In the News

Justin Gundlach noted that in its climate lawsuit against Big Oil, the city pointed out that “the number of days in New York City with rainfall at or above two inches is projected to increase by as much as 67% by the 2020s and the number of days with rainfall at or above four inches is projected to increase by as much as 67% by the 2020s and 133% by the 2080s.”

Housing, public health, transportation and other policy areas cannot be managed effectively if we fail to consider their interactions with the climate. Shrinking from this compound task might mean taking an easier path, but doing so will leave it to the climate to determine our city’s fate.

Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney for the left-leaning Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, said he hoped states like Pennsylvania – which control most drilling regulations and tend to be friendlier to it than the federal government – will follow the Biden administration's example of curtailing fossil fuel development while ramping up renewable energy production.

The newly proposed standards for model years 2023 through 2025 are not particularly ambitious, resulting in smaller emissions reductions than those that the Obama administration had prescribed back in 2012. But, maybe more importantly, they hint at the direction of future vehicle standards.

Though the report is likely to be cited often in litigation, its biggest imprint will be on establishing a social cost of carbon, said Richard Revesz, a law professor and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU. “That’s the building block used to justify the stringency of regulation across many, many agencies,” he said.

“The transition away from relying on fossil gas in buildings will involve intermediate solutions. But some solutions carry fewer physical risks and are easier to eventually cast aside than others,” said Justin Gundlach, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law.

If the international community does not step up to combat climate change, it is likely to do $1.7 trillion a year in damage by 2025, increasing to about $30 trillion a year by 2075, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Yesterday’s D.C. Circuit ruling is the latest decision to rebuke FERC for inadequate climate analysis. Judicial rebukes are likely to continue until FERC fully considers the social cost of greenhouse gases in its analyses, said Richard Revesz.

To ward off concern from conservative justices, EPA could recommend a more limited regulatory approach, such as carbon capture and sequestration, said Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. He said EPA officials are likely to be asking themselves: “Is there a bulletproof thing we can do that will actually achieve meaningful emissions reductions?"

A study published in Nature Communications has calculated exactly how many excess deaths we can expect per additional metric ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere."It could well have a significant impact on climate change policies," New York University School of Law professor Richard Revesz, who was not involved with the research, said of Bressler's figure.