In the News

While FERC’s new climate reviews are useful and a step in the right direction, failing to determine the significance of a project’s emissions could open the door to more lawsuits, said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law. “The bigger question is, what do you do now that you know what these emissions are? How is that going to affect your decisionmaking process?” Sarinsky said. “So far, FERC hasn’t shown that it will.”

Legal arguments that curbed several of the Trump administration’s most far-reaching executive actions could be used to slow President Joe Biden’s most ambitious climate and environment plans. The Trump administration had a 23% win rate in court challenges to its agency actions, according to data from the nonprofit Institute for Policy Integrity. That number is a stark contrast to the average 70% win rate of previous administrations, said Bethany Davis Noll, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center and an affiliated scholar at the Institute of Policy Integrity.

In Biden’s first two weeks in office, he took 16 executive actions directly reversing one or more of former president Donald Trump’s policies. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, of the nearly 260 deregulatory and other actions of Trump’s administration that were challenged in court, three-quarters were either struck down or withdrawn by the agency in question after it was sued.

The Institute for Policy Integrity, a regulatory think tank based at New York University, says in July 6 comments that OMB should “detail sustainable methodologies and procedures that agencies can implement,” and identifies four principles to guide such action.

A coalition of 16 states is urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to not reinstate a waiver allowing California to implement its own carbon emissions standards. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, from 1967 to 2018, the EPA granted more than 50 waivers for California alone, fully denied one in 1980, which was subsequently reversed, and revoked zero.

The Institute for Policy Integrity wants the FTC to weigh in on drip pricing, the hidden fees revealed later on in the purchasing process.

After years of bottlenecks for renewables, new transmission projects are moving forward in New York in a move that observers say could be a model for other states and the Biden administration. Pushback could be a challenge nationally given that interregional transmission lines may pass through states with different policy priorities, a problem New York has mostly been able to avoid so far, said Justin Gundlach, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

Legal experts say they expect these kinds of filings will happen more regularly in coming months. “There will be lots of them,” says Ricky Revesz, director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI). “It’s not an unusual pattern. The same thing happened in the beginning of the Trump administration. Parties that were already intervening on the side of the Obama administration took the role of defending the Obama regulations that were now being attacked by the Trump administration.”

Supporters of a stronger SCC are defending the Biden administration’s process to date and suggesting that the current interim SCC estimates -- $51 in estimated per-ton CO2 control benefits in 2020 -- could at least double by January 2022 following the White House’s planned update to the tool. “I would expect that come January, the [SCC] number will be at least $125 a ton,” New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) director Richard Revesz tells Inside EPA’s Climate Extra.

Justin Gundlach explained that the New York Public Service Commission is in a tough spot—coordinating the decline of the gas system is deeply complicated, and the state is still in the midst of a process to determine what, exactly, that decline should look like.