In the News

Peter Howard, economics director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, testified that the emissions tied to the tunnel project would generate approximately $1 billion in global social economic costs each year from 2027 to 2070, as well as “significant unmonetized climate effects and other unquantified pollution costs to human health and the environment.”

New York University law experts also tried to knock down the “perfect substitution” argument in an article for the Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law last year, calling it “contrary to basic principles of supply and demand” and a “fallacy.”

Peter Howard, the economics director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, said from 2027 to 2070 the average annual climate costs would approximate $1 billion each year over this period, "plus significant unmonetized climate effects and other unquantified pollution costs to human health and the environment."

Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney for the left-leaning Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, said he hoped states like Pennsylvania – which control most drilling regulations and tend to be friendlier to it than the federal government – will follow the Biden administration's example of curtailing fossil fuel development while ramping up renewable energy production.

Yesterday’s D.C. Circuit ruling is the latest decision to rebuke FERC for inadequate climate analysis. Judicial rebukes are likely to continue until FERC fully considers the social cost of greenhouse gases in its analyses, said Richard Revesz.

While FERC’s new climate reviews are useful and a step in the right direction, failing to determine the significance of a project’s emissions could open the door to more lawsuits, said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law. “The bigger question is, what do you do now that you know what these emissions are? How is that going to affect your decisionmaking process?” Sarinsky said. “So far, FERC hasn’t shown that it will.”

Justin Gundlach explained that the New York Public Service Commission is in a tough spot—coordinating the decline of the gas system is deeply complicated, and the state is still in the midst of a process to determine what, exactly, that decline should look like. 

In its order, a majority of FERC’s Commissioners said that they disagreed that greenhouse gas emissions must necessarily be a consideration, incremental or not for the WBI project, and rejected calls by the Institute for Policy Integrity to monetize such impacts using a social cost metric. Nonetheless, FERC did look briefly at the total potential for greenhouse gas emissions in its order, in response to Policy Integrity comments.

Several current and former policymakers expressed skepticism that hydrogen and renewable natural gas are mature enough to play a major role in their states' transition from natural gas. Those fuels cannot be the justification, as they are often presented, for building more gas infrastructure, former New York State PSC Chair John Rhodes said during a May 27 webinar hosted by the Institute for Policy Integrity, Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the New York University School of Law's State Energy and Environmental Impact Center.

It’s time to change course and take an approach that avoids bad investments and climate pollution. FERC should use its authority to meaningfully consider climate impacts and reject proposals that are inconsistent with national energy needs.