In the News

What President Trump’s environmental executive order fails to acknowledge is that the Obama Administration’s estimate of the social cost of carbon is consistent with the guidance from Circular A-4. Asking each agency to develop its own metric will waste agency resources and open rules up to needless and risky legal challenges.

“Staying in the Paris accord signals to the world that the long-term policy of the United States is to control greenhouse gases,” Richard Revesz, an environmental law expert who wrote a useful book about the climate wars, told me. “The U.S. gets large benefits from the greenhouse gas reductions occurring outside our borders, and the actions of the U.S. are likely to have an impact on the actions of other countries. Withdrawing from it is likely to lead some other countries to relax their own commitments, to the detriment of the United States.”

Most of us employ informal cost-benefit analysis (CBA)—or what Benjamin Franklin described as weighing pros and cons—whenever we make decisions in our daily lives. It seems fair to expect federal agencies to do the same when considering new rules. Surprisingly, though, some agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), are not required to engage in CBA before issuing a rule.

Last month, I explained that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s handling of the case would test the sincerity of his recent pledges to prioritize air quality, even as he works to unwind EPA restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. Well, test day arrived, and Pruitt failed miserably. It seems that the new administrator’s only real priority is rolling back regulatory protections, regardless of which type of pollution they address.

Speaking with Knowledge@Wharton, Denise Grab pointed out that the specific language of the order doesn’t remove requirements for federal agencies to meet their duties under regulations such as the Clean Air Act. “The executive order itself is a lot of sound and fury signifying not much on its own,” she said. “Whether it will result in substantive changes does remain to be seen.”

Mere hours after the signing ceremony for Trump’s executive order, EPA filed a motion in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to put a pending case about the Clean Power Plan on indefinite hold. The court should say no.

Experts said Tuesday that getting rid of the Clean Power Plan, the 2014 plan that put a limit to the amount of carbon dioxide produced by a range of power plants, will be far harder than just signing a document. “The executive order does not make the Clean Power (Plan) go away,” said Richard Revesz, Director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law. “This is the first move of a long chess game that will take years to unfold, and future moves will be far more challenging.”

Now there’s a window of opportunity for coal companies. Lifting the moratorium, says Jayni Foley Hein of the Institute for Policy Integrity, “will allow new lease sales to go forward using the same outdated minimum bids, rental rates, and stagnant royalty rates that have been used for decades.”

Richard Revesz, the director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank at the New York University School of Law dedicated to improving the quality of government decision-making, told ABC News by email that the order will ultimately hurt the economy. “There is no consistent evidence that regulations contribute to long-term changes in the unemployment rate, and rolling back regulations will not create jobs,” he said.

“The executive order has some symbolic importance for some of President Trump’s supporters, but on the ground it’s not clear how much difference it’s going to make,” says Richard Revesz, an environmental law expert at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.