In the News

“There is no bar — the White House can communicate its views,” said Richard Revesz, dean emeritus at the New York University Law School. “It’s true that it can’t direct the answer, but often that’s not necessary because the White House has significant leverage over [executive and independent] agencies.”

“As the extent of … fracking has grown nationally in the past few years, public attention has grown in parallel to that,” said Jayni Foley Hein, policy director for the Institute for Policy Integrity in New York.

“There’s very little public information on the practice, and to date, we just simply don’t know a great deal about where and when it’s taking place,” said Jayni Hein, policy director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

An Administrative Conference of the States (ACUS) panel has approved draft recommendations urging EPA and other agencies to craft written procedures to improve efficiency in responding to public petitions for rulemaking action, in order to establish better processes for analyzing and responding to the petitions in a reasonable time.

Whitehouse announced the legislation during a conference at New York University on Tuesday, claiming it would “generate significant new federal revenue.”

The bad news is that when methane escapes into the atmosphere unburned, it can trap a lot more heat than an equivalent amount of CO2 — up to 86 times more over a 20-year period, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The U.S. government could learn important lessons on offshore leasing from financial markets and oil companies.

U.S. wildfires cost as much as $125 billion annually, but climate change could add as much as $60 billion to the bill by 2050, the study said. The projected cost increase is attributed to an expanding area in which wildfires burn — estimated to be 50% to 100% larger by 2050.

The rising price of wildfires due to climate change should be included in the U.S. government’s future estimates of the social cost of carbon emissions. This is the argument in a report released today by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Fires continue to rage in many parts of the country, threatening hundreds of homes, creating emergencies in National Parks and residential areas, and straining government budgets — Washington State’s wildfire season is already six times more damaging than average. And we may be in for much worse in the near future if climate change is not contained.