In the News

Congress “never intended for these [coal] plants to operate forever. This was supposed to be a temporary transition ending at the end of their useful life,” said Revesz, co-author of Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the “War on Coal.” Instead, “We’ve created a monster.”

“In withdrawing the 2022-2025 greenhouse-gas standards, EPA arbitrarily ignored its own prior analysis as well as the facts,” said Bethany Davis Noll, director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. “The agency is acting without clear justification and creating a lot of legal question marks.”

The Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law has released a new report analyzing EPA’s decision to withdraw the standards that concludes the agency’s basis for withdrawing the standards is not grounded in fact or economic analysis. For example, EPA cites factors such as lower fuel prices and concerns about the growth of electric vehicles as reasons to reverse its earlier decision, but both fuel prices and electric vehicle sales are in fact rising.

A report released by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law said the EPA’s reasoning was “not grounded in fact.” For instance, the EPA says lower gas prices are making fuel-efficient cars less attractive, and cites flagging demand for electric cars as a sign the current standards are unrealistic.

Automakers face higher fines for violating stringent federal fuel-efficiency standards requiring them to produce produce car fleets that average over 50 miles per gallon by 2025 after a court overturned a Trump administration decision to postpone a hike in the penalties. Sylwia Bialek, economic fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, which filed a brief as an impartial adviser to the court on the case, said the court ruling overturning NHTSA’s decision to delay the fine increase for emission violators is significant, despite the fact that Trump administration is now weighing rolling back the rules completely.

In the end, “a lot of those arguments were losers,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert in environmental law at New York University. In particular, Mr. Revesz noted a case brought by the group against President Obama’s signature climate change regulation, the Clean Power Plan, which Mr. Pruitt is now working to overturn from within the E.P.A. The lawsuit challenged a draft proposal of the regulation, which was an unprecedented move that a federal court quickly struck down, saying that they could not legally challenge a draft.

Challenges to an EPA rule delaying a chemical safety regulation aimed at protecting emergency responders being argued March 16 could pose a test of the Trump administration’s push to roll back regulations. “Agencies need explicit statutory authority for their actions,” Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

Although cap-and-trade programs for government permits to emit carbon dioxide occasionally make headline news, the average American may not realize that billions of dollars’ worth of government permits are auctioned or traded in a wide variety of industries, from broadcasting to construction to fishing.

In the Dec. 14 press conference, Trump said the government had taken 67 deregulatory actions through Sept. 30 — with an annual savings to society of $570 million — and had imposed just three new regulations. The administration’s cost figures ignore projected benefits for regulations it has blocked, distorting the actual impacts on society, said Denise Grab, a lawyer with the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law.

Latinos are disproportionately affected by asthma in the U.S., in part because many Latinos live in areas with high levels of air pollution. Florida Exclusivo interviews Richard Revesz about this issue, and how Trump’s healthcare and immigration policies are making it worse. Florida Exclusivo is a weekly, one-hour news and public affairs program that focuses on news and issues of the Latino community.