In the News

The Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, which had backed the Biden administration in the 5th Circuit litigation, celebrated the court’s ruling. “Louisiana’s lawsuit against the government’s climate-damage valuations was doomed from the start due to a lack of standing,” Max Sarinsky, senior attorney for the institute, wrote in an email. “Although the challengers briefly prevailed last year, the district court decision granting their requested relief was widely derided across the political spectrum for misapplying legal doctrines, mischaracterizing facts (including a Constitutional provision), and prioritizing unsupported allegations over Nobel Prize-winning economics.”

Two key Hill Democrats and a legal think tank are backing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) against fuels sector and GOP states’ legal claims that the agency improperly factored zero emission vehicles (ZEV) into its baseline for fuel economy standards, building on the agency’s defense in the suit. An amicus brief from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) builds upon NHTSA’s arguments that EPCA does not preempt accounting for ZEV deploying in the regulatory baseline.

In a panel addressing how the FERC can incorporate environmental justice communities into their infrastructure permitting, Al Huang, director of environmental justice at the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said, “FERC needs to demonstrate a foundational commitment to environmental justice, and that means identifying who EJ communities are, engaging with them, providing support for them [and] building trust. Building that foundation can yield substantive advantages such as … identifying viable alternatives to opposed projects that can mitigate adverse impacts, and fully understanding the vulnerabilities that communities might face."

In this episode, we attempt to illustrate what daily life could be like as the earth warms to 3°C.  Dr. Peter Howard of the Institute for Policy Integrity discusses some of the likely economic and societal changes.

Known as the Climate Change Super Fund, the legislation was included in the Senate’s one-house budget proposal, but didn’t make it into the Assembly’s proposition. Lawmakers are pushing for the bill to make it into the final budget due April 1. Rachel Rothschild, who provided legal research for New York’s superfund bill, said fossil fuel companies will most likely fight the legislation by claiming carbon emissions are an international problem, not a state issue.

A massive coalition of health, environmental and civic groups – including Environmental Defense Fund – laid out a full-throated defense of EPA’s clean car standards in a brief filed today in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

As it is currently performed, cost-benefit analysis generally undercounts many benefits both to society at large and to vulnerable communities in particular. Before resolving how to consider equity as part of cost-benefit analysis, there are improvements we can make within the existing cost-benefit framework to ensure that health and environmental benefits to society at large — and to marginalized communities in particular — are sufficiently considered.

Forcing oil companies to cover New York’s climate costs will not raise the price of gas or home heating. According to an analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law, because companies’ payments would be based on historical contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, oil companies would have to treat these as one-time fixed costs.

In a recent blog post, Resources for the Future (RFF) Senior Fellow Joshua Linn and Christopher Holt, an economic fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity, offer a policy approach for reducing levels of harmful ozone: targeting ozone emissions that are most likely to violate air-quality standards. “This targeting could be accomplished by introducing trading ratios, such that emissions rules are stricter for firms at locations or times of day that are more likely to see ozone violations,” say Holt and Linn.

Environmentalists are bracing for the Biden administration to approve Willow. If it does, it’s unclear what difference a higher social cost metric would have made. “In theory — and this is what advocates have been saying — the agency could conduct some sort of weighing of costs and benefits,” said Max Sarinsky. “And there the social cost of carbon could factor prominently ... But right now, that's not what they do,” he added. “In most cases, that has meant ‘If there's an interest in fossil fuel development, we're going to approve it.’”