In the News

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has rolled back sweeping new policies for large natural gas projects, including a framework for assessing how pipelines and other facilities contribute to climate change, weeks after prominent lawmakers panned the changes. If the orders issued yesterday “inappropriately ignore” the impacts of climate change, they may continue to be rebuked by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, said Sarah Ladin, an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.

Many have viewed the current regulatory regime as ineffective in eliciting appropriate climate disclosure. As described in this 2021 report from the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU and the Environmental Defense Fund, two years after the issuance of the 2010 guidance, the SEC reported to Congress that it had not seen a noticeable change in disclosure as a result.

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted Monday 3-1 in favor of a proposed rule that would expand and standardize how public companies disclose business risks related to the climate and greenhouse gas emissions. Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, supported the SEC’s proposed rule in a statement Monday, saying the commission “no longer has the luxury of ignoring climate change.” The SEC, he said, must protect investors by demanding the same transparency on climate risk as other financial risks.

But Max Sarinsky, a professor at the New York University School of Law, said accounting for future damages from emissions is key to the administration attempt to weigh climate impacts of actions such as the pending oil and gas lease sale. “These numbers are important,” Sarinsky said. “They provide a useful tool for the government to develop cost effective policies that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

As the centerpiece of presidential leadership, OIRA serves as both overseer of the quality of agency action and mouthpiece for the President’s policy goals. Professor Richard Revesz has suggested that OIRA itself or another centralized, presidential enforcement body could encourage agencies to take into account the distributional consequences of regulation. His proposal could result in an administrative focus on equitable outcomes similar to the pervasive governmental culture of cost-benefit analysis that OIRA has promoted since the Reagan Administration. 

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday handed more fuel to FERC’s Democratic majority for its new policies on natural gas infrastructure, ruling that the commission has to take another shot at reviewing downstream greenhouse gas emissions from a Massachusetts compressor project. “Today’s decision adds to a growing list of cases affirming that FERC is required to consider these climate impacts,” said Sarah Ladin, an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. “More broadly, today’s decision affirms that the commission’s new policy statement is an appropriate action to ensure it properly considers greenhouse gas emissions in assessing pipeline applications,” Ladin wrote in a statement.

Jack Lienke discussed the history of West Virginia v. EPA, whether SCOTUS should have taken it at all, the legal issues involved, and the possible rulings we might expect from the court, ranging from bad to terrible.

Past regulations to deal with cross-state air pollution were "very successful” in cutting NOx releases, said Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, a liberal-leaning think tank based at New York University. “The reason that we need a new rule is not because those rules were failures," Lienke said. “It’s because the target has changed.”

Meredith Hankins, an attorney with the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University law school, says it is noteworthy that the proposal to cut nitrogen oxides (NOx) from heavy-duty trucks includes a first-time assessment of distributional impacts. The distributional considerations in the regulatory impact analysis (RIA) are the first to evaluate existing baseline conditions as well as the results if the more stringent option were implemented, Hankins says.

The Institute for Policy Integrity tracked the Trump administration’s record in court throughout Trump’s four years in office. By its count, the administration was “successful” 58 times, and “unsuccessful” 200 times. That is, just 22 percent of the Trump administration’s regulatory or deregulatory actions that were challenged in court came through the legal process unscathed.