In the News

In litigation over the attack on state clean car standards, our coalition has been joined by a dozen amici curiae, who have filed briefs as “friends of the court” in support of state authority. These amici include leading researchers and professors including University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman, New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, and seven climate science professors at California universities.

The Trump administration is inept. Evidence for this can be found in the administration’s victory record in the lower courts, where more run-of-the-mill cases are decided than in the Supreme Court. There, an astonishing statistic reveals itself: According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School, only 11 percent of Trump administration regulatory actions prevailed in the lower courts; the other 89 percent were blocked by courts or withdrawn. In contrast, academic research indicates that earlier presidents, since the 1990s or so, have prevailed 60 to 70 percent of the time on regulatory matters in the lower courts.

Messages, made public in a lawsuit, suggest the E.P.A. rescinded a requirement on methane at the behest of an executive just weeks after President Trump took office. Just last week, a federal court, restoring an Obama-era regulation, struck down a Bureau of Land Management effort to weaken restrictions on methane gas releases from drilling on public lands. In that case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that the Trump administration, in its “haste” and “zeal,” failed to properly justify its rollback. “In the early days they did very little justification,” said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, the university’s nonpartisan think tank. “They justify their policies on analytically flimsy or sometimes nonexistent grounds, thinking, I guess, that they will get away with it,” Mr. Revesz said. “But time and again, the courts say no.”

The decision serves as a powerful warning to other agencies seeking to justify rollbacks by using a domestic-only metric to study the social costs of greenhouse gases, said Jason A. Schwartz, legal director for New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. The group filed an amicus brief supporting challenges to the Trump administration’s methane rollback. “No administration can change what the best science or the best economics is by fiat,” he said, paraphrasing the opinion. “You can’t cherry-pick which aspects of a model or which recommendations from a scientific body or literature you want, and then ignore the rest.”

As of 2017, the Trump administration’s new discount rate for SCC is between 3% to 7%—up from 2.5% to 5% during the Obama administration. When setting funding priorities and regulatory policy for government agencies, the Office of Management and Budget has been instructed to use the maximum rate of 7%. That leaves the US without many peers, says Peter Howard, an economics director at New York University School of Law’s think tank for government decision-making, Policy Integrity. “Few economists think that [discount rate] is appropriate,” said Howard. “Seven percent is an extreme outlier.”

Had FERC taken up NERA’s arguments, it would not only have upended the legal basis for net metering programs but would also have severely hampered ongoing efforts by numerous states to develop programs that value [distributed energy resources] with greater accuracy,” the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law said

Jayni Hein of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University says the final rule -- published in the July 16 Federal Register after President Donald Trump personally unveiled it a day prior -- makes it seem like NEPA is “all about efficiently approving projects. There is a lot of new language that goes to efficiency and time limits and page limits, and the new regulation erases a lot of the discussion of the need for a careful analysis of environmental effects.”

Energy companies’ decision to cancel the Atlantic Coast pipeline has dealt an under-the-radar setback to the environmental movement, prolonging a legal campaign to force federal regulators to take a closer look at pipelines’ climate impacts. A panel of D.C. Circuit judges last year panned FERC’s climate review process as “decidedly less than dogged.” But the court hasn’t yet given a definitive answer on whether the commission’s narrow interpretation of the 2017 ruling passes muster. In the meantime, “we are seeing agencies continue to rely on these really problematic arguments without really fully weighing the climate impacts of projects,” said Jason Schwartz, legal director for New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, which has advocated for broader reviews.

The Trump administration’s estimate of the social cost of climate change is seven times lower than the amount used during the Obama administration, according to a Tuesday report by the Government Accountability Office. Richard Revesz, Lawrence King professor of law and dean emeritus at NYU School of Law and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, said the GAO’s documentation of “ignoring the best science available” will weaken the Trump administration’s efforts to uphold its environmental deregulation in court. “This is yet another example of how the administration is ignoring science and economics in its policy decisions,” Revesz said. “Pretending that climate change will have virtually no impacts on Americans is completely disingenuous, and the resulting policy failures could have terrible consequences.”

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity and professor of law and dean emeritus at NYU School of Law, suggested the GAO's findings provide "yet another example of how the administration is ignoring science and economics in its policy decisions."