In the News

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.”

Burcin Unel, senior economist for Institute for Policy Integrity told Utility Dive the social cost of carbon was used in several of the calculations made by the NYPSC in its Track One Reforming the Energy Vision proceedings. With a social cost of carbon-based adder, “the generators’ bids reflect the external costs they impose on society,” she added. “It is technology neutral. Short-term, the price signal will impact the dispatch order. Long-term, it will drive investments that will more cost-effectively reduce carbon.”

A protracted delay in the Trump administration coming up with its own carbon-cost estimate could empower environmentalists pursuing legal challenges to mining, drilling or pipeline projects, said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals’ rulings against the FERC “show how President Trump’s executive order withdrawing support for the social cost of carbon is misguided and shortsighted,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, said in a statement. “The executive order gives federal agencies a false sense of security that they can ignore the cost of greenhouse gas emissions in their policy decisions.”

Trump’s Executive Order 13783 disbanded the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, withdrew IWG’s official valuations, and instead instructed agencies to monetize climate effects using “the best available science and economics.” Yet IWG’s estimates already are the product of the most widely peer-reviewed models and best available data.

In several news stories this summer, administration officials have floated various strategies for how they would justify repealing the Clean Power Plan without a replacement. One strategy is to say the EPA can’t regulate carbon from existing power plants. Another approach may be arguing that the EPA can only require small tweaks to efficiency inside the plants. “I expect the first thing we’ll see when it gets published is a straight repeal,” says Richard Revesz, a Clean Air Act expert at the New York University School of Law. “Both of [these arguments] are legally weak and neither will ultimately get upheld by the courts.”