In the News

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt last week said he would seek to bolster the agency’s lagging Superfund program, after the release of a report recommending ways to expedite the cleanup of the nation’s most egregious toxic waste sites. “The proposed EPA budget would significantly reduce the amount for enforcement, and without enforcement it might be harder to get companies responsible for the pollution to participate in cleanups and pay remediation costs,” Richard Revesz said.

Maryland and Connecticut have filed formal notices with the EPA that they intend to sue the agency for not responding to petitions they filed asking the EPA to force power plants in upwind states to curb their air pollution. “The agency has an obligation to act,” said Richard Revesz, director of New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, a regulatory think tank.

A significant concern of administrative law is the status of independent agencies—agencies that are insulated in some ways from direct presidential control. These institutional relationships are particularly important when the President and agency officials disagree over law and policy. In our recent article, The Genesis of Independent Agencies, we ask a core question of administrative law: When are agencies established with features that insulate them from direct presidential control?

Eliminating regulatory safeguards will erase tangible public health and environmental benefits, making the public worse off. Rather than analyze these societal costs, President Trump’s agency heads have suspended rules in a flurry of deregulatory actions, without calculating or even acknowledging the effects.

I’m tempted to call it the decade’s most important paper on the costs of climate damage. The paper, just published in Environmental and Resource Economics, by Peter Howard, economics director at NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity; and Thomas Sterner, professor of environmental economics at the University of Gothenburg, upends the long-prevailing approach for estimating the social cost of carbon, potentially laying the ground for putting the SCC into triple digits.

Oren Cass’s article “Who’s the Denier Now?” (May 1) condemns the misuse of scientific data in climate-change policy debates, but to support his position Cass misrepresents the findings in our survey of economists and cherry-picks survey data to suggest that “economists hold widely varying views” on the costs of climate change.

The Trump administration has diagnosed a legitimate problem with distorted energy markets, but an honest attempt to stop picking winners would require eliminating all subsidies, many of which favor coal.

Climate economist Peter Howard, the economics director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said the assessment paper provided “insufficient reasons for abandoning a 2°C limit”.

Trump’s final decision on Paris will still tell us a great deal about how the administration plans to go about the business of undermining climate progress, and how successful it is ultimately likely to be.

“A new delay would essentially amount to an effective repeal and that is something that would have to be justified,” Bethany Davis Noll, an attorney with the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, tells the publication. “Labor has a huge burden to overcome if they want to delay this.”