation and increases the environmental benefits,” Revesz said.