In the News

U.S. executives and agencies will start considering the economic and social impacts of climate change in budget and procurement decisions and environmental reviews, according to a Thursday instruction from the Biden administration...

Jack Lienke, IPI's regulatory policy director who moderated the panel, recalled the group's conference last fall — held just after the IRA's passage and a few months after the Supreme Court's decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which cited the major questions doctrine to block EPA power plant rules premised on shifting to cleaner generation. At that point, "the conventional take seemed to be — the era of regulating has ended, the era of spending has begun; goodbye neoliberalism, hello industrial policy, etc.," Lienke said.

The GREET model will also need retooling to manage the broader complexities of measuring the greenhouse gas emissions of hydrogen production, many commenters to the Treasury Department have noted. For example, the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law has asked the Treasury Department to work quickly with DOE to develop a successor model that can accurately assess the ​“marginal emissions” impact of electrolyzers using a mix of clean and dirty grid power. 

Today, the safe transportation and storage of carbon dioxide is shaping the public debate. “There aren’t many sequestration projects that exist yet,” Derek Sylvan, with the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, told Jean. “So, it’s especially important for the next wave of projects to get extra scrutiny until all the necessary safety precautions are well understood.”

“I think that this is a really critical juncture,” said Derek Sylvan, strategic director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. “There aren’t many sequestration projects that exist yet. So, it’s especially important for the next wave of projects to get extra scrutiny until all the necessary safety precautions are well understood.”

A lawsuit challenging a natural gas expansion project on the East Coast could change how federal regulators assess state climate policies. “If the D.C. Circuit doesn’t step in, state ratepayers are going to end up paying twice,” said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank based at New York University School of Law. “They’ll end up paying more as the states are transitioning away from gas and electrifying building and heating and other uses.”

New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity stated the act is “burdensome, irrational, and legally questionable” for several reasons.

While ecosystems have sometimes appeared in the cost-benefit assessments that agencies must write to support their rules, policies and projects, there has never been a governmentwide directive or guidance for doing that accounting. As a result, ecosystem values are treated as secondary to more easily quantified benefits, Richard Revesz, administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and co-founder of the Institute for Policy Integrtity, along with OSTP Director Arati Prabhakar wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality proposed long-awaited regulations Friday that would streamline permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act. Federal agencies would need to meet set deadlines for environmental reviews — as required by this year's debt ceiling deal — but also consider how energy projects impact climate change and communities historically overburdened by pollution. Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity, described the draft as "meaningful" but "also fairly modest and incremental."

The US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a milestone on the path towards the electric vehicle (EV) era — a monumental shift with the potential to remodel not just the US automotive industry, but the global landscape. Washington is working to establish alternatives to China’s control over critical mineral resources within the Asia-Pacific region, potentially recalibrating the global EV industry.