In the News

Two amicus briefs -- one from Ricky Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University, and another from University of Chicago economics professor Michael Greenstone -- were submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which is hearing environmental groups’ appeal seeking to vacate the NEPA review by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation & Enforcement for failing to use the SCC to assess the coal mine’s climate harms.

As one of his biggest steps to tackle climate change, President-elect Joe Biden is expected to undo President Trump's rollback of clean car standards and set new auto emissions rules. But experts have one pressing question for the former vice president: How aggressive will the new tailpipe rules be? "The big-picture question for me is what the eventual standards will look like," said Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law.

Over 100 environmental safeguards were removed across the past four years. Biden plans to impose stricter environmental standards on industry, a job that would be overseen by his next EPA administrator. Possible picks include Richard Revesz, an NYU Law professor who is considered one of the foremost legal minds in environmental law. Originally from Argentina, he has spent most of his career in academia. But he has managing experience, having served as dean of the NYU law school from 2002 to 2013.

Combating Climate Change with Section 115 of the Clean Air Act: Law and Policy Rationales provides a roadmap for an essential component of such a plan: the Environmental Protection Agency’s international air pollution authority. This new book, which I edited, is the culmination of a decade of collaboration by scholars and lawyers at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, the Emmett Institute at UCLA, and the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU.

The outcome of Georgia’s runoff election will determine the degree to which President-Elect Joe Biden may be able to count on the Senate’s support in enacting his energy platform, which aims for a carbon-free electricity sector by 2035. Bethany Davis Noll and Richard Revesz, regulatory experts whose work focuses on the legal tools available to presidents to pursue their agendas, take a look at the options available to Biden to pursue his energy agenda with, or without, help from the Senate.

The deregulatory era of the past four years, in some cases, exposed how vulnerabilities in the way those rules were crafted or finalized can be used to weaken or rewrite them. About 85 percent of the Trump administration’s deregulatory actions over the past four years were struck down by the courts. Richard Revesz, the Lawrence King Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Institute for Policy Integrity, points out that regulatory action tends to be more durable if it’s undertaken in the first term of a two-term administration—all the more reason why Biden must take swift action in his first year in office to put the nation on an even more aggressive path for climate action.

Donald Trump is using the dying embers of his US presidency to hastily push through a procession of environmental protection rollbacks. The actions of the exiting administration will have “extremely damaging environmental consequences”, said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. “Trump’s counterproductive actions have allowed the climate crisis to intensify and put the health of many Americans, especially in the most vulnerable communities, at risk by ignoring threats from pollution,” he added.

Trump began or completed the process of rolling back 125 environmental rules and regulations, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. Most of those initiatives came under legal attack. The Trump administration lost 82 of 100 legal decisions related to rule making on energy, the environment and natural resources, calculates the Institute for Policy Integrity of New York University's law school. Often these adverse rulings were based on the lack of a suitable administrative record to support the rules — the result of laziness or incompetence at the agency level.

Host Kristin Hayes talks with Michael Livermore and Richard Revesz, cofounders of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law and coauthors of the new book, Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health. Looking forward, Livermore and Revesz contend that a Biden administration should review federal guidelines for conducting cost-benefit analysis and update the process based on the best available science.

EPA’s Science Advisory Board is moving closer to supporting the agency’s revised guidelines on counting the costs and benefits of rules with a draft review of the plan that includes caveats on the “discount” rate and other issues. Jason Schwartz, legal director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, said the 7 percent discount rate is unwarranted, and the SAB panel should reject it.