In the News

The Golden State could steer the country toward an electric future regardless of whether President-elect Joe Biden takes aggressive steps to promote clean cars. "You could see significant progress through a California waiver request and then the piggybacking on California standards by Section 177 states," said Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity and an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law.

Congress enacted a law in 2005 that granted the Department of Energy the authority to designate “national interest electric transmission corridors” where new lines are needed, and it gave FERC authority to override state inaction on lines in these corridors. But this law has been ineffective, largely failing to speed up expansion of transmission lines. As shown in a report about to be issued by Columbia’s Center for Global Energy Policy and New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, the law can and should be revived.

Two amicus briefs -- one from Ricky Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University, and another from University of Chicago economics professor Michael Greenstone -- were submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which is hearing environmental groups’ appeal seeking to vacate the NEPA review by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation & Enforcement for failing to use the SCC to assess the coal mine’s climate harms.

Without strong backing in Congress to carry out his campaign promises, Biden will need expert leadership over the little-known White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. There are few people with the economics and policy expertise to take on the role. The likely candidates mentioned by academics and congressional staff for Biden’s OIRA administrator are familiar faces in the regulatory community, including Richard Revesz at New York University.

As one of his biggest steps to tackle climate change, President-elect Joe Biden is expected to undo President Trump's rollback of clean car standards and set new auto emissions rules. But experts have one pressing question for the former vice president: How aggressive will the new tailpipe rules be? "The big-picture question for me is what the eventual standards will look like," said Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law.

Over 100 environmental safeguards were removed across the past four years. Biden plans to impose stricter environmental standards on industry, a job that would be overseen by his next EPA administrator. Possible picks include Richard Revesz, an NYU Law professor who is considered one of the foremost legal minds in environmental law. Originally from Argentina, he has spent most of his career in academia. But he has managing experience, having served as dean of the NYU law school from 2002 to 2013.

Team Trump lost a court battle that could have pushed our nation’s low-income elderly, disabled and blind out of their own homes and into deathtrap nursing homes during the pandemic. The defeat is yet another loss for Team Trump. Administrations usually win 70% of the cases brought against them, but the Trump administration won only about 16% of 132 decided lawsuits, according to research by Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.

Combating Climate Change with Section 115 of the Clean Air Act: Law and Policy Rationales provides a roadmap for an essential component of such a plan: the Environmental Protection Agency’s international air pollution authority. This new book, which I edited, is the culmination of a decade of collaboration by scholars and lawyers at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, the Emmett Institute at UCLA, and the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU.

The outcome of Georgia’s runoff election will determine the degree to which President-Elect Joe Biden may be able to count on the Senate’s support in enacting his energy platform, which aims for a carbon-free electricity sector by 2035. Bethany Davis Noll and Richard Revesz, regulatory experts whose work focuses on the legal tools available to presidents to pursue their agendas, take a look at the options available to Biden to pursue his energy agenda with, or without, help from the Senate.

The deregulatory era of the past four years, in some cases, exposed how vulnerabilities in the way those rules were crafted or finalized can be used to weaken or rewrite them. About 85 percent of the Trump administration’s deregulatory actions over the past four years were struck down by the courts. Richard Revesz, the Lawrence King Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Institute for Policy Integrity, points out that regulatory action tends to be more durable if it’s undertaken in the first term of a two-term administration—all the more reason why Biden must take swift action in his first year in office to put the nation on an even more aggressive path for climate action.