In the News

According to the analysis, the tunnel project and pipeline could contribute an additional 27 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere annually, and generate $41 billion in climate damages between 2027 and 2070. The testimony was provided by Peter Erickson, a senior scientist and climate policy director for the Stockholm Environment Institute, as well as by Peter Howard, an economic policy expert at New York University’s School of Law.

Peter Howard, economics director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, testified that the emissions tied to the tunnel project would generate approximately $1 billion in global social economic costs each year from 2027 to 2070, as well as “significant unmonetized climate effects and other unquantified pollution costs to human health and the environment.”

New York University law experts also tried to knock down the “perfect substitution” argument in an article for the Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law last year, calling it “contrary to basic principles of supply and demand” and a “fallacy.”

Peter Howard, the economics director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, said from 2027 to 2070 the average annual climate costs would approximate $1 billion each year over this period, "plus significant unmonetized climate effects and other unquantified pollution costs to human health and the environment."

The Trump-named anti-worker National Labor Relations Board majority hit a very sour note this year when it tried to use a case involving Musicians Local 23’s informational leafletting to write new national restrictions on workers exercising their rights. The 3-0 ruling on Aug. 31 by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals called the board’s limits “arbitrary and capricious.” The ruling was yet another in a long line of federal appellate court defeats for the former GOP Trump regime and its constant attempts to write agency rules in favor of the corporate class. NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity, which tracked such rulings, reported the Trump government lost such cases 77% of the time (59 wins, 200 losses).

No longer a risk of the distant future, a failure to tackle climate-change risk could cost the world $1.7 trillion a year by 2025—according to a report released in March by New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity. In what its authors believe to be “the largest-ever expert survey of the economics of climate change,” the “overwhelming consensus” among the 738 economists canvassed concludes that inaction will be costlier than action, and that “immediate, aggressive emissions reductions are economically desirable.”

Justin Gundlach noted that in its climate lawsuit against Big Oil, the city pointed out that “the number of days in New York City with rainfall at or above two inches is projected to increase by as much as 67% by the 2020s and the number of days with rainfall at or above four inches is projected to increase by as much as 67% by the 2020s and 133% by the 2080s.”

Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney for the left-leaning Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, said he hoped states like Pennsylvania – which control most drilling regulations and tend to be friendlier to it than the federal government – will follow the Biden administration's example of curtailing fossil fuel development while ramping up renewable energy production.

Republican governors across the United States have enacted legislation that will likely fuel the spread of COVID. A new op-ed published by legal expert Richard Revesz examines the governors' failure to properly mitigate the spread of COVID and their misunderstanding of federalism.

Though the report is likely to be cited often in litigation, its biggest imprint will be on establishing a social cost of carbon, said Richard Revesz, a law professor and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU. “That’s the building block used to justify the stringency of regulation across many, many agencies,” he said.