In the News

With the market and state and local governments pushing for clean energy and the Trump administration pushing the other way, the story of the past four years is mixed. The administration was largely unsuccessful in most of its environmental, energy, and natural-resources litigation that ended up in the federal courts, suffering unfavorable rulings or backing off potential lawsuits, according to data compiled by the Institute for Policy Integrity. 

As the Biden administration seeks to undo the 'science transparency' rule, along with over 100 other environmental deregulatory actions undertaken by the Trump administration, it can now make use of the most powerful tool in the arsenal: the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Now that Democrats control the House and Senate, they can deploy the tool more effectively and proceed even without Republican votes.

Increasing fossil fuel development on public lands comes with serious downsides, according to New York University law professor, Jayni Foley Hein. In an article published in 2018, she argues that the prices private developers pay to extract fossil fuels from public lands do not reflect the external harms of fossil fuel production, such as greenhouse gas emissions.

Getting an accurate value for the social cost of carbon will be vital for much of the Biden administration's environmental agenda, said Jason Schwartz, legal director at the
Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. "It is going to help in undoing all the harmful deregulation to climate regulations during the Trump administration," according to Schwartz.

The Obama White House was the first to require government agencies to use the social cost of carbon as part of any cost-benefit analysis of new regulations. This is not to say that the Obama administration’s method was perfect. Peter Howard, an economist at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, has identified significant damages that will result from climate change that the Obama administration failed to account for, like fishery damage from ocean acidification and public health impacts from wildfires.

The Department of Energy also announced a slate of appointees to senior leadership positions. Avi Zevin, formerly a senior attorney and affiliated scholar at the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, was appointed deputy general counsel for energy policy.

Now up for review is the 2019 rule repealing and replacing Obama’s flagship Clean Power Plan for existing power plants. This week's decision by a federal court to throw out the Trump rule greases the skids by allowing EPA to return to the drawing board to decide how power plants should be regulated. “The rule that the Biden administration will write will be written against the backdrop of some prediction of not just what the D.C. Circuit would do, of which we now have a fairly good sense, but also what the Supreme Court could do, which we don’t know,” said Richard Revesz.

Avi Zevin will be deputy general counsel for energy policy. He is an attorney with experience advancing electricity policies. He was a senior attorney and affiliated scholar at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law and an attorney at Van Ness Feldman LLP.

As former Interior Department official David Hayes heads for the Biden administration, the group he has helmed for four years is getting a new set of leaders. Bethany Davis Noll will serve as executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at the NYU School of Law, which has promoted actions by state attorneys general to fight the Trump administration's environmental rollbacks. Jessica Bell will be the center's deputy director, stepping in to replace Elizabeth Klein.

“It’s a laborious, time-consuming process,” said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, who was on Mr. Biden’s short list to run the E.P.A. “No one doubts the EPA’s authority to put these regulations on auto pollution back in place,” Mr. Revesz said. “But they can’t just make the Trump rules go away by executive order."