In the News

The Obama White House was the first to require government agencies to use the social cost of carbon as part of any cost-benefit analysis of new regulations. This is not to say that the Obama administration’s method was perfect. Peter Howard, an economist at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, has identified significant damages that will result from climate change that the Obama administration failed to account for, like fishery damage from ocean acidification and public health impacts from wildfires.

Now up for review is the 2019 rule repealing and replacing Obama’s flagship Clean Power Plan for existing power plants. This week's decision by a federal court to throw out the Trump rule greases the skids by allowing EPA to return to the drawing board to decide how power plants should be regulated. “The rule that the Biden administration will write will be written against the backdrop of some prediction of not just what the D.C. Circuit would do, of which we now have a fairly good sense, but also what the Supreme Court could do, which we don’t know,” said Richard Revesz.

“It’s a laborious, time-consuming process,” said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, who was on Mr. Biden’s short list to run the E.P.A. “No one doubts the EPA’s authority to put these regulations on auto pollution back in place,” Mr. Revesz said. “But they can’t just make the Trump rules go away by executive order."

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s law school, a non-partisan group, said EPA’s legal theory has been “unsupportable” and called the erstwhile ACE regulation the Trump administration’s top environmental policy.

“It’s fitting that, on the Trump administration’s last day in office, the D.C. Circuit forcefully struck down the signature item of its environmental agenda,’’ said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law.

Richard Revesz, director of New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity, said the Trump administration devised "an unsupportable legal theory" to justify the repeal of the Clean Power Plan.

The decision Tuesday caps the administration’s poor record fighting for its deregulatory attempts in court. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, the administration has lost more than 80 percent of its legal attempts to undo or force agency regulations in its favor. “The EPA constructed an unsupportable legal theory to justify the Clean Power Plan,” said Richard Revesz, director of the institute.

"For four years, the Trump administration has propagated the outright lie that the Clean Power Plan relied on regulatory techniques never used before, and the EPA constructed an unsupportable legal theory to justify its repeal," said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University's School of Law.

"It’s fitting that, on the Trump administration’s last full day in office, the D.C. Circuit forcefully struck down the signature item of its environmental agenda, which has brought enormous harm to the health of the American people, to the environment, and to the competitiveness of our economy," said Ricky Revesz, director of the NYU School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity, which opposed the ACE rule.

The federal auto regulator said this week it would delay an increase in fines imposed on manufacturers that fail to meet emissions standards designed to curb global warming, even after the Trump administration has lost two lawsuits over the issue. Richard Revesz, a law professor at New York University, said the agency’s action was “directly inconsistent” with a ruling last year by a federal appeals court in New York. “In an administration that has taken many outrageous actions to compromise the health of the American people and the environment, this one stands out as an example of rampant lawlessness,” said Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, which was involved in the litigation.