In the News

“What this decision says is, in evaluating the environmental consequences of the lease, an agency has to look not just at the consequences of the impacts immediately surrounding the lease but also the consequences down the road of burning the fuel once it’s extracted,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert on environmental law at New York University. “That’s enormously important.”

Two-thirds of the cases accuse the Trump administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act, a nearly 73-year-old law that forms the primary bulwark against arbitrary rule. The normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent, according to analysts and studies. But as of mid-January, a database maintained by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law shows Trump’s win rate at about 6 percent.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ new rule was accompanied by an assessment of its probable costs and benefits. Conspicuously absent from the tally: any acknowledgment of harms that the rule will impose on low-income women by reducing their access to affordable healthcare.

The agency has invented a new, unnatural way of evaluating regulatory cost that finds no support in the economics literature or in the regulatory practices of prior administrations of either political party.

Andrew Wheeler’s EPA may not be as dramatic as Scott Pruitt’s, but it still suffers the pathologies that make its work poor quality—and unlikely to hold up in court.

An efficient approach would be to pass one bill aimed at enacting the "Green New Deal," because it could go after multiple sectors at once, said Derek Sylvan, strategy director at New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity.

Such a bill would have clear goals and pathways to meet targets, which could then be put into place through regulatory approaches, he said.

One potential model might be America's Water Infrastructure Act of 2018, S. 3021, which sought to incorporate local input into projects and safeguards to make sure state infrastructure spending meets specific criteria, Sylvan said.

As climate threats mount and the window to act is beginning to close, states need to adopt desirable energy storage policies as quickly as possible.

An analysis by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law shows that more than 90 percent of court challenges to major Trump deregulatory actions have been successful so far. In a typical administration, the government wins on such challenges around 70 percent of the time, said Richard Revesz, a law professor at N.Y.U. who specializes in environmental law. “This is truly aberrational,” he said.

Senators may ask Wheeler about his plans to ease carbon pollution regulations on coal plants. That and many other initiatives will face legal challenges, including plans to roll back auto fuel efficiency and air pollution standards. Richard Revesz at NYU Law doubts if any will survive.

Richard Revesz, a professor at NYU Law School and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, discusses how Democratic attorneys general, riding a blue wave into office, may do a U-turn on lawsuits brought by their Republican predecessors – many of which challenge tighter federal environmental regulations. He speaks with Bloomberg’s June Grasso.