In the News

A law professor for more than 30 years, Revesz specializes in climate change and regulation. He will also oversee Biden’s promise to tame the sway of corporations over US regulations and increase the influence of Americans of color and low-income people. He said in his confirmation hearing that he supports a traditional approach to evaluating regulations and wouldn’t completely overhaul past calculations.

The Senate approved Richard Revesz’s nomination by voice vote to be administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, housed within the White House Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the regulatory process across the government, approves government information collections, establishes government statistical practices and coordinates federal privacy policy. Revesz “is one of the nation’s leading voices in the fields of environmental and regulatory law and policy,” said the announcement from the White House in September when President Biden nominated him.

By filing an amicus brief on Wednesday, the Institute for Policy Integrity challenged the American Petroleum Act's arguments that the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act bars the Department of Interior from considering nonlocal environmental effects resulting from offshore development. In the brief, IPI urged the D.C. Circuit to uphold the district court's ruling that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management violated NEPA and to reject arguments that the Inflation Reduction Act moots the issue of whether Lease Sale 257 violated NEPA.

The Institute for Policy Integrity is urging officials to create granular assessments of emissions tied to grid electricity used to generate hydrogen, while also placing robust requirements on the use of renewable energy credits to offset emissions from such power.

The government has consistently undercounted the societal benefits of reducing climate pollution when assessing regulations and other policies, tipping the scales toward polluters over people. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took a critical step to correct this problem by proposing a comprehensive update to the social cost of carbon. Consistent with the scientific and economics literature from independent researchers, the update would raise the metric’s central value from $51 to $190 for each ton of carbon-dioxide emissions in 2020.

Regarding the implementation of the EPA's social cost proposal, “If another agency were hypothetically to rely on EPA’s valuations in the future, that could be challenged. And that challenge would not be bound by the Clean Air Act’s jurisdictions,” said Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. He added that other courts wouldn’t be bound by any prior D.C. Circuit decision on the matter either.

Key U.S. authorities have acknowledged the urgent need to act on climate risks to the banking system. Recent actions and remarks are beginning to shed light on what the next wave of policies to address these risks might entail. They’re likely to look a lot like many other, existing financial risk regulations.

The Treasury Department’s implementation of new and expanded clean energy tax credits is providing a fresh venue for debates about the carbon accounting for federally backed hydrogen projects, with a think tank seeking “rigorous” rules that account for upstream emissions and ensure integrity of any renewable energy offset credits. The pitch by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI), in comments submitted earlier this month, tracks closely with arguments to the Department of Energy (DOE) as it develops a clean hydrogen production standard (CHPS) for directing grants for hydrogen “hubs” under the 2021 infrastructure law.

The Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law examined the question, “How Do We Know if Hydrogen is Clean?” and noted that "the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act includes “major incentives for ‘clean’ hydrogen. Now agencies need to decide what counts as clean.” The institute gave the Department of Energy, which is charged with developing a standard for clean hydrogen, a series of recommendations.

EPA has led the way in crafting these types of metrics in the past, said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. The agency began working on the social cost of methane and integrated it into some rulemakings before the Interagency Working Group undertook its own work. "The approaches that EPA took and that of the Interagency Working Group ultimately were consistent with each other — if that's any indication of what might be happening here," Sarinsky said.