In the News

Every additional ton of the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity contributes to climate change. This carbon pollution has many negative consequences, both to the physical world and also to global social and economic systems. But utilities don’t always tally the costs of these consequences. Because dealing with climate change is astronomically expensive, we believe that this should change.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ new rule was accompanied by an assessment of its probable costs and benefits. Conspicuously absent from the tally: any acknowledgment of harms that the rule will impose on low-income women by reducing their access to affordable healthcare.

The agency has invented a new, unnatural way of evaluating regulatory cost that finds no support in the economics literature or in the regulatory practices of prior administrations of either political party.

Andrew Wheeler’s EPA may not be as dramatic as Scott Pruitt’s, but it still suffers the pathologies that make its work poor quality—and unlikely to hold up in court.

As climate threats mount and the window to act is beginning to close, states need to adopt desirable energy storage policies as quickly as possible.

A recent government report predicts dire consequences from climate change. That complicates efforts to weaken environmental laws.

The administration’s so-called accomplishments, which include rolling back hazardous waste regulations and consumer protection rules, will inflict great harms on the American people, resulting in additional deaths, illnesses, and bankruptcies. The damages done by these heedless regulatory rollbacks significantly exceed the cost savings for regulated industries.

EPA calls its Affordable Clean Energy proposal “a new rule to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” from coal-fired power plants. There are just two problems with that characterization: ACE won’t do much of anything to reduce coal plants’ CO2 emissions, and the rule isn’t really new at all.

The Trump administration’s coal and nuclear bailout proposals wouldn’t truly protect customers from damaging electricity outages. Policymakers interested in serious, evidence-based resilience improvements already have the tools they need to act—including metrics for measuring resilience, a framework for evaluating improvements, and legal authorities to implement changes.

Now that Scott Pruitt’s scandal-ridden tenure has ended, there are those who might like to think that the Environmental Protection Agency will be able to move past the distractions and roll back major environmental regulations successfully. But Pruitt’s time as EPA’s administrator was marked by more than just scandals. He also lost in court repeatedly when his deregulatory efforts were challenged.

His successor will face similar obstacles because the policies that the Trump administration is trying to undo brought enormous benefits to the American people. Acknowledging the truth — that the deregulatory actions will cause significant harms and are being undertaken merely to please political supporters — is not a viable political or legal strategy.