In the News

U.S. wildfires cost as much as $125 billion annually, but climate change could add as much as $60 billion to the bill by 2050, the study said. The projected cost increase is attributed to an expanding area in which wildfires burn — estimated to be 50% to 100% larger by 2050.

The rising price of wildfires due to climate change should be included in the U.S. government’s future estimates of the social cost of carbon emissions. This is the argument in a report released today by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund.

The anti-regulatory crowd wasted no time in launching its next AutoCorrect attack: A new suit asks the D.C. Circuit to nix the president’s biggest climate-change initiative—EPA’s “Clean Power Plan”—due to a 25-year-old mistake in the text of the Clean Air Act.

The political task of enacting carbon taxes ­― and maintaining those in place ― has proven so daunting that questions of the tax’s appropriate level have gotten short shrift. Carbon tax advocates do not often discuss: How high is the optimal carbon tax? Along what trajectory should it increase over time? What, if anything, can climate science tell us about the right carbon tax to aim for?

Methane’s interstate — and, indeed, international — impacts make it particularly well-suited to federal regulation. If lawmakers are serious about reducing risks from climate change, they will need to regulate fugitive methane emissions from “upstream” sources — the wells, pipelines and storage tanks used for gas extraction, processing and delivery.

A source with the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School notes “We’re in new territory here” so there is “no precedent” for whether a 111(b) rule for modified sources will or will not satisfy the 111(d) prerequisite. “Anyone who says that this is an impermissible argument has no authority to purport that statement.”

In a paper published on 10 April 2014 in the leading peer-reviewed journal Nature, Professor Richard Revesz from New York University and distinguished co-authors argue that current values reported for the SCC are underestimated, due to inherent assumptions that current climate-economic models make about the time-dependence of future climate change and limited proliferation of economic impacts.

Environmental Protection Agency performance standards are needed to constrain emissions of “fugitive” methane generated by hydraulic fracturing from upstream sources such as natural gas wells, pipelines and storage tanks, Richard Revesz said at a House subcommittee hearing today.

Though the opinion is a win for the EPA, environmental law expert Michael A. Livermore said Scalia’s opinion could sow confusion about who really won. That’s because, though Scalia handed a win to the EPA, the rhetoric in his opinion reads as a fiery reprimand of the agency for “laying claim to extravagant statutory power over the national economy.”

The decision doesn’t touch President Barack Obama’s more comprehensive climate-change proposal released June 2 to cut carbon emissions from existing power plants. No precedent was set that could alter that plan, said Ricky Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University.