In the News

Environmental justice organizations and local municipalities had an opportunity to learn about a new resource designed to help them identify, navigate, and pursue federal funding for environmental justice by attending a webinar on Monday. This webinar introduced attendees to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Center (TCTAC) for EPA Region 2, from Harlem to Newark. Among the speakers was Al Huang, Environmental Justice Director at the New York University School of Law Institute for Policy Integrity

Three agencies that are the backbone of U.S. banking regulation have developed joint guidance, released today, on how banks should manage the monetary risks of the climate crisis. Previously, EDF partnered with NYU School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity to submit joint comments to all three agencies – the FDIC, the Federal Reserve Board and the OCC. 

On October 11, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) for a sweeping prohibition of “hidden” and “misleading” fees across all industries. This “Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees” can be traced back to the FTC publishing a petition (86 FR 73207) for rulemaking from the Institute for Policy Integrity on “drip pricing” on December 27, 2021. The petition defined drip pricing as “the practice of advertising only a part of a product’s price upfront and revealing additional charges later as consumers go through the buying process.”

After stumbling twice at the Supreme Court, Republicans still want to make the case that the administration has its math wrong on climate change's financial toll. The justices "make it very clear that you can't challenge these valuations in the abstract," said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity. "You have to challenge them in their application."

Breaking the law soon could get more expensive for companies and people who violate U.S. environmental regulations. That’s based on a White House directive from last month that looked at a complex calculation known as the social cost of greenhouse gases. Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, co-wrote a 2021 report that said basing penalty calculations in part on the social cost of greenhouse gases “internalize the climate-related harms from noncompliance, thereby punishing violators based on the damage caused and efficiently deterring future violations.” Sarinsky told E&E News in an interview that agencies may not be confined to considering traditional factors such as inflation when setting penalties.

Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, says that the problem is going to take a lot to be solved. "Drip pricing is really not good for anyone. It creates a race to the bottom, where all ticket sellers feel like they have to advertise deceptively low fees or they'll lose out to those who do," he said.

Mark Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, also applauded the White House's move, but pushed the administration to update its carbon cost estimates. Agencies "must be aware that the current federal metrics have grown outdated and grossly underestimate the true cost of climate pollution," Sarinsky said in a press release.

“It’s a way to balance climate effects against other economic effects,” said Max Sarinksy, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. For example, he said, the “social cost of carbon offers even stronger support for the purchase of electric vehicles because you would add the climate cost savings to the budgetary cost savings.”

Jack Lienke, IPI's regulatory policy director who moderated the panel, recalled the group's conference last fall — held just after the IRA's passage and a few months after the Supreme Court's decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which cited the major questions doctrine to block EPA power plant rules premised on shifting to cleaner generation. At that point, "the conventional take seemed to be — the era of regulating has ended, the era of spending has begun; goodbye neoliberalism, hello industrial policy, etc.," Lienke said.

The GREET model will also need retooling to manage the broader complexities of measuring the greenhouse gas emissions of hydrogen production, many commenters to the Treasury Department have noted. For example, the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law has asked the Treasury Department to work quickly with DOE to develop a successor model that can accurately assess the ​“marginal emissions” impact of electrolyzers using a mix of clean and dirty grid power.