In the News

Trump’s final decision on Paris will still tell us a great deal about how the administration plans to go about the business of undermining climate progress, and how successful it is ultimately likely to be.

State climate policy efforts not only help reduce emissions, but provide a means of political experimentation that offers data on what might work to escape the climate policy gridlock. There are many contexts in which well-organized and well-networked interest groups will be in a better position to learn from experimentation than public interest groups. Thus the “peril” associated with experimentation: the bad guys may often be able to translate political information into policy advantage.

New York, as a leader in energy policy, has embraced the Social Cost of Carbon in many recent landmark regulatory decisions. But now the state Public Service Commission is being wrongly attacked for using the SCC in its zero-emission credits (ZECs) program. If the Legislature halts this program, it would be a massive setback for climate change action in New York and around the country.

“My guess is that the bulk of the litigation is ahead of us,” said Richard Revesz, an environmental and regulatory law expert at New York University School of Law. “All this litigation is going to consume the full four years.”

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, said a D.C. Circuit ruling resolving that uncertainty would head off further courtroom wrangling over the issue. “There is no compelling reason for the D.C. Circuit to delay facing those issues for years, with the serious negative consequences that would entail, when it is likely to already have decided them,” he said.

What President Trump’s environmental executive order fails to acknowledge is that the Obama Administration’s estimate of the social cost of carbon is consistent with the guidance from Circular A-4. Asking each agency to develop its own metric will waste agency resources and open rules up to needless and risky legal challenges.

“Staying in the Paris accord signals to the world that the long-term policy of the United States is to control greenhouse gases,” Richard Revesz, an environmental law expert who wrote a useful book about the climate wars, told me. “The U.S. gets large benefits from the greenhouse gas reductions occurring outside our borders, and the actions of the U.S. are likely to have an impact on the actions of other countries. Withdrawing from it is likely to lead some other countries to relax their own commitments, to the detriment of the United States.”

Speaking with Knowledge@Wharton, Denise Grab pointed out that the specific language of the order doesn’t remove requirements for federal agencies to meet their duties under regulations such as the Clean Air Act. “The executive order itself is a lot of sound and fury signifying not much on its own,” she said. “Whether it will result in substantive changes does remain to be seen.”

Mere hours after the signing ceremony for Trump’s executive order, EPA filed a motion in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to put a pending case about the Clean Power Plan on indefinite hold. The court should say no.

Experts said Tuesday that getting rid of the Clean Power Plan, the 2014 plan that put a limit to the amount of carbon dioxide produced by a range of power plants, will be far harder than just signing a document. “The executive order does not make the Clean Power (Plan) go away,” said Richard Revesz, Director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law. “This is the first move of a long chess game that will take years to unfold, and future moves will be far more challenging.”