In the News

Peter Howard, economics director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, testified that the emissions tied to the tunnel project would generate approximately $1 billion in global social economic costs each year from 2027 to 2070, as well as “significant unmonetized climate effects and other unquantified pollution costs to human health and the environment.”

So what's a reasonable investor to think about the MOPR and state climate and clean energy policies? If nothing else, it should be clear that one is more certain than the other. A reasonable investor knows the MOPR has not been a durable construct, while state policies have long been moving in one direction. There is certainty there. Regardless of what happens to the MOPR, states are not giving up on their climate ambitions. They will continue to support clean energy technologies that are cheaper for consumers and safer for their citizens.

New York University law experts also tried to knock down the “perfect substitution” argument in an article for the Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law last year, calling it “contrary to basic principles of supply and demand” and a “fallacy.”

Peter Howard, the economics director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, said from 2027 to 2070 the average annual climate costs would approximate $1 billion each year over this period, "plus significant unmonetized climate effects and other unquantified pollution costs to human health and the environment."

No longer a risk of the distant future, a failure to tackle climate-change risk could cost the world $1.7 trillion a year by 2025—according to a report released in March by New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity. In what its authors believe to be “the largest-ever expert survey of the economics of climate change,” the “overwhelming consensus” among the 738 economists canvassed concludes that inaction will be costlier than action, and that “immediate, aggressive emissions reductions are economically desirable.”

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.