In the News

The Wall Street Journal's recent editorial argues that the White House missteps in updating its approach to regulatory cost-benefit analysis. Many experts disagree. The Biden administration’s evidence-based approach to cost-benefit analysis recognizes that both benefits and costs merit evenhanded consideration. In this way, it’s a welcome update.

Setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants is an important part of EPA’s legal framework for reducing climate change. In its recently proposed rule, EPA has walked the line between its congressional mandate, the Court’s West Virginia decision, and the agency’s analysis of the technological and economic realities.

Good governance requires that the federal government regularly account for its natural resources according to a standard set of evidence-based rules. It also requires a systematic approach to deciding when and how to account for environmental services, rather than doing so only when convenient to advance specific political objectives. Two recent federal documents take this task seriously, with the aim of creating a predictable system for how the government will take natural resources into account when making decisions.

A lawsuit challenging a natural gas expansion project on the East Coast could change how federal regulators assess state climate policies. “If the D.C. Circuit doesn’t step in, state ratepayers are going to end up paying twice,” said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank based at New York University School of Law. “They’ll end up paying more as the states are transitioning away from gas and electrifying building and heating and other uses.”

New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity stated the act is “burdensome, irrational, and legally questionable” for several reasons.

Natasha Brunstein & Donald L. R. Goodson... [give] us a solid overview of the MQD’s triggers that is increasingly being picked up by advocates and academics. In their telling, the MQD is triggered in “extraordinary” cases where an agency action is (1) “unheralded” and (2) “transformative"... Richard L. Revesz & Max Sarinsky, Regulatory Antecedents and the Major Questions Doctrine (Dec. 12, 2022). If you work at a federal agency, please, please, please read this paper.

The White House has proposed a new rule to streamline permitting for clean energy and other infrastructure projects under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, a bedrock law that requires federal agencies to conduct an environmental review before approving any major project. Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, described the rule as “fairly modest and incremental” to E&E News. “We’re in an era where preserving the environment often means building new things,” he said. “I think these regulations are trying to be sensitive to that.”

While ecosystems have sometimes appeared in the cost-benefit assessments that agencies must write to support their rules, policies and projects, there has never been a governmentwide directive or guidance for doing that accounting. As a result, ecosystem values are treated as secondary to more easily quantified benefits, Richard Revesz, administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and co-founder of the Institute for Policy Integrtity, along with OSTP Director Arati Prabhakar wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality proposed long-awaited regulations Friday that would streamline permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act. Federal agencies would need to meet set deadlines for environmental reviews — as required by this year's debt ceiling deal — but also consider how energy projects impact climate change and communities historically overburdened by pollution. Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity, described the draft as "meaningful" but "also fairly modest and incremental."

The US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a milestone on the path towards the electric vehicle (EV) era — a monumental shift with the potential to remodel not just the US automotive industry, but the global landscape. Washington is working to establish alternatives to China’s control over critical mineral resources within the Asia-Pacific region, potentially recalibrating the global EV industry.