In the News

The Clean Air Act “authorizes EPA to do a lot with respect to greenhouse gases” and also demands a great deal of the agency, said Jason Schwartz, the legal director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, the law school’s advocacy arm. Schwartz’s group is going to be looking for so-called market mechanisms that allow power plants to trade or borrow emission credits, for example.

According to Michael Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, the legal requirement for cost-benefit analysis is at the heart of the issue. Beginning under the Reagan administration, proposed government regulations must be submitted to review by a little-known office called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Environmentalists are launching an effort they hope will pressure the Obama administration to raise its default estimate of the social cost of carbon (SCC), believing it will strengthen the case for strict greenhouse gas (GHG) rules and other emission controls just as concerns about irreversible climate change due to the emissions are mounting.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Environmental Defense Fund and the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank based at the New York University School of Law, are developing a web-based platform to foster sharing of data between climate scientists and economists in an effort that proponents believe will help put pressure on the administration to raise its SCC estimate.

We need to pay to repair our roads and bridges; but there is no reason, in principle, for funding to be linked to gas taxes. The government can use income taxes, tolls and other revenue-raising mechanisms to cover the costs.

One advantage of using gas taxes to pay for our roadways is that gas taxes help to “internalize” the price of pollution into a gallon of gas. Without some kind of price signal, gas is cheaper than it should be because no one is paying for the harm caused by emissions of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants.

On the eve of Gina McCarthy’s first Senate committee hearing towards her confirmation, we find our work a potential topic of conversation between certain senators and the candidate for EPA Administrator.

Four senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee, including James Inhofe and David Vitter, sent a letter to Ms. McCarthy asking for her take on a petition the Institute for Policy Integrity, which we direct, submitted to the EPA in 2009. There are now reports that they plan to raise the question during tomorrow’s hearing.

Vitter also said McCarthy and the EPA have worked with left-leaning environmental groups on crafting stringent carbon regulations and hiding this from Congress.
He sent a letter to McCarthy in March to ask her about the intent of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law to threaten litigation as a way to “force a cap-and-trade system on the transportation fuels sector” – a process known as “sue and settle.”

“Such a process is wholly unacceptable, especially considering the administration’s pattern of excluding states and economically impacted individuals and businesses from important rule-making decisions,” Vitter wrote.

Republican panel members are also likely to quiz McCarthy on whether EPA might use the Clean Air Act to implement a cap-and-trade system for transportation fuel, even though the agency has announced no such plan.

The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University has threatened to sue EPA if it does not consider implementing the rule. The think tank says a market-based program of that kind would be the best way to reduce emissions from the transportation sector while limiting cost. It would ultimately apply to fuels for all motor vehicles and aircraft.

But Vitter, Inhofe and Sens. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) responded late last month by demanding that McCarthy say whether the agency planned to quickly accommodate IPI’s petition (E&ENews PM, March 28).

GOP senators used a New York University-based think tank’s push for a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade system for the fuel sector’s emissions to criticize U.S. EPA as overly eager to settle lawsuits filed by environmentalists seeking more regulations.

Four members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee said in a letter to EPA that using the Clean Air Act’s Section 211 to regulate greenhouse gases would “expand environmental regulation beyond original intent of the law and could have detrimental effects on the livelihoods of our fellow Americans.”

If you don’t believe that human actions are leading to a warming planet, nothing will convince you that carbon controls are useful — if it ain’t broke, as they say, why pay to fix it?

But for the rest of us who know that there is near unanimity among climate scientists that temperatures are rising and humans are the cause, the choice isn’t whether to act but how to most efficiently lower our pollution.

With climate legislation stalled in Congress, environmental groups have been refocusing their efforts on EPA rulemaking and litigation in efforts to speed up greenhouse gas regulation. In a recent rulemaking petition, the Institute for Policy Integrity (the Institute) seeks to compel EPA rules under three separate sections of the Clean Air Act. The Institute first argues that Section 115 of the Clean Air Act, a never-before-used provision addressing international air pollution, requires EPA to order all 50 states to modify their state-level implementation plans to address greenhouse gas emissions.