In the News

“There’s absolutely no reason climate should not be considered as part of the public interest,” said Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity. The change is a long overdue update for the 2019 life cycle analysis of greenhouse gas emissions that concluded US LNG exports are likely to reduce global emissions on a per-unit basis because of an assumption that LNG is replacing other fossil fuel sources, Sarinsky said.

Max Sarinsky, an attorney with the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School, said if the Energy Department updates its analytical assumptions for gas, it could significantly change its calculus on approving new projects. But what would happen if the U.S. didn’t ship LNG? “The harder piece of it is thinking through more seriously how exporting gas will affect the energy mix globally — and particularly in the countries that we’re exporting to — and what that could mean for the pace of renewables going forward,” said Sarinsky. Sarinsky of NYU and his colleague, Minhong Xu, released a report Friday that tallied the climate damages of expanded U.S. LNG exports using two sets of social cost of greenhouse gas metrics — the administration’s interim figures and updated EPA values.

The Biden administration's decision to halt new LNG exports may bolster pending lawsuits against the government's approvals of proposed LNG facilities — and could face its own hurdles in court. For projects with export approvals and lawsuits that pre-date the Biden administration's pause, courts' consideration of DOE's review in those cases may be limited, said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. "Technically speaking, this announcement is outside the records of those approvals," he said. "But contextually, it's in the atmosphere. It might give judges a little bit more pause."

Today, the safe transportation and storage of carbon dioxide is shaping the public debate. “There aren’t many sequestration projects that exist yet,” Derek Sylvan, with the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, told Jean. “So, it’s especially important for the next wave of projects to get extra scrutiny until all the necessary safety precautions are well understood.”

“I think that this is a really critical juncture,” said Derek Sylvan, strategic director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. “There aren’t many sequestration projects that exist yet. So, it’s especially important for the next wave of projects to get extra scrutiny until all the necessary safety precautions are well understood.”

A bill to raise the national debt ceiling would greenlight all permits needed for the Mountain Valley pipeline’s “construction and initial operation at full capacity,” according to text released Sunday. If the bill is approved by congress, "MVP's approvals would be virtually unassailable, unless someone were to challenge the legislative provision itself," said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity.

The D.C. Circuit recently endorsed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's climate change review of a massive liquefied natural gas export project, but agency watchers question how much the decision will crack a current commissioner stalemate over weaving climate into FERC's gas infrastructure approval policies. Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, discussed the implications of the case.

Several attorneys and FERC watchers see an ambiguous directive in the law governing FERC’s oversight of LNG. The language was last updated in 2005, at a time when virtually no natural gas was being exported from the continental U.S. While the law — the Natural Gas Act — directs FERC to “issue or deny” applications to site LNG import and export terminals, it gives the commission “absolutely zero guidance” for how to make that decision, said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity.

The upcoming rule from the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to depend on rarely used technology for capturing power plants’ greenhouse gas pollution. It will have to survive the conservative Supreme Court that hobbled the EPA’s regulatory powers just 10 months ago. An EPA standard based on carbon capture would be “entirely different” from the Obama regulation’s demand that utilities switch to cleaner fuel sources. Capturing pollution at the source “is really the bread and butter of the Clean Air Act and the type of regulation that EPA has been issuing for decades,” said Dena Adler, an attorney with New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity. 

Last month, the U.S. Forest Service decided to move forward with a logging project on the border of Yellowstone National Park without applying the new White House guidance, which would have involved a detailed projection of the resulting greenhouse gas emissions. “There’s no perfect way to contextualize greenhouse gas emissions,” said Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. “I think the ways that CEQ suggests—particularly, the social costs of greenhouse gases and considering carbon budgets and climate commitments—is really a thoughtful way to show what the emissions mean.”