In the News

In addition to the federal centers of power, state and local governments play major roles in shaping U.S. climate policy, as do business interests and other stakeholders, including community and non-governmental organizations. We provide more detail on the workings of the three federal centers of power with respect to climate policy, followed by short discussions of influence wielded by states and other stakeholders.

The U.S. climate policy story has four important, interrelated dimensions: action at the federal level, action at the state level, policy innovation, and technical innovation. The federal story is one of legislative failure but some executive and innovation success, while the state story is one of variegated progress.

With the new Administration in Washington, many think tanks and advocacy groups are making their voices heard on crafting mandatory climate disclosure regulations. A new report from the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU and the Environmental Defense Fund advocates adoption by the SEC of a climate disclosure mandate.

Days before a Biden administration working group releases an “interim” value for the social cost of carbon used to estimate the benefits of greenhouse gas reduction measures, Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, is urging a broad reform of the SCC and the associated “discount rate” of future impacts in order to bolster the value of new EPA GHG rules.

Some environmental groups are vowing to seek rigorous National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental reviews of planned transmission lines, even when they are built to facilitate low- or zero-carbon power, a strategy that may frustrate the Biden administration’s effort to accelerate reviews for such projects. “Unlike the Trump administration, which sought to prioritize environmentally undesirable projects and run roughshod on NEPA requirements in the process, the Biden administration is seeking to prioritize environmentally desirable projects but respect NEPA safeguards,” argues Ricky Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University.

President Biden’s day-one presidential memorandum on "modernizing regulatory review" reasserts the importance of evidence, analysis, and expertise in regulatory decision-making. After a four-year long experiment in abandoning these norms of good governance, the Biden memorandum should comfort anyone who cares about cultivating a regulatory system that can improve the well-being of people in the United States.

On January 20, just hours after being sworn into office, President Joe Biden signed a presidential memorandum on modernizing regulatory review. This document embraces continuity on important components of the administrative state but, more importantly, it provides a significant blueprint for much-needed reform.

Jointly penned by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund and New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity, a new report said the current quality of firms' climate risk disclosures is not at the same level as that for other forms of risks that publicly traded companies routinely disclose. It calls on the U.S. government to improve and mandate its current disclosure regime because it will "help not only investors deciding how to allocate capital across corporations but also the corporations themselves."

Biden on Tuesday added several policy officials and legal experts to his White House Council on Environmental Quality. Jayni Hein, recently an adjunct professor at the NYU School of Law, will become senior director for NEPA and counsel.

Jayni Hein, the new senior director for NEPA and counsel at CEQ, was an adjunct professor of law and the Natural Resources Director for the Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law.