In the News

“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.

Federal agencies are supposed to abide by the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, to insure that the work informing new regulations is transparent, reasoned, and not overly politicized. Bethany Davis Noll, an environmental lawyer at the N.Y.U. Institute for Policy Integrity, said, “It’s also so you don’t have agencies turning on a dime in response to an election.” Courts hold agencies to the “arbitrary and capricious” standard: to rescind a regulation, they must demonstrate sound reasoning tied to a factual record.

The Trump Interior Department could not rush through an impact statement quickly just to get it out of the way, according to Jayni Foley Hein, policy director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. That’s because the National Environmental Policy Act, its regulations, and various court decisions have laid out firm guidelines about what a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement must include, she said.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s plan to organize a “red team-blue team” exercise about climate change, consisting of a public debate over whether and to what degree human activities are causing global warming, was reportedly halted by Gen. John Kelly, the White House chief of staff. Kelly should be applauded for putting an end to a terrible idea that would have undermined, rather than increased, public understanding of a critical issue.