In the News

Yesterday’s D.C. Circuit ruling is the latest decision to rebuke FERC for inadequate climate analysis. Judicial rebukes are likely to continue until FERC fully considers the social cost of greenhouse gases in its analyses, said Richard Revesz.

Drip pricing has no legitimate business purpose and harms consumers in at least two key ways. It can also be damaging to businesses, and it is not a problem that the market will correct on its own. That's why several colleagues from the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law and I filed a petition for rule-making last month, calling on the F.T.C. to ban the use of drip pricing. 

New York University’s regulatory policy center is urging EPA to adopt “best practices” for TSCA risk management rules that would lead to stringent limits on existing chemicals, potentially offering legal and policy justifications the agency could use to grant environmentalists’ requests to go beyond what they see as too-lenient Trump-era chemical evaluations.

To ward off concern from conservative justices, EPA could recommend a more limited regulatory approach, such as carbon capture and sequestration, said Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. He said EPA officials are likely to be asking themselves: “Is there a bulletproof thing we can do that will actually achieve meaningful emissions reductions?"

A study published in Nature Communications has calculated exactly how many excess deaths we can expect per additional metric ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere."It could well have a significant impact on climate change policies," New York University School of Law professor Richard Revesz, who was not involved with the research, said of Bressler's figure.

As Olga Khazan of the Atlantic reports, the Trump administration did such a poor job of writing and implementing its own policies that many either have already been struck down by courts or will be straightforward to dismantle: As of April, out of the 259 regulations, guidance documents, and agency memoranda it issued that were challenged in court, 200, or 77 percent, were unsuccessful, according to a tracker from the Institute for Policy Integrity.

What is the cost of our carbon footprint — not just in dollars, but in lives? According to a paper published on Thursday, it is soberingly high, and perhaps high enough to help shift attitudes about how much we should spend on fighting climate change. Richard Revesz, a professor at New York University School of Law, praised the new work, which extends research that he and others have done to view the social cost of carbon as the beginning of an understanding of the costs of climate change, not the full cost.

Richard Revesz said the proposal to ramp up annual requirements from 3.7% to 5% positions the administration for future carbon reductions. “A tightening of the standard over the next few years is productive because it will require a less big leap — a big leap — but a less big leap after 2026,” he said. “Starting there and moving up is in my mind a reasonable approach, but we can’t stop there. We have to keep moving forward.”

The rule process is specific, technical, and tedious, which did not exactly fit Trump’s style. Some experts say Trump’s agencies wrote their rules carelessly, failing to provide good explanations for what they were doing. “​​You do have to explain why you’re making the change you’re making and give some good reasons for it. And you have to respond to criticism from the public,” Jack Lienke, the regulatory-policy director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, told me. “And the Trump administration often didn’t do that.”

The agencies are not expected to meet this week’s deadline, and questions are swirling about the scope of a cars rule that could play a central role in cutting emissions from the nation’s biggest source of CO2. “Is the proposal going to reinstate the Obama standards, is it going to embody the agreement California reached with auto companies, which was less stringent, or will it be somewhere in between?” said Richard Revesz, a professor at the New York University School of Law.