In the News

“The court didn’t do anything to this rule. The case now gets remanded to the D.C. Circuit,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity and dean emeritus of NYU Law School, said shortly after the ruling was released. “I don’t think this is any blow at all. I think it is pretty clear that this rule will ultimately be upheld.”

Chicago, Philadelphia and Sacramento, Calif.: These are just a few of the cities within the “blast zones” of mile-long trains carrying flammable crude oil across the country. Twenty-five million Americans live in these vulnerable areas; yet it will be years until dangerous tank cars are retrofitted or retired from the rails, based on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s new safety standards.

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, assesses the arguments presented and questioning by the justices.

Michael Livermore, a senior advisor with the Institute for Policy Integrity, agreed that the NERA report overestimates compliance costs by making “unrealistic” assumptions, including the assumption that shutting down coal-fired power plants would be needed to meet a revised ozone standard.

The economic benefits of cutting back on smog far outweigh the costs. In fact, the benefits are so great that an even more stringent rule would be economically justified.

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.

Richard Revesz , a New York University law professor and author of “Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and our Health” says the EPA has generally underestimated, not overestimated, costs. But the whole argument over costs and benefits is largely about convincing the public and the politicians.

Michael Livermore, senior advisor at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, explained that NERA’s analysis developed “an extraordinarily high and basically unrealistic picture of how expensive those costs are going to be” because they fail to account for the economic reality of businesses achieving low-cost ways to meet the standards.

Richard Revesz, professor of the New York University School of Law, said generally the federal government should set the floor for chemical regulations and allow states to set more stringent limits if they wanted to do so.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board is continuing to pretend that the EPA is acting against the law by regulating coal pollution, despite repeated Supreme Court rulings that conclude otherwise. On April 29, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-2 decision to re-instate the EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, which regulates air pollution that crosses state lines and “significantly” prevents neighboring states from achieving national air quality standards. The rule, which is part of the Clean Air Act by way of the “Good Neighbor Provision,” was delayed in 2011 for further review after being challenged by a major coal-fired operator — to the delight of the Wall Street Journal, which lauded the decision to delay for showing “how out of bounds the cross-state regulation is.” The board decided that the Supreme Court “should overturn [the Cross-State pollution rule] for violating the federalist intentions of Congress,” adding it would “to show this increasingly rogue agency that it can’t rewrite the law as it pleases.” Now that the rule has been reinstated (counter to the wishes of the Journal) in EPA v. EME Homer City Generation, the paper is scrambling to find wrongdoing. The board published an editorial titled “The EPA Unchained” recycling its own faulty arguments that concluded with the fear that “the Obama EPA will feel even less bound by legal restraints, if that’s possible.” Its claims, however, are extremely misguided. … The WSJ summarily dismisses the court’s defense of the EPA’s use of cost-benefit analysis when considering the best regulatory action, calling it “ironi©” because “the EPA typically dismisses cost-benefit analysis unless a statute explicitly calls for it.” However, according to an amicus brief from NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity, the EPA has been using cost-benefit analyses to guide inter-state air pollution regulations for decades. The “Good Neighbor Provision,” for instance, does not explicitly call for cost-benefit analysis. The Court deferred to the EPA as the most appropriate body to determine whether or not to use cost-benefit analysis to regulate pollutants that are clearly covered by the Clean Air Act.