In the News

Richard Revesz is interviewed about the social cost of carbon and its crucial role in crafting smarter energy and climate policies. Justin Gundlach and Peter Howard discuss how the SCC can be further improved.

This kind of bot would help catch human errors and help make regulations more accurate. Language processing tools could analyze a proposed rule to determine its subject matter area, then crawl through related academic research to find and submit relevant scientific studies to the agency. This could help improve the government’s analytical basis for its policy choices.

Conflating economic problems has led FERC to implement inappropriately broad rules without grounding its decisions in rigorous economic analysis. The Expanded MOPR was based on a faulty premise and unsupported by economic theory. Ending the snipe hunt for state exercises of market power in capacity markets is a critical first step toward empowering stakeholders to craft durable economic solutions that allow markets to work.

Advocates of the newly formed Initiative on Climate Risk and Resilience Law (ICRRL) are advocating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) bolster climate change protections with the finance industry. The ICRRL is a joint initiative that includes the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, and the Vanderbilt Law School.

The Biden administration intends to revive federal environmental protections for millions of streams, marshes and other bodies of water across the country. By starting early to revise the policy, the Biden administration stands a greater chance of defending it against the legal challenges that are expected to come, said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. “That makes it much more likely it will stick,” Mr. Revesz said.

Local governments in the U.S. have instead tried to use common-law nuisance claims to force companies to pay the costs of adapting to the effects of climate change. Most of those cases are pending. Should a case end up at the Supreme Court, the conservative-leaning panel could be skeptical of allowing cities to get involved in regulating global matters, said Rachel Rothschild, a legal fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

In its order, a majority of FERC’s Commissioners said that they disagreed that greenhouse gas emissions must necessarily be a consideration, incremental or not for the WBI project, and rejected calls by the Institute for Policy Integrity to monetize such impacts using a social cost metric. Nonetheless, FERC did look briefly at the total potential for greenhouse gas emissions in its order, in response to Policy Integrity comments.

Many U.S. communities won't reach their climate targets without transitioning away from natural gas, a panel of regulators and lawmakers agreed during a Thursday discussion hosted by the New York University School of Law. However, they said there's no clear path to eliminating the fuel.

Several current and former policymakers expressed skepticism that hydrogen and renewable natural gas are mature enough to play a major role in their states' transition from natural gas. Those fuels cannot be the justification, as they are often presented, for building more gas infrastructure, former New York State PSC Chair John Rhodes said during a May 27 webinar hosted by the Institute for Policy Integrity, Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the New York University School of Law's State Energy and Environmental Impact Center.

It’s time to change course and take an approach that avoids bad investments and climate pollution. FERC should use its authority to meaningfully consider climate impacts and reject proposals that are inconsistent with national energy needs.