In the News

Rewriting agency guidelines to ignore co-benefits might sound like a mundane accounting change, but over time it would have grave effects on public health and welfare. This change would make it appear that regulations deliver fewer benefits relative to their costs than they in fact would. This would then make it easier for Pruitt to justify repealing rules, further tilting the scales toward the powerful polluters that he insistently favors—while severely disadvantaging the families and communities that bear the heavy burden of pollution.

Congress “never intended for these [coal] plants to operate forever. This was supposed to be a temporary transition ending at the end of their useful life,” said Revesz, co-author of Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the “War on Coal.” Instead, “We’ve created a monster.”

If EPA’s replacement doesn’t come out at the same time as the final repeal, that could compound the agency’s problems, said Richard Revesz, director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “EPA has a duty to regulate [greenhouse gas] emissions. To have a repeal without a replacement, among other problems, they are violating those duties,” he said.

“In withdrawing the 2022-2025 greenhouse-gas standards, EPA arbitrarily ignored its own prior analysis as well as the facts,” said Bethany Davis Noll, director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. “The agency is acting without clear justification and creating a lot of legal question marks.”

The Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law has released a new report analyzing EPA’s decision to withdraw the standards that concludes the agency’s basis for withdrawing the standards is not grounded in fact or economic analysis. For example, EPA cites factors such as lower fuel prices and concerns about the growth of electric vehicles as reasons to reverse its earlier decision, but both fuel prices and electric vehicle sales are in fact rising.

A report released by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law said the EPA’s reasoning was “not grounded in fact.” For instance, the EPA says lower gas prices are making fuel-efficient cars less attractive, and cites flagging demand for electric cars as a sign the current standards are unrealistic.

The Institute for Policy Integrity just released a new white paper on exactly this subject: “Managing the Future of Energy Storage.” It covers the research, Hittinger’s and others’, showing that energy storage can increase emissions and discusses three targets for reform. They are all geared, in one way or another, toward constructing a market that efficiently and accurately values the different characteristics of energy storage.

Automakers face higher fines for violating stringent federal fuel-efficiency standards requiring them to produce produce car fleets that average over 50 miles per gallon by 2025 after a court overturned a Trump administration decision to postpone a hike in the penalties. Sylwia Bialek, economic fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, which filed a brief as an impartial adviser to the court on the case, said the court ruling overturning NHTSA’s decision to delay the fine increase for emission violators is significant, despite the fact that Trump administration is now weighing rolling back the rules completely.

Looking just at compliance costs also ignores the vast number of benefits — both economic and social — that regulations like the Clean Power Plan can have for society overall. According to a 2017 analysis by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law, for instance, costs of the Clean Power Plan would have been about $5.1 and $8.4 billion annually, while benefits would have been about $54 billion annually. This means that the Clean Power Plan would have created a net economic benefit of between $45.6 billion and $48.9 billion.

In the end, “a lot of those arguments were losers,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert in environmental law at New York University. In particular, Mr. Revesz noted a case brought by the group against President Obama’s signature climate change regulation, the Clean Power Plan, which Mr. Pruitt is now working to overturn from within the E.P.A. The lawsuit challenged a draft proposal of the regulation, which was an unprecedented move that a federal court quickly struck down, saying that they could not legally challenge a draft.