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“If this ends up being a one-term administration, very little of the regulatory changes will stick,” said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, which monitors lawsuits brought against all the administration’s departments. “The Trump administration has tried to do a lot, but it’s done it in an extraordinarily sloppy way.” According to the institute, courts with judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans have so far ruled against about 84 percent of the 90 energy and environmental regulations, guidance documents and other actions by the Trump administration.

Environmentalists acknowledge a Trump re-election victory would mean new threats to regulation but might not guarantee success of poorly crafted deregulatory efforts. “The Trump administration’s record in defending these rollbacks has been really atrocious thus far,” Environmental Defense Fund attorney Tomás Carbonell said during the environmental law conference, citing a statistic from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity that the administration has lost 83 percent of its legal fights to date with respect to deregulatory efforts across multiple federal agencies.

The New York University School of Law's nonpartisan Institute for Policy Integrity also faulted the EPA for declining to conduct a cost-benefit analysis for the changes, noting that the agency cited the March 2018 guidance in claiming its proposed rule would not result in a change to existing regulations. "An agency cannot evade its responsibility to provide a reasoned explanation for a policy change — including a discussion of the relevant factor of cost — simply by announcing the change in a memorandum prior to codifying it in a regulation," the institute said.

On October 2, the Institute for Policy Integrity and the Volatility and Risk Institute at NYU Stern School of Business co-hosted a conference on “Corporate Climate Risk: Assessment, Disclosure, and Action.” The conference explored the systemic risks that climate change poses to financial markets and the emerging calls from investors, governments, and other parties for companies to disclose these risks.

According to prominent medical doctors, we are in the midst of “the biggest public health challenge of the 21st century.” But it’s not the one you think. The toll of the COVID-19 pandemic is enormous and devastating. But the public health impacts of climate change could be vastly greater. The medical profession is demanding that we recognize climate change for the health crisis that it already is, rather than the environmental catastrophe that it threatens to become. 

In this episode of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State's podcast, Professor Caroline Cecot of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School discusses her new working paper, “Congress and the Stability of the Cost-Benefit Analysis Consensus,” with Executive Director Adam White and with Professor Ricky Revesz, NYU’s Lawrence King Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Ideological leaning could make the court even more favorable toward oil and gas interests and could come into play in environmental cases as the justices resolve disputes involving climate policy and Trump administration rollbacks of environmental regulations, experts said. Trump’s administration has faced lawsuits over its regulatory rollbacks and efforts to fast-track oil and gas projects, winning 22 such cases but losing 119, according to New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

As the prospects for a nationwide carbon price have waned, FERC has begun to change from a sleepy backwater to a central player in climate policy, said Jason Gundlach, a senior attorney at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity who co-authored a report on carbon pricing. “There’s a recognition that FERC is going to be a major fulcrum in any energy transition policy,” he said.

NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity found that Trump attempts to rewrite or revoke regulations had failed in court or been yanked after a challenge 84% of the time. In the process, an arrogant administration under the sway of a man who has said of the Constitution, “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president,” squanders political capital and breeds justifiable cynicism about every move it makes. Four years in, this is still a nation of laws.

As she did on judicial matters, such as her views on Roe v. Wade, Judge Barrett declined to state her thoughts on climate change in exchange after exchange this week. “I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial,” she concluded. But stating "I would not say I have firm views on climate change” in the face of so much evidence in daily life, as Judge Barrett did, is controversial. “She’s a smart and sophisticated person,” said Richard L. Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School. “If she didn’t want to associate herself with the climate denial perspective, she could have used different words."