In the News

While FERC’s new climate reviews are useful and a step in the right direction, failing to determine the significance of a project’s emissions could open the door to more lawsuits, said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law. “The bigger question is, what do you do now that you know what these emissions are? How is that going to affect your decisionmaking process?” Sarinsky said. “So far, FERC hasn’t shown that it will.”

The Institute for Policy Integrity, a regulatory think tank based at New York University, says in July 6 comments that OMB should “detail sustainable methodologies and procedures that agencies can implement,” and identifies four principles to guide such action.

Justin Gundlach explained that the New York Public Service Commission is in a tough spot—coordinating the decline of the gas system is deeply complicated, and the state is still in the midst of a process to determine what, exactly, that decline should look like. 

Richard Revesz is interviewed about the social cost of carbon and its crucial role in crafting smarter energy and climate policies. Justin Gundlach and Peter Howard discuss how the SCC can be further improved.

Advocates of the newly formed Initiative on Climate Risk and Resilience Law (ICRRL) are advocating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) bolster climate change protections with the finance industry. The ICRRL is a joint initiative that includes the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, and the Vanderbilt Law School.

Local governments in the U.S. have instead tried to use common-law nuisance claims to force companies to pay the costs of adapting to the effects of climate change. Most of those cases are pending. Should a case end up at the Supreme Court, the conservative-leaning panel could be skeptical of allowing cities to get involved in regulating global matters, said Rachel Rothschild, a legal fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

In its order, a majority of FERC’s Commissioners said that they disagreed that greenhouse gas emissions must necessarily be a consideration, incremental or not for the WBI project, and rejected calls by the Institute for Policy Integrity to monetize such impacts using a social cost metric. Nonetheless, FERC did look briefly at the total potential for greenhouse gas emissions in its order, in response to Policy Integrity comments.

Several current and former policymakers expressed skepticism that hydrogen and renewable natural gas are mature enough to play a major role in their states' transition from natural gas. Those fuels cannot be the justification, as they are often presented, for building more gas infrastructure, former New York State PSC Chair John Rhodes said during a May 27 webinar hosted by the Institute for Policy Integrity, Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the New York University School of Law's State Energy and Environmental Impact Center.

It’s time to change course and take an approach that avoids bad investments and climate pollution. FERC should use its authority to meaningfully consider climate impacts and reject proposals that are inconsistent with national energy needs. 

The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law conducted a large-sample survey on climate economics, which was sent to all economists who have published climate-related research in the field’s highest-ranked academic journals. The results show an overwhelming consensus that the costs of inaction on climate change are higher than the costs of action, and that immediate, aggressive emissions reductions are economically desirable.