In the News

When there are two conflicting amendments, Revesz said statutes trump U.S. code unless the code itself was adopted as legislation, which didn’t happen in this case. Revesz said it’s up to the EPA to then interpret the rule.

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, told the subcommittee that the EPA’s proposal falls squarely within its Clean Air Act authority, citing three U.S. Supreme Court decisions upholding the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the act. “The Supreme Court has not stood in the way of this kind of regulation,” he said.

But despite the result, CES’ counsel Michael Livermore told Law360 that the court left the door open to future challenges on one of its major arguments: that Interior should use a quantitative rather than qualitative approach to assess the informational or option value of delaying leasing.

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.

A large oil spill would likely hurt our economy according to Michael Livermore, an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Law.

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.

In an amicus brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Jan. 30, the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University of Law argues that ever since the current version of Section 111(d) was enacted in the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, Republican and Democratic administrations have interpreted a so-called Section 112 exclusion in a way that is consistent with the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide.

But is 111(d) language ambiguous or flatly contradictory? As Jack Lienke noted in a Grist post last year, the Supreme Court faced a similar dilemma in a case last session called Scialabba v. Cuellar de Osorio, which dealt with contradictory statutory language. Kagan, Ginsburg, and Kennedy invoked Chevron and deferred to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the executive agency charged with implementing the statute.

The agency’s consistent and longstanding interpretation of the Clean Air Act is due deference, particularly in the context of the proposed Clean Power Plan, the Institute for Policy Integrity told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a Jan. 30 brief. The institute filed an amicus brief in support of the EPA.

The EPA announced that it will regulate methane emissions from the oil and gas sector directly, rather than relying on voluntary programs or regulating associated pollutants. This a commonsense action that reduces a very potent greenhouse gas while directing valuable natural gas back into the supply chain. The rules, which will be unveiled this summer, will apply to all new oil and natural gas wells, but they will not address emissions from existing sources.