In the News

EPA is issuing a draft update to the social cost of carbon (SCC) metric that floats significantly higher estimates of the climate-related damage caused by greenhouse gases than the Biden administration’s interim values, as well as a new dynamic approach to setting the “discount rate” used to reduce the value of future benefits from curbing emissions. In response to EPA’s release of the draft estimates, Peter Howard, economics director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said they “will contribute to better policy choices. These metrics ensure that the benefits of climate action are accurately reflected in government decisionmaking. The revision is long overdue, as it has been almost a decade since the last comprehensive update and five years since [NASEM] laid out a roadmap.”

Federal regulations touch virtually all aspects of American lives, so the Biden administration wants to hear from you on how it can boost public participation in the rulemaking process. Upon taking office, almost two years ago, President Biden issued a memo on modernizing regulatory review, which has not been finalized yet. The president nominated Richard Revesz, most recently the AnBryce Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at the New York University School of Law, to lead OIRA.

The Yale Journal on Regulation's blog compiled a reading list on the "major questions" doctrine. The list features Mangling the Major Questions Doctrine by Natasha Brunstein & Richard L. Revesz, which attributes the expansion of the doctrine over the last six years to its aggressive use by the Trump Administration.

Peggy Shepard, the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council co-chair, gave the administration a grade of D in September for its environmental justice work so far, telling a New York University Institute for Policy Integrity event that, in order to do something as transformative as the administration is seeking, “you have to restructure . . . but that has not happened and that is really the crux of the problem, that structurally, nothing has changed in any of these agencies.”

The issue represents one of multiple instances in which critics of strict climate- and energy-related rules are attempting to leverage this summer’s Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v. EPA that curbed the agency’s greenhouse gas regulatory authority under the major questions doctrine, which says that policies with significant political or economic effects require “clear” statutory authority. But Oct. 20 supplemental comments from the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University argue that West Virginia should not apply to FERC’s long-pending gas review policies, which would require consideration of upstream and downstream greenhouse gas emissions when assessing projects under the Natural Gas Act (NGA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

The new study could add to calls to limit public health risks from gas stoves. Earlier this year, the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University pressed the Consumer Product Safety Commission to address such risks -- an effort that comes as California and various local governments seek to limit gas-fired appliances over climate change concerns.

If confirmed, Revesz would be uniquely positioned to help shield the president’s climate regulations from legal scrutiny, a challenge that has derailed the administration’s decisions repeatedly. While at New York University, Revesz tracked and evaluated the Trump administration’s poor record defending its environmental decisions in court.

EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) is urging the agency to begin to systematically quantify the environmental justice (EJ) benefits of its air pollution rules, a potentially sweeping recommendation that could help the agency justify stricter controls on mobile and stationary sources. The recommendation is spelled out in a Sept. 27 draft SAB report on EPA’s proposed phase 3 heavy-duty truck and engine rule recently posted to the board’s website ahead of a Nov. 3 meeting where the advisors are slated to discuss it. Meredith Hankins, an attorney with the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University law school, said it was noteworthy that the proposed rule included the first-time distributional impact analysis evaluating baseline conditions as well as the results if the proposed rule’s more stringent option were implemented.

Millions of Americans are still reliant on gas combustion for their furnaces, water heaters, clothes dryers, fireplaces, stoves, and ovens, not realizing the pollution they create both indoors and outdoors because of it. Gas appliances have fallen through the cracks of federal regulation in part because the EPA sees the Clean Air Act as charging it with overseeing outdoor air. “There’s no equivalent clean indoor air act,” said New York University’s Jack Lienke, co-director of the Institute for Policy Integrity and a co-author of a history of the EPA law.

A new report from several progressive groups urges EPA and other agencies to take “more and bolder risks” on greenhouse gas and other rules in response to the Supreme Court’s embrace of the major questions legal doctrine, underscoring debates on whether strategic caution or a “flood-the-zone” strategy is the best response for backers of strong regulation. For example, Earthjustice attorney Kirti Datla during an Institute for Policy Integrity event last month partially downplayed West Virginia as “a unique case” over the Obama administration’s specific Clean Power Plan -- suggesting that a variety of agency regulatory efforts in areas including vehicles and methane are unlikely to trigger similar scrutiny. But she also cited “deep thinking” going on within the environmental community on how to respond to West Virginia, including on what information needs to be before” agencies like EPA in the wake of the decision.