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Viewing all news in Climate and Energy Policy
  • The Trump Administration’s American Climate Exceptionalism

    Legal and environmental experts warn that the Trump administration’s willingness to eschew scientific consensus for political advantage typifies a worrying trend. “The administration is definitely trying to mess with the numbers to make it look like they’re saving money on these repeals,” Denise Grab, western regional director for the Institute for Policy Integrity, told ThinkProgress. “But they aren’t considering the massive benefits to the public, and the economic and scientific consensus on the substantial benefits that could be achieved by reducing this greenhouse gas pollution.”

  • Material World: How Climate Change Affects What You Buy

    In this week’s Material World, Lindsey and Jenny dive into how changes in the environment are showing up in stores and businesses. Dr. Peter Howard, the economics director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU’s School of Law, explains how changing global temperatures and climate could have ripple effects on businesses and shoppers. Bloomberg’s Jordyn Holman discusses her reporting in Puerto Rico after it was hit by Hurricane Maria and the director of the Florida Department of Citrus describes Hurricane Irma’s impact on growers.

  • Why Better Energy Storage Could Ramp Up Fossil-Fuel Use

    Energy storage has long been viewed as the missing piece in the clean-energy puzzle. But the current discussion overlooks the possibility that as batteries and other storage technologies become cheaper and more pervasive, they could instead have the perverse consequence of increasing fossil-fuel use and greenhouse-gas emissions.

  • EPA Slashes Social Cost of Methane in Bid to Delay Oil and Gas Limits

    Alongside those notices the agency released a cost-benefit analysis, which includes estimates of cost savings and climate benefits that the rule would have provided. The EPA’s original proposals to halt the standards had not included those climate benefits, Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director for New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said. Now, in the updated analysis, the agency “monkeyed with the numbers” by adjusting the social cost of methane value.

  • A Los Angeles-Houston World Series in Record Heat Is a Little On-The-Nose for 2017

    More broadly, the EPA under Trump (and administrator Scott Pruitt who, before taking that job, had sued the EPA multiple times) has dramatically cut its estimates of the long-term costs of greenhouse gas emissions as part of its effort to scale back an Obama administration rule limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. “After a few years out, basically we’re not counting any effects on any future generations of Americans,” NYU’s Jason Schwartz told S&P Global Market Intelligence.

  • The Costs of Coddling Coal

    This week, the public comment period closed on Secretary of Energy Rick Perry’s plan to keep uncompetitive, inefficient and highly polluting coal plants from retiring. If successful, his plan will enrich coal executives and investors at the expense of working Americans, while having pernicious public health consequences.

  • Trump Administration Drops Social Cost of Carbon from $51 to $1

    Jason Schwartz, legal director for the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said the Trump administration has “decimated” the social cost of carbon. The new analysis makes several key changes that Schwartz said are out of step with the thinking of economists. The new value has been narrowed to only consider the domestic impacts of carbon, while the Obama administration’s version also took into account the global impacts, Schwartz noted. And in contrast to the Obama administration, which assumed a 3% discount rate, the new value assumes a 7% discount rate that Schwartz said “virtually no economist surveyed or written in the literature supports using.”

  • Scott Pruitt’s Quest to Kill Obama’s Climate Regulations Is Deeply Shady and Legally Vulnerable

    Pruitt is taking other steps to soften the ground for the weak rule he is expected to issue. Many of them involve monkeying around with cost-benefit analysis to make carbon regulation look as bad as possible. For more on these cost-benefit shenanigans, see this excellent piece from Richard Revesz and Jack Lienke of the Institute for Policy Integrity and the original reporting from Politico’s Emily Holden on which it’s based.

  • Coal Country Is Finding Little Relief in Trump’s Climate Actions

    The Trump administration in an awkward place. Even after straining to show the repeal of the Obama-era rules would boost the economy by baking into their plan financial assumptions that many experts dispute, their plan as written still doesn’t do much for the sagging coal industry. “In order to justify this, they do serious violence to established economics,” Richard Revesz, dean emeritus at New York University School of Law, said of the repeal. “The level of contortions and the attacks on standard economic principles are unprecedented.”

  • Here, Breathe This Coal

    The Trump administration’s decision to repeal the Clean Power Plan — and promote coal use — is clearly bad for the planet’s far-off future, because it will aggravate climate change. But I think the most effective strategy for the opponents of repeal is to focus on the here and now. And unlike some anti-environmental policies, this one will begin to harm Americans very quickly. On this subject, Richard Revesz and Jack Lienke have written an op-ed in The Times carefully detailing how the E.P.A. has fudged the economic numbers to justify its policy.