In the News

“I think there's a problem that courts are frequently quite slow to respond to agency rules, and as a result, particularly when you have these issues that keep ping-ponging back and forth, we just don't get a lot of clarity,” said Max Sarinsky, legal director at New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity.

In addition to those expenses, the agency’s decision to ignore climate change related costs “massively distorts” its calculations, said Max Sarinsky, legal director at New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity. The 2024 standard that was unwound Monday projected $129 billion in climate benefits ...

At the same time, academic research consistently shows that consumers “do a pretty poor job of actually accounting for fuel savings” when shopping for a new car, said Peter Howard, economics director at the NYU Institute for Policy Integrity. “They’re not very good at doing these calculations in their head.”

Jason Schwartz, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law, said the repeal will result in higher fuel costs for consumers and make them more vulnerable to “price shocks” in the cost of gasoline ...

The Institute for Policy Integrity says more than $17 billion in projected annual consumer savings are now at risk due to regulatory rollbacks by the Trump administration. 

Federal decisionmaking under the Trump administration has raised a host of procedural, scientific, and ethical concerns. Agencies have bypassed processes for public input, interfered with grant management, shuttered long-standing public data resources, and ignored well-established scientific findings when they contradicted policy aims, among other troubling occurrences. 

“This is a final action, so it officially strikes the standards from the books,” said Dena Adler, senior attorney focusing on federal environmental regulation at the non-partisan Institute for Policy Integrity and adjunct professor of law at New York University School of Law.

EPA is effectively saying it’s futile to control emissions from power plants because climate change is such a big, global problem, according to Dena Adler, a senior attorney at Policy Integrity and an adjunct professor at New York University’s law school. 

“This claim runs contrary to everything the Clean Air Act stands for and decades of past agency practice recognizing that even a small portion of a very large pollution problem can itself be enormous,” Adler said.  

Dena Adler, a senior attorney at the Institute for Public Integrity, said her organization would not let the EPA’s actions go unchallenged.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that EPA has an obligation to control greenhouse gas emissions from power plants under the Clean Air Act,” Adler wrote in a statement following the repeal. “Leaving this pollution unchecked ignores the Supreme Court, puts the public at risk, and flagrantly violates EPA’s legal responsibilities.”

According to a recent study by the Institute for Policy Integrity, the U.S. power sector contributed 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions between 1990 and 2002. If it were a country, the sector would have been the sixth-biggest global emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in this time frame.

New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity in a Sept. 14 statement likewise attacked the rule’s omission of estimated costs from increased greenhouse gas emissions. “This is like an insurance agent saying that your home burning down is costless because you don't know the exact dollar value of the damages.”

A report from New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity found that if the U.S. power sector were a country, it would be the world’s sixth-largest emitter, contributing more to climate change than the entirety of nations such as Canada, Japan, Brazil and Mexico ...

“The public health and welfare toll of this deregulation is just going to be staggering,” said Jason Schwartz, one of the report’s authors and regulatory policy director at the Institute, told The Hill.