In the News

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.

Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity and State Energy & Environmental Impact Center are hosting a May 27 webinar to examine state efforts to move away from natural gas appliances to lower-emitting products. “Navigating this transformation successfully will be a monumental endeavor--one that the federal government can support, but cannot undertake itself. It is a task for the states,” the groups say.

At the Institute for Policy Integrity, a New York University think tank critical of Trump administration environmental policies, Director Richard Revesz said the forecasting requirements "sought to put a thumb on the scale in favor of deregulation and would have caused additional deaths, illnesses, and lost work days and decreased the overall welfare of Americans. The repeal of this rule is an important step to restore scientific integrity at EPA."

In a recent essay, Natasha Brunstein and Richard Revesz, who directs New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, charge that efforts by Republican state officials to use the so-called “major questions” doctrine in their nascent bid to reinstate the Trump-era Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule governing power plant GHGs should be met with “great skepticism” given the Trump administration’s distorted use of the doctrine for deregulatory purposes.

EPA faces the daunting task of tackling multiple regulations to meet the administration's ambitious climate goals. Finalizing passenger vehicle standards will likely be one of EPA's heaviest policy lifts, said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University's School of Law. "The car standards have to be done quickly," Revesz said in an interview, noting any delay could mean they will apply to fewer vehicle model years.

While it may be a while before the precise outlines of EPA’s upcoming methane rules are clear, legal experts are already noting that the Senate vote makes EPA’s task easier by essentially restoring the 2016 Obama era NSPS as a baseline for further action without the need for a fresh comment process to simply reverse the Trump rule. “You can imagine the whole process of getting this done through the comment-and-rule process could take the majority of Biden’s first term,” New York University School of Law Institute for Policy Integrity Director Richard Revesz told the Wall Street Journal.