In the News

The Trump administration had no interest in conducting a good-faith update of the E.P.A.’s original estimates. Instead, it relied on accounting gimmicks to greatly inflate the Clean Power Plan’s projected costs and slash its expected benefits. The rule’s transformation from boon to boondoggle, as laid out in a draft of Mr. Pruitt’s plan to repeal it, is thus pure illusion.

The Trump administration announced Monday that it would take formal steps to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, setting up a bitter fight over the future of America’s efforts to tackle global warming. “Every step of this, from the repeal to the replacement, will involve a lot of time-consuming litigation, and we could ultimately see this end up in the Supreme Court,” said Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University.

The Trump administration will consider fundamentally limiting the way the federal government counts benefits from curbing climate change and air pollution in an upcoming proposal to rescind former President Barack Obama’s signature climate regulation. The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law this week released a paper compiling multiple studies that have found that Clean Power Plan compliance costs have fallen dramatically since the rule came out in 2015.

Federal law doesn’t allow officials to simply ignore climate impacts, the courts have begun to rule. “The Trump administration is not doing any favors to its agencies and their ability to bring energy projects to approval,” said Jason Schwartz, legal director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. “This issue is going to come up again and again.”

The U.S. Interior Department this week will try again to delay parts of an Obama-era rule to limit methane emissions from oil and gas production on federal lands. Bethany Davis Noll, the litigation director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, said the administration’s repeated moves to delay “have created substantial uncertainty for the regulated community and put at risk valuable benefits.”

Jack Lienke of NYU says the costs of decarbonizing are falling as renewable energy and natural gas are getting cheaper. “This administration will have to grapple with these recent emission trends that show costs are actually even lower than originally thought,” said Lienke.

A group of U.S. state attorneys general say they are now acting as one of the primary checks on efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to weaken environmental protections and back away from action on climate change. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said the state officials are now the core of the “legal resistance” to efforts by the U.S. government to overturn environmental protections.

A Sept. 14 decision of an appeals court establishes an argument that could be tested nationwide in other courts to challenge any fossil fuel-related project that might have climate change effects, said Jayni Foley Hein, policy director at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity. These might include natural gas pipelines, oil sand pipelines, coal railroads, and coal export terminals.

Late last week, a federal court knocked down plans to expand coal mining in the Western US. The ruling fits a pattern of federal courts pushing back against agencies that are trying to gloss over their statutory climate change obligations. “We are more used to seeing decisions like this from the Ninth Circuit, which has been a leader on requiring accounting for climate change. It’s a sign that courts are recognizing the importance of this,” said Jayni Hein, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.

A major court decision dressing down the federal government for “irrational” consideration of the climate impacts of coal leasing stands to reverberate throughout the Trump administration. “This opinion is significant because it means that future federal agencies cannot just rest on these questionable assumptions and will have to do meaningful analysis as to the actual greenhouse gas emission effects from their leasing decisions,” said Jayni Hein, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity. “They can’t just conclude that there’s no net effect.”