In the News

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.”

The Clean Air Act also requires the EPA to define the “best system of emission reduction” for existing facilities, such as power plants. But the EPA’s new plan “has identified a system of emission reduction that is, at best, mediocre, far from ‘best,’” Richard Revesz, a professor of law at New York University and an expert on environmental law, told E&E News this week.

Trump officials contend that their carbon approach better reflects the way the government has traditionally done cost-benefit analyses. Critics argue that this approach is inappropriate for global, multigenerational problems like climate change, and that newer research suggests the social cost of carbon may be even higher than the Obama administration estimated. Ultimately, the courts could decide which view prevails. “This will be part of the legal challenges to these regulatory rollbacks,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert in environmental law at New York University. “The reasons for why the Trump administration picked these numbers for the social cost of carbon are going to be scrutinized.”

“When an agency wants to do something that’s harmful to the American people, it typically tries to hide it,” said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. “What’s unusual here is that the EPA just comes out and says it.”