In the News

On Thursday, the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources hosted a remote oversight hearing titled, “What More Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Leasing Means for Achieving U.S. Climate Targets.” Witnesses included Policy Integrity's Max Sarinsky. The recording is available here.

To address perceived market concentration across the economy, the FTC under Chair Khan plans to examine how to define “unfair methods of competition” under Section 5 of the FTC Act in an attempt to root out perceived anticompetitive practices. In addition to the proposed Trade Regulation Rule on Commercial Surveillance, the FTC is also actively seeking comment on the following: A petition from the Institute for Policy Integrity asking the FTC to regulate “drip pricing.” The petition describes “drip pricing” as “the practice of advertising only part of a product’s price upfront and revealing additional charges later as consumers go through the buying process.”

A House Natural Resources subcommittee will meet this week to debate the emissions impact of the federal oil and gas program in the Gulf of Mexico. Witnesses include Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Justin Gundlach, senior attorney with the Institute for Project Integrity at New York University, noted that the outcome depends not just on DOE but on “the speed, ambition, and success of parallel efforts by FERC [overseeing wholesale power markets], as well as the state-level politics of specific transmission project proposals.”

“It’s unprecedented for OIRA to strengthen a rule to increase net benefits,” said James Goodwin, a senior analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform. “This is a good thing,” said Richard Revesz, a New York University professor whose name was floated as a potential Biden OIRA administrator. “To the extent OIRA is doing its job, it should push the agency to maximize net benefits. I don’t know if it happens all the time.”

California has been a leader in embedding environmental justice into different parts of its state government, from the Department of Justice to the Air Resources Board. Meredith Hankins, an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity who used to work for the Golden State's attorney general's office, said the state is doing work that other states as well as the federal government could learn from. "I think one of the most important developments in environmental justice work generally, and especially in recent years, is the understanding that it really needs to be bottom-up — it can't be top-down," Hankins said. "States and local governments really need to listen to what the communities are saying, rather than coming across with some one-size-fits-all solution that's going to solve environmental racism."

Conservative Supreme Court justices’ focus on the “major questions” doctrine during recent arguments over the Biden administration’s COVID vaccine mandate could spell trouble for EPA’s greenhouse gas authority under the Clean Air Act, which is facing similar challenges in a separate high court suit, warns Richard Revesz, who directs New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity. Revesz in a follow-up interview with Inside EPA says given the significant role that the major questions doctrine played in the OSHA arguments, “I am fairly certain that the justices will have a ‘major questions discussion’ in the opinion when it comes out. And the question is, what they say? If they take a very aggressive view that it applies broadly, then that has significant implications for West Virginia and other regulatory cases.”

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.