In the News

According to prominent medical doctors, we are in the midst of “the biggest public health challenge of the 21st century.” But it’s not the one you think. The toll of the COVID-19 pandemic is enormous and devastating. But the public health impacts of climate change could be vastly greater. The medical profession is demanding that we recognize climate change for the health crisis that it already is, rather than the environmental catastrophe that it threatens to become. 

In this episode of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State's podcast, Professor Caroline Cecot of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School discusses her new working paper, “Congress and the Stability of the Cost-Benefit Analysis Consensus,” with Executive Director Adam White and with Professor Ricky Revesz, NYU’s Lawrence King Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Policy Integrity.

A rational administration would look at the decline in demand for oil and gas leases and see it as an opportunity to hit pause and come up with a fiscally and environmentally smarter way to manage public lands. Instead, the Trump administration is rushing ahead with these lease sales, locking in more harmful greenhouse gas emissions while failing to earn a decent return for American taxpayers.

New Jersey has recently taken some important steps to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and other pollution from the transportation sector, but these efforts face a new potential roadblock as the coronavirus has sent the state budget into free fall. Exploding state expenditures, diminished tax revenue, and jarring transitions in the labor force all foretell that the state will have a hard time meeting its goals for decarbonization. To close this fiscal gap and make transportation investments that will benefit nearly every resident, New Jersey’s leadership should look to a program being developed by about a dozen states in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast: the Transportation and Climate Initiative.

The U.S. Supreme Court made a significant move toward a “unitary executive” vision of Article II in Seila Law LLC v. CFPB. In this 5-4 decision, the Court relied on misleading arguments and revisionist history to strike down the statutory provision granting for-cause removal protection to the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

What are we to make of this seeming sea change in corporate social responsibility? Critics are correct in pointing out that these measures fall far short of what is needed to avoid catastrophic levels of warming. But to observers of corporate governance, this level of climate activism is unprecedented, almost shocking—and without an analytical vocabulary to make sense of it. To understand this recent rise in institutional investor activism, one has to look at the shifting composition of the major players in capital markets over the past decade.

While experts recommend distancing on airplanes as much as possible—urging high-risk individuals to be especially cautious—many airlines have nonetheless eschewed basic measures to ensure social distancing, and rightfully received widespread condemnation. But a battle-tested mechanism to protect safety for airline passengers already exists and could be applied immediately to reduce passenger capacity—if only the Trump administration were willing to do it.

Recent groundbreaking legal and business decisions mark a turning point for longstanding advocacy against pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. And while they don’t represent any sort of change of heart in the federal government, they can be understood as examples of the laws we already had on the books working—and working particularly well in the face of incompetence. They also serve as a harbinger of future costly outcomes, especially when agencies and project proponents cut corners rather than fully analyze environmental effects and engage the public in decision making.

A mysterious group has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to kill net metering. FERC should say no – not because net metering should last forever, but because states, not the feds, have the tools needed to reform it.

In a recent essay, William Yeatman, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, takes issue with the central conclusions of our recent essay in The Regulatory Review, “Regulatory Rollbacks Have Changed the Nature of Presidential Power.” Yeatman’s discussion of our piece is flawed. Most importantly, he wrongly attributes to us the view that the Trump Administration “has been too effective in rolling back Obama-era rules.” The claim in our article is far narrower and very different.