In the News

If the Supreme Court next term overrules Chevron USA v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the era of “Chevron deference” will have been displaced by what ought to be called the era of “West Virginia skepticism.”  There is, to be sure, some parallelism in the structure of the two doctrines. In simplest terms, each is offered up as a two-step test. Still, much remains to be clarified in the implementation of West Virginia. A recent study by Natasha Brunstein of the Institute for Policy Integrity found that lower court “judges have taken vastly different approaches to defining and applying the doctrine—even within the same circuit—illustrating that many judges view the doctrine as little more than a grab bag of factors at their disposal.”

Last year, the Supreme Court sided with West Virginia in rejecting a different (Obama-era) EPA plan. “The West Virginia decision left intact EPA’s obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that endanger public health from the power sector,” says Dena Adler, an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, in an emailed statement. The 2022 ruling left pathways available to the EPA, she says, and “the agency has carefully walked those lines in this proposal.”

Several attorneys and FERC watchers see an ambiguous directive in the law governing FERC’s oversight of LNG. The language was last updated in 2005, at a time when virtually no natural gas was being exported from the continental U.S. While the law — the Natural Gas Act — directs FERC to “issue or deny” applications to site LNG import and export terminals, it gives the commission “absolutely zero guidance” for how to make that decision, said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity.

EPA has previously set standards that require industries to invest in new types of pollution controls, said Dena Adler, an attorney with New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “The history of the Clean Air Act is filled with regulations where technologies were projected to be very expensive,” she said. “And after the regulations came down, industry figured out how to install these control technologies better and cheaper.”

The update to how agencies assess costs and benefits of proposed regulations will help ensure that economic analysis applies state-of-the-art approaches to a range of issues, from valuing future impacts to considering distribution and equity, according to Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. 

Two key Hill Democrats and a legal think tank are backing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) against fuels sector and GOP states’ legal claims that the agency improperly factored zero emission vehicles (ZEV) into its baseline for fuel economy standards, building on the agency’s defense in the suit. An amicus brief from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) builds upon NHTSA’s arguments that EPCA does not preempt accounting for ZEV deploying in the regulatory baseline.

In a panel addressing how the FERC can incorporate environmental justice communities into their infrastructure permitting, Al Huang, director of environmental justice at the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said, “FERC needs to demonstrate a foundational commitment to environmental justice, and that means identifying who EJ communities are, engaging with them, providing support for them [and] building trust. Building that foundation can yield substantive advantages such as … identifying viable alternatives to opposed projects that can mitigate adverse impacts, and fully understanding the vulnerabilities that communities might face."

In this episode, we attempt to illustrate what daily life could be like as the earth warms to 3°C.  Dr. Peter Howard of the Institute for Policy Integrity discusses some of the likely economic and societal changes.

Known as the Climate Change Super Fund, the legislation was included in the Senate’s one-house budget proposal, but didn’t make it into the Assembly’s proposition. Lawmakers are pushing for the bill to make it into the final budget due April 1. Rachel Rothschild, who provided legal research for New York’s superfund bill, said fossil fuel companies will most likely fight the legislation by claiming carbon emissions are an international problem, not a state issue.

A massive coalition of health, environmental and civic groups – including Environmental Defense Fund – laid out a full-throated defense of EPA’s clean car standards in a brief filed today in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.