In the News

But is 111(d) language ambiguous or flatly contradictory? As Jack Lienke noted in a Grist post last year, the Supreme Court faced a similar dilemma in a case last session called Scialabba v. Cuellar de Osorio, which dealt with contradictory statutory language. Kagan, Ginsburg, and Kennedy invoked Chevron and deferred to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the executive agency charged with implementing the statute.

The agency’s consistent and longstanding interpretation of the Clean Air Act is due deference, particularly in the context of the proposed Clean Power Plan, the Institute for Policy Integrity told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a Jan. 30 brief. The institute filed an amicus brief in support of the EPA.

The EPA announced that it will regulate methane emissions from the oil and gas sector directly, rather than relying on voluntary programs or regulating associated pollutants. This a commonsense action that reduces a very potent greenhouse gas while directing valuable natural gas back into the supply chain. The rules, which will be unveiled this summer, will apply to all new oil and natural gas wells, but they will not address emissions from existing sources.

“EPA’s announcement marks incremental progress, but thus far, the agency fails to regulate existing oil and gas sources, which are projected to be responsible for up to 90 percent of emissions in 2018,” Jayni Hein, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law, said in a statement. “This is a major concern in states like North Dakota, where oil production is booming, yet methane capture technology remains far behind.”

“Results like this should give a pause that maybe we should start being more cautious,” Peter Howard, an economist at NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity, told VICE News. “Maybe this doesn’t happen, but if it does it could be quite costly, and we should take this risk into account.”

The price of gasoline today is wrong. It does not include the cost of carbon dioxide pollution from burning it. This is the baseline case for taxing carbon emissions. Without it, fossil fuels are underpriced, argues law professor Michael Livermore at the University of Virginia

While critics of climate regulations often complain that the costs of pollution controls are too high, directly regulating methane would buy time on climate change and redirect natural gas back into the supply chain, at little net cost, due to the commercial value of the captured gas.

For several years, Republican leaders and coal-state Democrats have railed against “Obama’s war on coal.” In reality, this supposed “war” is merely the latest stage of an effort to protect public health and welfare that began decades before President Obama took office.

Tribe states that “coal has been a bedrock component of our economy and energy policy for decades” and that the Obama administration’s measure therefore “represents a drastic change in directions from previous Democratic and Republican Administrations.” He is flatly wrong.

“There are a lot of different things they can try. It’s unclear how successful they’ll be,” Jack Lienke with the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law says.