In the News

Legal and economic experts, including NYU's Richard Revesz, are urging the Biden administration to couple its year-long process to bolster the federal government's approach to the social cost of carbon climate damages metric with a broader overhaul of cost-benefit review procedures, arguing such an approach could shield any changes from legal challenges.

The Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University School of Law is out with a new report aimed at helping EPA and other federal agencies improve climate-related environmental justice (EJ) analyses, in line with a new executive order (EO) from President Joe Biden seeking to elevate both issues. The report also assesses the original Clinton-era EO issued in 1994 on EJ and provides detailed guidance for how agencies can conduct better EJ analysis going forward in line with Biden’s goals.

"The question is, do the folks in charge at the Energy Department and does FERC really want to push this and risk the backlash?" said Alexandra Klass, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. "Maybe the answer is yes." A December paper from the New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity and Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy concluded that needed long-distance transmission can be developed by applying existing federal legal authorities.

When more renewable energy comes online, power storage facilities that Canada’s reservoirs provide to the U.S. grid should become even more valuable. “There’s this version of Canadian hydro not only being firm (capacity) but being something like a battery. That’s the big picture informing the vision of some policymakers,” said Justin Gundlach, senior attorney at the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

Jayni Hein, a former law professor at the New York University School of Law and natural resources director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, has become the council’s senior director for the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA. Part of her role will be to steer a path through the sweeping changes the Trump administration made to NEPA—or possibly to quarterback a rewrite of them.

This research might have been prevented from informing public health policy but for a federal court in Montana, which last week vacated a rule written by the EPA under former President Donald Trump that barred scientific research based on standard, anonymized health data from consideration in its work. “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to rely on this important study is significantly enhanced as a result,” said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, of the court case.

Experts at the New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity agreed that the ‘censored science’ rule would have seriously constricted the EPA from considering important scientific evidence in a wide range of environmental rulemakings. In a statement, Richard Revesz, who directs the NYU institute, described the rule as ‘one of the Trump administration’s most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy’.

"The 'censored science' rule was one of the Trump administration's most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy," Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said in a statement on Monday. "Today, the Trump anti-science effort, which had been opposed by the leadership of major scientific organizations, was quickly dispatched."

Failures to defend its last-minute rules mirror the Trump administration’s poor overall record defending its deregulatory attempts in court. One analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University found the administration lost more than 80% of its legal attempts to undo regulations or write new rules.

“The ‘censored science’ rule was one of the Trump administration’s most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said in a statement on Monday. “Today, the Trump anti-science effort, which had been opposed by the leadership of major scientific organizations, was quickly dispatched.”