In the News

Eight days before President Donald Trump leaves office, the EPA published a rule on 13 January that sets 3% of total gross US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as the significant threshold at which the agency can regulate releases of these pollutants. Below that level, the EPA said no endangerment of public health would ensue. "The final rule violates the APA because it isn't a logical outgrowth of EPA's 2018 proposal and the public didn't get a meaningful opportunity to comment on the 3% threshold for significance," Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity and an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, said.

In a surprise move yesterday, the EPA posted a final rule that does nothing to change Obama-era carbon regulations on new power plants. Instead it doubles down on an issue that was raised only in a footnote in the December 2018 proposal: whether EPA should create a new metric for which industrial sectors contribute to climate change enough to trigger regulation. Environmental lawyers predicted that the Biden EPA would have little difficulty dispensing with it. "I think there's very little practical effect," said Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. "It's a banana peel, and the Biden administration is very unlikely to slip on it, I trust."

Four years ago, President Trump launched his deregulatory push with gusto. So far, the Trump administration has lost 83% of legal challenges to its regulations, guidance and agency memorandums, according to statistics compiled by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. "It's pretty shoddy," said Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director for the NYU institute. "There are all these cases they lost at the beginning, and then only this year have we seen the big rollbacks. Since Trump didn't win reelection, the administration isn't going to be able to defend those in court."

The Trump administration lost a mountain of critical cases and failed to get most of its top priorities across the legal finish line. “The biggest rules are still being litigated, and that doesn’t help solidify a legacy for this administration,” said Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director for New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

The impending power shift in the Senate means Congress will once again turn to the Congressional Review Act to scrap a bevy of regulations. Hill Republicans and President Trump used the CRA to kill 16 Obama-era rules in 2017. Democrats, in contrast, have never deployed the CRA. "It's the quickest way to get rid of policies that will cause significant harms to the health of Americans and to the quality of our environment," said Ricky Revesz, a New York University professor whose name has been mentioned as a possible Biden regulatory chief.

Richard Revesz shares his thoughts on how the transition to a new presidential administration later this month will impact U.S. environmental and climate change policy.

Utilities that address climate risks will see benefits in their bottom lines, said Justin Gundlach, a senior attorney at the New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity. "The fundamental point here is that it would be cheaper if they just looked at this hard and made prudent investments," he said.

The Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs has issued a paper, in partnership with the New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity, detailing how the federal government can enable the construction of the transmission infrastructure necessary to decarbonize the country’s power generation.

Ricky Revesz, a New York University professor whose name has been floated as a possible Biden OIRA administrator, said generally the Trump administration's regulatory aggressiveness is "unusual." "It's part of a larger story to get stuff out at the very end where the regulatory initiatives are on the whole extremely harmful," he said. Revesz pointed to a Health and Human Services Department proposal that would force all the agency's regulations to sunset within 10 years, unless a review is completed.

Transmission is an area where DOE watchers say they are hoping Granholm takes the lead. "In the absence of legislation, critical long-distance transmission can be developed by applying existing federal legal authorities," researchers said in a report this month out of NYU Law School's Institute for Policy Integrity and Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy. It pointed at a 2005 act establishing DOE's authority to advance "national interest" transmission projects as the critical lever.