In the News

Is the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management acting illegally on the approval of new offshore lease sales? During today’s OnPoint, Michael Livermore, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and a senior adviser at the Institute for Policy Integrity, discusses his recent argument before the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia on a case pertaining to the economic analysis used by the Interior Department in its sales of new leases.

“Interior fails to give the same treatment to environmental and social costs and gives no explanation for the different treatment,” CSE’s counsel Michael Livermore said during Thursday’s oral arguments.

The anti-regulatory crowd wasted no time in launching its next AutoCorrect attack: A new suit asks the D.C. Circuit to nix the president’s biggest climate-change initiative—EPA’s “Clean Power Plan”—due to a 25-year-old mistake in the text of the Clean Air Act.

A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) suggests that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should improve the way it analyzes regulations. Critics have been quick to trumpet the EPA’s “failure,” but in reality, the EPA deserves an A (or at least an A-).

The political task of enacting carbon taxes ­― and maintaining those in place ― has proven so daunting that questions of the tax’s appropriate level have gotten short shrift. Carbon tax advocates do not often discuss: How high is the optimal carbon tax? Along what trajectory should it increase over time? What, if anything, can climate science tell us about the right carbon tax to aim for?

Michael Livermore, senior advisor at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, explained that NERA’s analysis developed “an extraordinarily high and basically unrealistic picture of how expensive those costs are going to be” because they fail to account for the economic reality of businesses achieving low-cost ways to meet the standards.

Methane’s interstate — and, indeed, international — impacts make it particularly well-suited to federal regulation. If lawmakers are serious about reducing risks from climate change, they will need to regulate fugitive methane emissions from “upstream” sources — the wells, pipelines and storage tanks used for gas extraction, processing and delivery.

A source with the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School notes “We’re in new territory here” so there is “no precedent” for whether a 111(b) rule for modified sources will or will not satisfy the 111(d) prerequisite. “Anyone who says that this is an impermissible argument has no authority to purport that statement.”

In a paper published on 10 April 2014 in the leading peer-reviewed journal Nature, Professor Richard Revesz from New York University and distinguished co-authors argue that current values reported for the SCC are underestimated, due to inherent assumptions that current climate-economic models make about the time-dependence of future climate change and limited proliferation of economic impacts.

Richard Revesz, professor of the New York University School of Law, said generally the federal government should set the floor for chemical regulations and allow states to set more stringent limits if they wanted to do so.