In the News

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.

Publicly owned lands in the United States contain many of the country’s most iconic natural areas as well as a wealth of natural resources. But these taxpayer-owned assets are on the verge of being given away for a fraction of their true value in an effort to prop up the uneconomical mining and drilling operations of some fossil-fuel companies, who clearly have the Department of the Interior’s ear.

The Trump administration’s new draft plan for offshore drilling represents a colossal shift in policy by proposing to make nearly all U.S. coastal waters available for oil and gas exploration. The administration has framed this proposal as a way to achieve “energy dominance,” but this claim doesn’t add up: The United States is already the world’s number one oil and natural gas producer. What is clear is that the administration’s approach entails major environmental and social risks and ignores basic economic facts, making it a terrible deal for the American public.

In the coming weeks, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will announce its response to the Department of Energy’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR). As long as FERC decides to do something, it has to deal with a fundamental issue. The NOPR failed to answer the most critical question: just what is resilience? This question is not just a matter of semantics. Without a precise definition, FERC cannot determine whether the grid is sufficiently resilient, or gauge whether payments or other actions might be warranted.

The Trump administration had no interest in conducting a good-faith update of the E.P.A.’s original estimates. Instead, it relied on accounting gimmicks to greatly inflate the Clean Power Plan’s projected costs and slash its expected benefits. The rule’s transformation from boon to boondoggle, as laid out in a draft of Mr. Pruitt’s plan to repeal it, is thus pure illusion.

Eliminating regulatory safeguards will erase tangible public health and environmental benefits, making the public worse off. Rather than analyze these societal costs, President Trump’s agency heads have suspended rules in a flurry of deregulatory actions, without calculating or even acknowledging the effects.

New York, as a leader in energy policy, has embraced the Social Cost of Carbon in many recent landmark regulatory decisions. But now the state Public Service Commission is being wrongly attacked for using the SCC in its zero-emission credits (ZECs) program. If the Legislature halts this program, it would be a massive setback for climate change action in New York and around the country.

Under Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, Maryland has petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency for help bringing ozone pollution in the state to a safe level. Granting this request should be a no-brainer for EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

It’s no secret that the Trump administration would like to undo as much of Obama’s environmental legacy as possible by rescinding or repealing regulations. Under the law, that process is difficult, but Trump’s agency heads now seem to be looking for an easy way to undo rules without officially rescinding or repealing them. Courts have rejected this kind of behavior in the past. Let’s hope they do so this time too.