In the News

The Trump administration in an awkward place. Even after straining to show the repeal of the Obama-era rules would boost the economy by baking into their plan financial assumptions that many experts dispute, their plan as written still doesn’t do much for the sagging coal industry. “In order to justify this, they do serious violence to established economics,” Richard Revesz, dean emeritus at New York University School of Law, said of the repeal. “The level of contortions and the attacks on standard economic principles are unprecedented.”

The Trump administration’s decision to repeal the Clean Power Plan — and promote coal use — is clearly bad for the planet’s far-off future, because it will aggravate climate change. But I think the most effective strategy for the opponents of repeal is to focus on the here and now. And unlike some anti-environmental policies, this one will begin to harm Americans very quickly. On this subject, Richard Revesz and Jack Lienke have written an op-ed in The Times carefully detailing how the E.P.A. has fudged the economic numbers to justify its policy.

The GOP offered years of lies and impossible promises, which have come due. In health care: Obamacare is a disaster; the GOP alternative will have none of its flaws. In climate: the CPP will crush the economy; the GOP alternative will lower emissions better. Yet a recent report from the Institute for Policy Integrity shows that the rapidly falling cost of renewable energy technologies, coupled with the stubbornly low price of natural gas, mean that CPP compliance is likely to be cheaper than anyone projected.

Conservative groups want the EPA to reconsider the endangerment finding. Even if the EPA were to replace the Clean Power Plan, that wouldn’t tie the agency’s hands on the finding, they said. Denise Grab, an attorney with New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, told Bloomberg BNA that any potential replacement rule issued by the EPA “wouldn’t really affect any position that the endangerment finding could be revisited.” But she noted that a replacement plan would have to rely on the endangerment finding, thus “re-endorsing it.” The EPA “could try later” to reverse the finding, she added, though said there is “still no basis for doing so.”

The agency fudged the numbers to prove Obama’s signature climate regulation wasn’t worth the cost and still came up short. Pruitt’s agency contends that the regulation could cost up to $33 billion a year by 2030, instead of $8.4 billion. But this is fuzzy, self-interest math, critics say: the agency is strategically leaving out huge savings that power companies would achieve from energy efficiency investments, according to a New York Times op-ed published by New York University law professor Richard L. Revesz and the Institute for Policy Integrity’s Jack Lienke.

The Trump Administration announced this week that it would repeal an Obama-era policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. We talk with a law professor, Richard Revesz of New York University, about what this news means for the future of energy policy in the country and the process for the repeal of the policy.

The Trump administration had no interest in conducting a good-faith update of the E.P.A.’s original estimates. Instead, it relied on accounting gimmicks to greatly inflate the Clean Power Plan’s projected costs and slash its expected benefits. The rule’s transformation from boon to boondoggle, as laid out in a draft of Mr. Pruitt’s plan to repeal it, is thus pure illusion.

The Trump administration announced Monday that it would take formal steps to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, setting up a bitter fight over the future of America’s efforts to tackle global warming. “Every step of this, from the repeal to the replacement, will involve a lot of time-consuming litigation, and we could ultimately see this end up in the Supreme Court,” said Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University.

The Trump administration will consider fundamentally limiting the way the federal government counts benefits from curbing climate change and air pollution in an upcoming proposal to rescind former President Barack Obama’s signature climate regulation. The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law this week released a paper compiling multiple studies that have found that Clean Power Plan compliance costs have fallen dramatically since the rule came out in 2015.

Federal law doesn’t allow officials to simply ignore climate impacts, the courts have begun to rule. “The Trump administration is not doing any favors to its agencies and their ability to bring energy projects to approval,” said Jason Schwartz, legal director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. “This issue is going to come up again and again.”