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  • Beyond Economic Analysis

    As part of the symposium on Modernizing Regulatory Review, Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at Policy Integrity, discusses the economic and legal implications of the draft update to Circular A-4.

  • Immediate Options to Address Environmental Disparities in Cost-Benefit Analysis

    As it is currently performed, cost-benefit analysis generally undercounts many benefits both to society at large and to vulnerable communities in particular. Before resolving how to consider equity as part of cost-benefit analysis, there are improvements we can make within the existing cost-benefit framework to ensure that health and environmental benefits to society at large — and to marginalized communities in particular — are sufficiently considered.

  • Spring Forward: Making Sense of New Research on Daylight-Saving Time

    Energy conservation has long been the main justification for having daylight-saving time. But there is no compelling scientific evidence that daylight-saving time conserves energy. Recent evidence shows that the effect is smaller than previously thought and very much dependent on local circumstances.

  • Targeted Regulation Can Reduce the Frequency of High-Ozone Events

    The downward trend of ozone levels has slowed in recent years despite regulatory efforts at the federal and state levels. New research suggests that regulation that targets emitters when high-ozone events are most likely could be a cost-effective way of further reducing ozone levels.

  • The Wins Keep Coming for Robust Climate Analysis in Fossil-Fuel Permitting

    Environmental advocates have insisted for years on the need to robustly account for climate impacts when permitting fossil-fuel infrastructure. Courts and agencies are starting to listen. A recent decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and a new guidance document from the White House Council on Environmental Quality mark the latest developments in ensuring that federal agencies consider climate-change impacts before greenlighting fossil-fuel projects.

  • How a Climate Superfund Act in New York Would Work

    Policy Integrity research helped spur a novel climate bill introduced by New York state lawmakers: the Climate Change Superfund Act. The Act would establish a climate change adaptation fund by requiring the fossil-fuel companies most responsible for climate damages to pay $30 billion to the state over 10 years. This blog post highlights the key takeaways from Policy Integrity's legal and economic research on the Act, establishing its legal basis and economic viability.

  • Balancing Equity and Efficiency in Electricity Tariff Design

    The growth of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as rooftop solar, raises significant distributional justice and equity concerns about who has access to DERs and their benefits. DER compensation is critical to incentivize widespread adoption. However, traditional tariff design approaches suffer from the assumption that economic efficiency and equity must necessarily trade-off. Our paper describes a comprehensive tariff design framework that incorporates both economic efficiency and equity objectives to determine electricity tariffs. We offer recommendations on how efficient tariffs can be designed without sacrificing equity, and the role of spatio-temporal granularity in tariff structures to achieve equity.

  • A Realistic Solution to Gas Stove Pollution

    Gas stoves are a dangerous source of indoor air pollution. The Consumer Product Safety Commission won’t be banning them, but it can make them safer, explains Laura Figueroa.

  • Texas Should Think Again Before Rushing to Overhaul Its Electricity Markets

    To prevent power outages like those that occurred during Winter Storm Uri, the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) is considering a fundamental overhaul of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’s (ERCOT) wholesale electricity market. We urge the PUCT to consider whether incentivizing more generation is needed or whether the key issue is enhancing the resilience of existing generation to extreme weather events. We then explain why any new reliability mechanism should compensate both dispatchable and non-dispatchable resources according to their reliability value, include an efficient penalty structure for non-performance of generation units, reduce uncertainty for market participants, and mitigate the exercise of market power.

  • The Supreme Court Has Not Turned Out the Lights on Chevron, and Lower Courts Should Continue to Apply It

    While reading Isaiah McKinney’s recent piece on Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, I was struck by how different people can see the exact same facts and yet draw such wildly different conclusions from them. Where McKinney sees a problem with lower courts’ applying Chevron while the Supreme Court has relied on it less in recent years, I see lower courts doing exactly what they should be doing: Following Supreme Court precedent until a majority of the Court overrules it.