In the News

The Clean Power Plan ruling was extremely unusual, especially as the Circuit Court had unanimously declined to issue a stay; as Richard Revesz, a professor at the New York University School of Law, recently told my colleague Jeffrey Toobin, “It was totally unprecedented for the Supreme Court to step in.” The 5–4 vote on the stay seemed, to put it mildly, to bode ill for the plan.

Richard Revesz shares his take on yesterday’s Clean Power Plan oral arguments, and why the strength of EPA’s arguments came through clearly.

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s law school, said the suing states were exaggerating the regulatory reach of the EPA. “The Clean Power Plan, while certainly a very important rule, is not the boundary-breaking behemoth that the petitioners make it out to be,” Revesz said.

In the summer of 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a long-awaited regulation aimed at combating climate change, requiring electric power plants to sharply reduce their emissions. “It was probably the most important environmental regulation in history, since power plants account for about half of the carbon-dioxide emissions in the country,” Richard Revesz, a professor at New York University School of Law, said.

In a critical federal court hearing this month, challengers of the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s signature climate change policy, will characterize the Plan as an “enormous and transformative expansion” of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regulatory power.

A recent federal court ruling may have opened a new chapter in U.S. climate and energy policy. Now that the Seventh Circuit has formally endorsed the use of the social cost of carbon, it could become one of the primary tools used to shape policies on environmental regulation, energy efficiency, natural resource leasing, and environmental impact quantification.

“In Hughes, Maryland was focused on the money that would be needed to prop up companies, to help them survive in the face of changing markets,” said Denise Grab, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law. “New York’s final CES decision does what it can to stay away from that approach; instead, it focuses on properly valuing the low-carbon attributes of nuclear plants separate from the wholesale markets.”

New York State’s new Clean Energy Standard (CES) has drawn plenty of attention for trying to prop up otherwise-faltering nuclear plants. But what it’s actually doing is far more significant. The CES, recently approved by the New York Public Service Commission, aims to help meet the state’s goals of using renewable energy sources for half its electricity by 2030 and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. To help get there, the CES lays out one of the country’s first clean energy plans that relies on sound economic valuation of generators’ clean energy attributes. This isn’t a nuclear plant bailout; it’s an embrace of economic principles.

Jayni Foley Hein, the policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, told me that not all companies oppose SCC, and that some, like Microsoft, actually have an internal social cost of carbon.

Jayni Hein, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, praised the OSMRE’s move. “This guidance could help protect taxpayers, as well as land and water resources,” Hein said in a statement.