In the News

The Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization have said gas stoves are unsafe and linked to respiratory illness like asthma, cardiovascular problems, cancer and other health conditions, according to reports by groups such as the Institute for Policy Integrity and the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

The Trump administration often lost battles over its policies when they ended up in court. The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law found the administration lost over three-fourths of those fights from 2017 to 2021.

The Climate Change Superfund Act is modeled on the existing State and Federal Superfund law (which requires polluters to fund toxic waste dump cleanups) by making Big Oil climate polluters financially responsible for the environmental damages that they have caused. The top Big Oil companies will be required to pay a combined $3 Billion annually, every year for 25 years. These costs won’t fall back on consumers, according to economists and an analysis from the think tank Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law. 

"If you are trying to run a legal or compliance department, you're thinking, 'I have a lot of more work now in telling my front office what they can or cannot do,'" Donald Goodson, deputy director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, told Regulatory Intelligence. "Across the country, if you have nationwide operations, you may face conflicting requirements."

Efforts to filter carbon dioxide from the air and oceans will rapidly expand in the coming decades — but not enough to reach net-zero emissions globally, according to a landmark survey of carbon removal experts. That means global warming would be unlikely to remain below the 2-degrees-Celsius limit set by the Paris Agreement, which would require the world to offset more emissions than it produces by midcentury, the New York University School of Law study found. The study, published Wednesday by the law school's Institute for Policy Integrity, is likely the largest expert study of its kind.

“The D.C. Circuit’s opinion is clear and unequivocal,” said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. Danis penned a “friend of the court” brief on behalf of the project’s opponents.

However, the Trump administration’s attempt to deregulate was also often thwarted by the courts. All told, the Trump administration lost 57 percent of cases challenging its environmental policies, a much higher rate of loss than previous administrations, according to a database maintained by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

Project 2025 urges the agency to “revise guidance documents” for the so-called social cost of carbon, while another chapter proposes ending its use altogether. Co-benefits — a rule’s health and environmental advantages that aren’t tied directly to reducing a targeted pollutant — have been persona non grata with conservatives for years. But the Trump EPA did count them in its climate rules — which showed minuscule benefits due in part to low social cost values for greenhouse gases. Jason Schwartz, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, said sidelining benefits could make rules less legally durable. “I think that the courts have been clear in a number of cases that it would actually be arbitrary for an agency to ignore — or to really treat differently — co-benefits or indirect costs,” he said.

The state commissioners’ objections to FERC’s order likely would not be the case to introduce the claim to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals because their rehearing request to FERC was limited to factual questions about the agency’s statutory interpretation, said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “That is not to say that other Order 1920 suits might not invoke Loper Bright or Chevron’s demise more squarely, and I suspect that many will try arguments related to that out for size,” Danis said in an email.

Jason Schwartz, the legal director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, said the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks often ignored congressional statutes or inflated the costs of regulations on industry. Mr. Trump’s allies have presumably learned from those missteps, experts said.