In the News

Advocates of the newly formed Initiative on Climate Risk and Resilience Law (ICRRL) are advocating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) bolster climate change protections with the finance industry. The ICRRL is a joint initiative that includes the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, and the Vanderbilt Law School.

The Biden administration intends to revive federal environmental protections for millions of streams, marshes and other bodies of water across the country. By starting early to revise the policy, the Biden administration stands a greater chance of defending it against the legal challenges that are expected to come, said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. “That makes it much more likely it will stick,” Mr. Revesz said.

Local governments in the U.S. have instead tried to use common-law nuisance claims to force companies to pay the costs of adapting to the effects of climate change. Most of those cases are pending. Should a case end up at the Supreme Court, the conservative-leaning panel could be skeptical of allowing cities to get involved in regulating global matters, said Rachel Rothschild, a legal fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

In its order, a majority of FERC’s Commissioners said that they disagreed that greenhouse gas emissions must necessarily be a consideration, incremental or not for the WBI project, and rejected calls by the Institute for Policy Integrity to monetize such impacts using a social cost metric. Nonetheless, FERC did look briefly at the total potential for greenhouse gas emissions in its order, in response to Policy Integrity comments.

Many U.S. communities won't reach their climate targets without transitioning away from natural gas, a panel of regulators and lawmakers agreed during a Thursday discussion hosted by the New York University School of Law. However, they said there's no clear path to eliminating the fuel.

Several current and former policymakers expressed skepticism that hydrogen and renewable natural gas are mature enough to play a major role in their states' transition from natural gas. Those fuels cannot be the justification, as they are often presented, for building more gas infrastructure, former New York State PSC Chair John Rhodes said during a May 27 webinar hosted by the Institute for Policy Integrity, Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the New York University School of Law's State Energy and Environmental Impact Center.

The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law conducted a large-sample survey on climate economics, which was sent to all economists who have published climate-related research in the field’s highest-ranked academic journals. The results show an overwhelming consensus that the costs of inaction on climate change are higher than the costs of action, and that immediate, aggressive emissions reductions are economically desirable.

A coalition of the Environmental Defense Fund, Food & Water Watch, the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, and others was among the groups that commented on FERC's gas pipeline certificate policy. Their comments suggested that FERC use the social cost of greenhouse gases as the best approach to assessing impacts of a proposed project's emissions.

Some observers wonder why Democrats — many eager to sack four years of Trump policies — did not use the CRA on the laundry list of rules they have spent years condemning. Ricky Revesz, a New York University law professor, thought the entire narrative around the CRA has been mangled. He said it's significant that the Democrats used it at all — stressing this is the first time in history that a Democratic congressional majority has done so. He added: "The Biden administration has been very aggressive, moving quickly to undo some very pernicious regulations without resorting to the CRA."

FERC has yet to act on the 92.5-mile, 250 MMcf/d North Bakken Expansion Project, which would provide incremental firm capacity from six gas processing plants to a proposed interconnect with Northern Border Pipeline Company. Adding a possible hurdle in that docket, the Institute for Policy Integrity has faulted FERC's environmental assessment for a failure to project indirect GHG emissions or monetize emissions.