In the News

According to Bethany Davis Noll and Burcin Unel of the Institute for Policy Integrity, the Commission has embraced “market efficiency” as the primary measure of just and reasonable rates. It relies on market mechanisms to set wholesale energy prices, and its regulatory agenda is mainly aimed at promoting competition and economic efficiency in energy markets. The problem, Davis Noll and Unel say, is that energy markets have completely failed to account for the environmental and social cost of carbon emissions. Given FERC’s obsession with promoting economic efficiency, its reluctance to address such a glaring inefficiency is puzzling, Davis Noll and Unel argue. Like others before them, they suggest that an agency-imposed surcharge on the wholesale price of high-carbon energy—a “carbon adder”—could be a workable fix.

The Trump administration can’t roll back a penalty imposed on car manufacturers that fail to meet Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, the Second Circuit ruled Monday. “This ruling ensures that NHTSA and the automakers it regulates are held accountable for actions that are harmful to the public,” said Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, which submitted a brief in the case.

In a win for environmentalists, a federal court struck down a Trump administration rule that lowered penalties for polluting car companies. The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, whose analysis found that the reduced penalties would effectively lower average vehicle fuel economy by 5 mpg by 2032, filed an amicus brief in the case. "This ruling ensures that NHTSA and the automakers it regulates are held accountable for actions that are harmful to the public," Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at the institute, said in a statement. "With this decision, NHTSA's rule joins the ever-growing list of legal losses for the Trump administration."

A handful of Trump administration environmental rules could be the first on the chopping block under a Biden administration and a Democratic Congress. Actions on methane emissions, the National Environmental Policy Act, cost-benefit analyses and an EPA science rule may die under the Congressional Review Act, experts say. "The Trump Administration's successful use of the Congressional Review Act demonstrates that it is a powerful option for any President whose party also controls both branches of Congress," wrote regulatory experts Bethany Davis Noll and Richard Revesz in The Regulatory Review. "And the threat of a Congressional Review Act disapproval now hangs over any new President, putting pressure on agencies to finalize important rules before the summer prior to an election."

This podcast—featuring Dr. Burcin Unel, Energy Policy Director at the Institute for Policy Integrity—discusses how information, or lack thereof, can affect the cost-effectiveness of the transition to a clean and distributed energy future. It then outlines how new modeling tools that can take into account information asymmetries can help policymakers design better policies.

New Jersey has recently taken some important steps to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and other pollution from the transportation sector, but these efforts face a new potential roadblock as the coronavirus has sent the state budget into free fall. Exploding state expenditures, diminished tax revenue, and jarring transitions in the labor force all foretell that the state will have a hard time meeting its goals for decarbonization. To close this fiscal gap and make transportation investments that will benefit nearly every resident, New Jersey’s leadership should look to a program being developed by about a dozen states in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast: the Transportation and Climate Initiative.

The EPA’s top lawyer is trumpeting the agency’s success rate in court, saying it’s won two-thirds of “significant” environmental cases during the Trump administration. But the assertion, made by the agency’s general counsel, Matthew Z. Leopold, clashes with—and also comes in response to—other tallies showing judges have largely sided with the EPA’s state and environmental adversaries. A New York University Institute for Policy Integrity analysis, for example, lists just nine EPA wins out of 47 regulatory cases tracked. Policy Integrity's litigation director Bethany Davis Noll, who oversees the institute’s tracker, said the EPA’s list had nearly two dozen cases that she had left off because they were either duplicative, still pending, not focused on Trump-era actions, or resolved on procedural grounds rather than on the merits.

“Existing law has evolved over a century of fossil fuel use and the development of existing infrastructure,” said Justin Gundlach, an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank. “There is a lot of work to be done identifying where New York's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act and existing law need to either be amended or reinterpreted.”

In some cases, Trump administration efforts are hitting delays and possibly brick walls. The Administrative Procedure Act requires that a new rule must have a “reasoned explanation” for it to be sound – or withstand a lawsuit, says Bethany Davis Noll of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. If some Trump moves leave a lasting mark, in other cases the president’s actions could face reversals – notably in cases where his policies lack strong economic or scientific footing. “I think most presidents want some kind of legacy,” Davis Noll says, and in her view “that’s what he hasn’t managed to accomplish.”

The D.C. Circuit is expected to hear oral arguments in challenges to major replacement rules sometime in the fall. Decisions in all three high-profile legal battles could come after Biden potentially takes the oath of office. "These are complicated cases and it typically takes the D.C. Circuit at least six months to decide them, so they're probably pending when the new administration comes into office," Richard Revesz, director of New York University Law School's Institute for Policy Integrity, said. A new Biden administration would likely ask the D.C. Circuit to put the suits on hold on the grounds that the new president wants to review and modify the rules, Revesz said, noting that Trump did the same thing with the Clean Power Plan shortly after being sworn into office in 2017.