In the News

Environmentalists and their allies say EPA’s recently finalized updates to its Risk Management Program (RMP) rule leaves out many measures they believe are necessary to ensure it covers all facilities at risk of accidental releases, in particular because the agency rejected calls to expand the list of chemicals whose use at a site triggers RMP requirements. “Safeguards are only helpful where they’re applicable,” Dena Adler, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University, told Inside EPA by email.

The Biden administration directed agency policymakers on Thursday to more heavily weigh how their economic regulations will help or hurt worker safety, children’s health, and consumer prices decades into the future. The 93-page memo instructs agencies to pay more attention to how the costs and benefits of their regulations vary by person… “Costs accrue for the most part in the short term,” said Max Sarinsky, an attorney that studies regulation at New York University School of Law. “But the benefits accrue decades or more into the future.”

Last year, the Supreme Court sided with West Virginia in rejecting a different (Obama-era) EPA plan. “The West Virginia decision left intact EPA’s obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that endanger public health from the power sector,” says Dena Adler, an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, in an emailed statement. The 2022 ruling left pathways available to the EPA, she says, and “the agency has carefully walked those lines in this proposal.”

In a recent blog post, Resources for the Future (RFF) Senior Fellow Joshua Linn and Christopher Holt, an economic fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity, offer a policy approach for reducing levels of harmful ozone: targeting ozone emissions that are most likely to violate air-quality standards. “This targeting could be accomplished by introducing trading ratios, such that emissions rules are stricter for firms at locations or times of day that are more likely to see ozone violations,” say Holt and Linn.

Recently environmentalists have touted a series of studies that find links between gas stoves and health risks. An April 2022 report from the Institute for Policy Integrity summarizes that “[w]ithin just a few minutes of cooking . . . pollutant concentrations can exceed levels” that both EPA and the World Health Organization “have deemed unsafe and linked to respiratory illness, cardiovascular problems, cancer, and other serious health conditions.”

The downward trend of ozone levels has slowed in recent years despite regulatory efforts at the federal and state levels. New research suggests that regulation that targets emitters when high-ozone events are most likely could be a cost-effective way of further reducing ozone levels.

The consumer commission has several options it could consider should it choose to dive into stove regulation. A report last year from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity argued that the CPSC could require warning labels on gas stoves, conduct public education campaigns about their dangers or, most directly, issue mandatory rules to reduce the risks.

Gas stoves are a dangerous source of indoor air pollution. The Consumer Product Safety Commission won’t be banning them, but it can make them safer, explains Laura Figueroa.

Researchers at the Institute for Policy Integrity released a report calling for gas stoves to be sold with warning labels and requirements for better ventilation, while pointing to studies concluding that low-income households and people of color were more likely to live in homes with poor ventilation.

A report by the Institute for Policy Integrity says that natural gas stoves produce dangerous levels of air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter. These pollutants a stove can emit can exacerbate asthma and are linked to other diseases, like inflammation of organs and cancer, according to the Institute for Policy Integrity report.

"Causal relationships between adverse health effects and [particulate matter] have been found at long-term exposure levels well below [the Environmental Protection Agency's] ambient limits for outdoor air, which indoor concentrations caused by gas stoves likely exceed," the report said.