In the News

The New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity [PDF]has also expressed disappointment, calling the new rules “tepid,” and has focused on one specific aspect of the decision: managed services. What in the nine hecks are “managed services”?

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said that “the FCC has failed to protect free speech and Internet openness for all users,” by not applying the same rules to wireless. At the New York University School of Law, the Institute for Policy Integrity called it “a batch of tepid new rules.”

This fall, NOAA released a draft policy to change all that—to streamline, codify, and make more transparent the penalties and fee structures for fisheries violations. Trouble is, a report released Monday by NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity indicates that NOAA’s new rules may actually have the opposite effect: encouraging rather than deterring overfishing.

A mini-firestorm erupted recently in response to the EPA’s attempt to stall on a regulation to clean up mercury pollution from industrial plants; environmentalists see the move as a political cave in the face of a newly empowered congressional opposition.

A new report from NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity out this morning calls on NOAA to rethink its plans for overhauling enforcement of the nation’s laws on over-fishing. The authors say NOAA’s proposed revisions are too lenient on some violators and don’t create the right incentives to obey the law.

There is a much stronger economic case for curtailing highly toxic air pollution from old and outdated industrial boilers than there is for allowing the emissions to continue.

Over the last two weeks in Cancún, some Latin American countries have shown openness to exploring private funding sources and market mechanisms to address climate change, while a small number of others have staked an ideological opposition to market-based climate solutions with little interest in compromise.

Phasing out dirty oil over a 20 year period would generate $5.3 million worth of health benefits and avoid 600 mortalities, according to a study from the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity. The DEP received roughly 2,200 311 complaints about buildings’ chimney smoke in Fiscal Year 2009 and issued 500 violations. Boilers using the heavy No. 6 or No. 4 are more difficult to maintain than No. 2 oil or natural gas, causing problems with incomplete combustion, officials said.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in April that the FCC did not have legal authority to stop Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, from blocking its customers’ access to a file-sharing service called BitTorrent. The decision limited the FCC’s power over web traffic under the current law and gave the ability for Internet service companies to block or slow specific sites. For example, they could decide to charge video sites like YouTube to deliver their content faster to users. “That’s the worst case scenario,” said Scott Holladay, an economics fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. “The likelihood of that happening is very small.”

Michael Livermore, a law professor at New York University and a leading proponent of cost-benefit analysis in environmental regulation, said estimating the value of mercury reductions would help inform the public about the new rules. But because EPA isn’t allowed to consider costs when it sets the toxic pollution standards, he said, “it doesn’t make sense for the agency to pull its hair out estimating the benefits of a rule that’s already cost-benefit justified” by the particulate matter reductions.