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The tax credits require guidance issued by the Treasury Department to help define which projects are eligible. In the case of a clean hydrogen tax credit, a Trump administration could issue guidance that would skew the credit toward more polluting fossil fuel projects. For electric vehicles or wind and solar generation, new guidance could restrict how many vehicles or projects qualify for the credits or could simply cast uncertainty over the programs’ future, discouraging private investment. Derek Sylvan, strategy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said the tax credits have the potential to drive tremendous emissions cuts with hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits. But many, like the hydrogen credit, have the potential to be skewed in favor of fossil fuels or other polluting technologies.

“The most important thing about the guidance is that to the extent that it does improve the integrity of carbon credits underlying these derivatives, it could improve integrity in the voluntary carbon market,” said Erin Shortell, legal fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University law school.

While the CFTC guidance is the first effort by a U.S. financial regulator to address voluntary carbon markets, some critics have said the agency's action would address only a small part of the global marketplace. "The guidance applies only to a tiny sliver of transactions one step removed from voluntary carbon markets' core," said Erin Shortell, climate risk legal fellow at the Institute of Policy Integrity, a nonprofit think tank at NYU Law School.

An Oct. 16 webinar from the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) will discuss whether skepticism of voluntary carbon markets is justified.

Additionally, in Oct. 1 comments submitted on the draft final report, the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University urges the SAB to advise EPA to “distinguish EJ analyses from analyses that characterize distributional effects.” A distributional analysis can provide insight into how costs and benefits may or may not be equitably distributed across populations but do not fully address EJ.

The Climate Superfund has another benefit: It is designed to protect the public from costs being passed on by Big Oil. That’s not just what lawmakers think, it’s what experts think too. According to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law, the public would be protected from costs being passed on. And their conclusion was recently echoed the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz,by who makes the case that the Superfund Act will not raise the price of oil on consumers.

If groups do manage to show standing, Matt Lifson, an energy attorney at IPI, explained “the legal durability of regulations will depend on courts agreeing that agencies have selected the best interpretation of the law, not merely a reasonable interpretation.” But aside from interpreting statutes, “agencies will still get substantial leeway” on their expert factual and technical findings, Lifson says, “just not when it comes to interpreting the text of the statutes.” That means backers of the IRS rules will try to show that key debates -- such as what counts as a “clean” hydrogen project under the 45V credit -- are effectively technical rather than legal disputes.

However, some advocates for tougher climate policy are warning that observers should not get “too excited” about the CFTC guidance because it is relatively limited in scope. “While the guidance is a positive step towards improving voluntary carbon market integrity, it’s only a small one: The guidance is extremely limited in reach,” says a Sept. 25 post from Erin Shortell of the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI). “The guidance applies only to a tiny sliver of transactions one step removed from voluntary carbon markets’ core.”

In other words, the CFTC designed its guidance in such a way that it cannot do anything about the underlying voluntary markets’ low-quality carbon credits, which are the most likely to be fraudulent. The guidance is “extremely limited in reach,” as Erin Shortell, a legal fellow at the nonprofit Institute for Policy Integrity, put it in a blog post.

Also on the sidelines of Climate Week, New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity hosts a day-long event on Sept. 24 about greenhouse gas emissions accounting.