In the News

The White House on Thursday will introduce the first major changes to the nation’s benchmark environmental protection law in more than three decades. Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, said he did not believe the changes would hold up in court. In fact, he argued, it is more likely that federal agencies will be sued for inadequate reviews, “thereby leading to far longer delays than if they had done a proper analysis in the first place.”

When a cost is placed on CO2 — either explicitly, through a tax or cap-and-trade system, or implicitly, by subsidizing clean competitors — the result is a more effective market, not a “distorted” one. Externalities have been internalized. It is the companies that aren’t being charged for CO2 pollution that are distorting the market. (The Institute for Policy Integrity has a good report on Capacity Markets and Externalities.)

When companies produce and sell harmful products, even if the full extent of the danger isn’t initially clear, they should pay to help remedy the damage done. Whatever challenges are involved in arriving at those solutions shouldn’t be mistaken for reasons to let fossil-fuel companies off the hook.

Jayni Foley Hein, the Natural Resources Director for the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, told Newsweek, “The analysis here is a disservice to the American people, who deserve to understand the full environmental and economic implications of drilling in ANWR for an estimated 70 years.” Hein says this move from the Trump White House Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a 180-degree turn on previous administrations, who have sought to protect the Refuge since its inception in 1960.

Environmental groups, along with several Democratic attorneys general, have filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging environmental rollbacks under the Trump administration. While many cases are ongoing, many have led to rulings favorable to environmentalists. Of 28 cases that have been resolved, according to a tracker from the New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity, the administration has prevailed only twice.

Together, these court decisions amount to a stunning defeat of the “energy dominance” agenda and reveal that the Trump administration cannot operate outside the bounds of the law.

The decision is a telling indication of rulings to come, as the first one targeting a final environmental repeal by the Trump administration, said Jayni Foley Hein, natural resources director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “It’s emblematic of the challenges this administration has faced in trying to carry out the energy dominance agenda. When you are weakening or rolling back environmental standards, you’re going to be challenged in the court, and there are certain substantive and procedural hurdles you have to overcome in order to carry that out.”

It was the latest setback for an administration that has repeatedly lost efforts to defend its deregulatory actions in court. It has lost roughly 95% of its deregulatory cases, according to data compiled by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. That is three times the rate of most executive-branch agencies in prior administrations for similar actions in the courts.

“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.”

The largest expanse of pristine wilderness in the United States, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), is at risk of becoming a staging ground for heavy machinery, with oil drilling projects threatening to displace and damage wildlife and natural ecosystems.