In the News

Every institution, no matter how much good it brings to the American people, has room for improvement. But opponents of the regulatory state ignore the net benefits of regulation.

Speaking Friday at the Institute for Policy Integrity’s 10th anniversary conference at the New York University School of Law, McCarthy ticked off a long list of environmental policies that frustrate her. Some of her complaints: Climate science has been scrubbed from government websites; the administration is changing how it calculates the benefits of slashing greenhouse gases; and President Trump has said he’ll exit the Paris climate accord.

In the panel discussion, Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, slammed its impact on cost-benefit analysis. “[Executive Order] 13771 requires a cap on costs, suggesting the goal of the regulatory system is to minimize overall regulatory costs, not to maximize the net benefits of regulation, which is the hallmark of cost-benefit analysis,” he said.

Those public health costs “could be the thing that determines whether the rule is actually justified or not,” Avi Zevin, an attorney with the Institute for Policy Integrity, told Bloomberg Environment. “[EPA] should be doing a more complete consideration of what those costs of the foregone health benefits are, what they would mean, and how that factors into their decisionmaking,” Zevin said.

In a recent proposal to replace the Clean Power Plan, the Trump administration made little attempt to sugarcoat the consequences of its decision.

Richard Revesz discusses why the Trump administration is proposing to relax Obama-era rules that were meant to block rogue methane leaks from oil and gas wells.

EPA calls its Affordable Clean Energy proposal “a new rule to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” from coal-fired power plants. There are just two problems with that characterization: ACE won’t do much of anything to reduce coal plants’ CO2 emissions, and the rule isn’t really new at all.

Bucking the science on particulate matter’s health impacts could carry a legal risk, Michael Livermore told Bloomberg Environment. “Courts like deferring to agencies, but if they think the agency is untrustworthy on fundamental science, that is a huge problem for the agency,” he said. The EPA might have some discretion to adjust its co-benefit treatment, “but they might also threaten their ability to get deference in general by risking their scientific credibility.”

The Trump administration’s coal and nuclear bailout proposals wouldn’t truly protect customers from damaging electricity outages. Policymakers interested in serious, evidence-based resilience improvements already have the tools they need to act—including metrics for measuring resilience, a framework for evaluating improvements, and legal authorities to implement changes.

“When an agency wants to do something that’s harmful to the American people, it typically tries to hide it,” Richard Revesz of the Institute for Policy Integrity told Johnson. “What’s unusual here is that the EPA just comes out and says it.”