In the News

Forcing oil companies to cover New York’s climate costs will not raise the price of gas or home heating. According to an analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law, because companies’ payments would be based on historical contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, oil companies would have to treat these as one-time fixed costs.

In a recent blog post, Resources for the Future (RFF) Senior Fellow Joshua Linn and Christopher Holt, an economic fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity, offer a policy approach for reducing levels of harmful ozone: targeting ozone emissions that are most likely to violate air-quality standards. “This targeting could be accomplished by introducing trading ratios, such that emissions rules are stricter for firms at locations or times of day that are more likely to see ozone violations,” say Holt and Linn.

Environmentalists are bracing for the Biden administration to approve Willow. If it does, it’s unclear what difference a higher social cost metric would have made. “In theory — and this is what advocates have been saying — the agency could conduct some sort of weighing of costs and benefits,” said Max Sarinsky. “And there the social cost of carbon could factor prominently ... But right now, that's not what they do,” he added. “In most cases, that has meant ‘If there's an interest in fossil fuel development, we're going to approve it.’”

Recently environmentalists have touted a series of studies that find links between gas stoves and health risks. An April 2022 report from the Institute for Policy Integrity summarizes that “[w]ithin just a few minutes of cooking . . . pollutant concentrations can exceed levels” that both EPA and the World Health Organization “have deemed unsafe and linked to respiratory illness, cardiovascular problems, cancer, and other serious health conditions.”

Both the House and the Senate this week passed legislation overturning a Labor Department rule designed to ensure that fund managers remain capable of considering environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors when making investments. The bill "has to be the ne plus ultra of hysterical overreaction to any policy with the word climate in it," writes NYU law professor Jack Lienke, an expert on environmental law.

Top Hill Democrats are backing the Biden EPA’s legal defense of its light-duty vehicle greenhouse gas rule, asserting that challengers’ claims the standards violate the “major questions” doctrine ignore “explicit direction” from Congress and “would severely limit the ability of Congress itself to craft effective legislation” if affirmed. Other amicus briefs backing EPA filed by a March 3 deadline include filings by the Institute for Policy Integrity.

University of Virginia law professor Michael Livermore explains the significance of the Biden administration's proposal to increase its estimate of the social cost of carbon, which federal regulatory agencies use to measure the economic consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. Livermore's 2022 article in the Yale Journal on Regulation, Costs, Confusion and Climate Change, coauthored with Justin Gundlach of New York University School of Law, looked at the SCC's effectiveness as a cost-benefit analysis tool.

Environmental groups are largely supporting EPA’s draft update and urge the agency to use even lower discount rates than it floats. For example, a large coalition of groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University say in Feb. 13 comments that the report “faithfully implements the roadmap laid out in 2017” by the National Academies of Science, Engineering & Medicine“ and applies recent advances in science and economics on the cost of climate change.

Supporters have said that EPA is supposed to account for all predicted benefits of future rules, even those not directly tied to the planned regulation's purpose or calculable in money terms. Among those previously taking that position is Richard Revesz, who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Revesz, a Biden appointee who won Senate confirmation for the post late last year, earlier led the Institute for Policy Integrity, a liberal-leaning think tank based at New York University law school.

Legislation in Albany to force oil companies to NY's climate costs will not raise the price of gas or home heating, according to an analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law. The report makes clear that opponents' claims otherwise are false.