In the News

Getting greener mail trucks would help combat climate change — and all of the Postal Service’s competitors are doing it.

But what would serious distributional analysis look like? As we explained in our recent comments on EPA’s Draft Strategic Plan for 2022–2026, serious distributional analysis requires that an agency consider the distributional consequences of multiple regulatory alternatives.

TGP representatives themselves project annual emissions from the East 300 project at more than 2.34 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. The Institute for Policy Integrity, a non-partisan organization at New York University School of Law, used a federal government model to calculate that the project would be responsible for damage of more than $131 million per year.

Unlike most executive orders that undergo a lengthy and sometimes fractious regulatory process before they are enacted, procurement rules can take effect almost immediately, said Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. He called the executive orders “very significant.”

A group of watchdogs recently asked the FTC to issue new rules that would ban drip pricing. You can let the FTC what you’d like to see them do with this request by sending them a message here.

By changing the underlying risk profile of certain insurance products, climate change threatens insurers’ business model. At the same time, insurers also face risk as investors, as insurers’ assets may be overvalued due to unassigned climate risk. Improved data, research and resilience planning can contribute to a more robust and more equitable insurance system, while improving financial disclosure requirements can limit investment risk.

Two clean energy companies have signed deals with the Empire State that could provide New York City with as much as a third of its electric needs each year from solar, wind and hydroelectric sources. But some predecessors have encountered road blocks in their quest to build out the massive infrastructure necessary to deliver the renewable energies to major load centers. Justin Gundlach, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, told Law360 on Wednesday that New York may not encounter that level of difficulty. He noted that the state already underwent a lengthy process before the Champlain Hudson Power Express — a proposed high-voltage direct current submarine line linking Montreal to New York City — began construction earlier this year. 

With experts worldwide calling on governments to transition away from fossil fuels to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change, the Biden Administration is in the midst of reconsidering the federal government’s oil, gas, and coal leasing programs. Reforms to these programs could bring U.S. energy policy closer in line with climate reality by reducing the extraction of fossil fuels from public lands.

A top White House official says the Biden administration is planning to review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) various federal programs as a way to help speed later review of related low-carbon projects, an effort aimed at easing the challenge officials face as they seek to expedite such projects while also ensuring rigorous reviews. The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) is looking at “ways that programmatic analysis can be used more frequently and effectively by federal agencies,” Jayni Foley Hein, CEQ’s senior director for NEPA, said Oct. 19.

Was there another choice for DOI? Yes. The Louisiana decision “doesn’t force the administration to move forward with any particular lease sale,” Max Sarinsky of the New York University School of Law told The Guardian, though he added that if the sale were postponed, “I’m almost certain they would be sued by oil and gas interests.”