In the News

In an essay in The Regulatory Review, Jack Lienke and Richard L. Revesz of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law argued that EPA’s attempt at replacing the Clean Power Plan represented a drastic about-face. Lienke and Revesz observed that the Trump Administration had played up the Obama-era regulations as “draconian” and a huge cost to the U.S. energy sector, but EPA’s final proposal justified a new plan by stating that no changes to emissions or health outcomes would have been achieved by the Clean Power Plan. Lienke and Revesz criticized EPA for attempting to obscure the effects of jettisoning the Clean Power Plan and engaging in less-than-clear regulatory analysis.'

The Supreme Court’s consideration of the "major questions doctrine," a judicial doctrine that can limit agency authority to act on major issues facing the country, comes after a “huge uptick” in litigants—including the Trump administration, Republican attorneys general, and business groups—invoking it over the past decade in attempts to invalidate regulations, said Richard Revesz, who’s written about its recent use.

As the new year opens, President Biden faces an increasingly narrow path to fulfill his ambitious goal of slashing the greenhouse gases generated by the United States that are helping to warm the planet to dangerous levels. “While it’s important to do things quickly, it’s also important to do a good job,” said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. He noted that the Trump administration moved rapidly to undo former President Barack Obama’s policies and most of those efforts were considered rushed and sloppy, leading to a high rate of decisions being overturned by courts.

Increasingly it appears that Presidents only have two years to make policy if they want it to last. This is the thesis of a forthcoming article by two legal experts who argue that President Donald J. Trump made aggressive use of a set of policy-reversing tools during his term and that President Joseph R. Biden has followed suit. The article’s authors—Bethany A. Davis Noll, the executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at the NYU School of Law, and Richard L. Revesz, AnBryce Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at the NYU School of Law—contend that Presidents can combine these tools to roll back recent policy, making any regulations issued in the last two years of the previous presidency vulnerable to repeal.

MATS's issuance capped a two-decade regulatory tug of war that originated with the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. Based on EPA projections of the expected health gains, tens of thousands of Americans had their lives cut short by toxic power plant pollution in the interim. One of MATS’s lessons is that “there are real costs to delay,” said Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the liberal-leaning Institute for Policy Integrity, based at New York University. “And real benefits to the people who would rather that the rules not be issued at all.”

TGP representatives themselves project annual emissions from the East 300 project at more than 2.34 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. The Institute for Policy Integrity, a non-partisan organization at New York University School of Law, used a federal government model to calculate that the project would be responsible for damage of more than $131 million per year.

Unlike most executive orders that undergo a lengthy and sometimes fractious regulatory process before they are enacted, procurement rules can take effect almost immediately, said Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. He called the executive orders “very significant.”

A group of watchdogs recently asked the FTC to issue new rules that would ban drip pricing. You can let the FTC what you’d like to see them do with this request by sending them a message here.

Two clean energy companies have signed deals with the Empire State that could provide New York City with as much as a third of its electric needs each year from solar, wind and hydroelectric sources. But some predecessors have encountered road blocks in their quest to build out the massive infrastructure necessary to deliver the renewable energies to major load centers. Justin Gundlach, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, told Law360 on Wednesday that New York may not encounter that level of difficulty. He noted that the state already underwent a lengthy process before the Champlain Hudson Power Express — a proposed high-voltage direct current submarine line linking Montreal to New York City — began construction earlier this year. 

A top White House official says the Biden administration is planning to review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) various federal programs as a way to help speed later review of related low-carbon projects, an effort aimed at easing the challenge officials face as they seek to expedite such projects while also ensuring rigorous reviews. The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) is looking at “ways that programmatic analysis can be used more frequently and effectively by federal agencies,” Jayni Foley Hein, CEQ’s senior director for NEPA, said Oct. 19.