June 3, 2026
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Unpacking New York’s Step Away from Climate Leadership
New York State finally passed its annual budget last week after two months of gridlock. As part of the deal, the state delayed the relevant environmental regulator’s obligation under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and amended the state’s methodology for counting these emissions. “The recent CLCPA changes contained in the state budget move some goalposts, especially in near term, but do little to provide a strong foundation for the state to build toward its long-term decarbonization vision,” says our Elizabeth B. Stein.
Our Drs. Raimundo Atal and Al McGartland examine the change to the CLCPA’s accounting method in a recent report. Adopting the new accounting method will reduce the gap between current state emissions levels and emissions-reduction goals, but may not reduce the price tag of reaching these goals, which depends on the cost of specific methane and carbon dioxide reductions. New York could support improved analysis of the budget’s new accounting change by making publicly available the cost of methane and carbon emissions reductions.
To ultimately reach its climate goals, New York policymakers will need to think systematically about interactions and interdependencies among sectors and energy systems, and harmonize disparate policy frameworks. Stein and our Erin Shortell identified some opportunities to harmonize and enhance New York policies in the interest of economy-wide decarbonization in a review of New York’s major climate policies that was released during negotiations of the new budget.
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Planning the Grid of the Future Requires Modeling the Grid in the Future
Planning the grid of the future requires modeling that accounts for the interdependence of electric transmission, electricity generation, and energy storage. Traditional transmission-planning models don’t do this, and have mostly looked at short-term needs. But the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has mandated long-term transmission planning, so new models that account for interdependent grid infrastructure are necessary. In a new report, our Natalie Friedberg, Jennifer Danis, and Dr. Christoph Graf examine the rationale for advanced modeling and why a co-optimization model meets federal grid-planning requirements while incorporating states’ regulatory authority and policy goals. “Choices about where to build generation and storage facilities influence decisions about where to build transmission, and vice versa,” say the authors.
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EPA Keeps Rolling Back Air Pollution Protections Without Accounting for Public Health
For nearly 30 years, EPA has quantified and monetized the harmful effects of particulate matter and ozone, two lethal air pollutants that threaten human health. No longer. EPA now claims that the health effects of these pollutants are too uncertain and is omitting them from its analyses. “The new, nihilistic EPA position is that environmental safeguards have essentially no benefits,” wrote our Richard Revesz in January, when the agency first abandoned its estimates of these benefits. These omissions are flawed and arbitrary. The agency is rejecting the extensive scientific record supporting its estimates of the health benefits of reduced air pollution, as our Bridget Pals and Martha Roberts explain in feedback to EPA. Pals and Roberts have pushed back on EPA’s omission of these benefits in agency rollbacks of protections against hazardous air pollutants from certain power plants and in amendments to regulations on combustion and gas turbines. Joined by a coalition of environmental partners, Pals and Roberts also submitted feedback on amendments to regulations on marine tank vessel loading operations.
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Reviewing the Major Questions Doctrine After Learning Resources
The major questions doctrine has generated extensive commentary and uncertainty since the Supreme Court first announced it in 2022. The doctrine has this year already been cited in two headline policy changes. In late February, the Supreme Court relied on the doctrine in Learning Resources v. Trump, the case that struck down the President’s global tariffs. A week before this ruling, the Environmental Protection Agency asserted that the doctrine undercuts the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles and, on this basis, repealed its “endangerment finding” for those emissions. Our Don Goodson, Bridget Pals, Max Sarinsky, and Kate Welty recently reviewed the doctrine in a Policy Integrity webinar, stressing that it applies only when government action is unheralded, transforms the actor’s role, and is of vast economic and political significance. They also examined the implications of Learning Resources for other recent federal actions, including EPA’s endangerment repeal. “The repeal is a poor vehicle for applying the major questions doctrine,” noted Welty. “Regulating greenhouse gases was neither unheralded nor transformative in 2009, which is confirmed in Massachusetts v. EPA.”
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Which Federal Agency Should Regulate Carbon Markets?
Project-based carbon credits are supposed to fund greenhouse gas emissions reductions and removals. But more than 80 percent of carbon credits may misrepresent the amount of emissions they claim to reduce or remove, according to several recent studies. These integrity problems, along with misaligned incentives among market participants and market failures like information asymmetry, have diminished the credibility and effectiveness of carbon credits as a tool for addressing climate change. Future federal regulation could help carbon credits reach their potential, but no federal agency currently has comprehensive authority to regulate these credits—Congress would need to grant that authority in legislation. In a new Brookings Institution report, our Erin Shortell and Don Goodson and Brookings coauthors Sanjay Patnaik and Aidan Kane examine which federal agencies would be well equipped to regulate carbon credits in the United States if Congress were to grant that authority. “EPA and [the Department of Energy] would be strong candidates to regulate carbon credits,” write the authors. “Each brings relevant mission alignment, technical expertise, and experience with emissions reporting and credit trading programs.”
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Why and How the Benefits and Costs of Regulations Differ Across Communities
Last year, the Trump Administration ended longstanding efforts to determine the extent to which pollution has disproportionate impacts on different communities, including overburdened and disadvantaged communities. Yet the administration has also reaffirmed the use of benefit-cost analysis to analyze the consequences of regulations. These actions are contradictory: Benefit-cost analysis requires considering a policy’s effects across different communities, also known as a policy’s distributional impacts. These impacts can dramatically affect calculations of benefits and costs. For example, the top five percent of the population in terms of susceptibility to cancer may be subject to twenty-five times more risk of cancer than the average person, according to one study. In an article forthcoming in the Duke Law Journal, our Richard Revesz and Dr. Burçin Ünel and coauthor Sarah Wheaton review existing research into the causes for such disproportionate environmental harms and the related distributional effects of regulations, survey what federal agencies have already done, and recommend an agenda for future research.
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More from This Month
- Our Richard Revesz received the 2026 Robert A. Katzmann Award for Academic Excellence at the Library of Congress this week. The award is presented annually to a law school dean or thought leader who has brought added prominence and recognition to their institution. Revesz, co-founder of the Institute for Policy Integrity, was chosen for his exemplary service during his eleven years as dean of NYU School of Law and his career in law. He has authored 10 books and over 80 articles and, from 2023 to 2025, served as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House, where he helped shape major federal regulations and updated key federal guidance on regulatory analysis.
- Max Sarinsky and Dr. Peter Howard submitted comments to the Bureau of Land Management about its revision of oil and gas royalty rates.
- Bridget Pals, Dr. Erica Chuang, and Dena Adler submitted comments to EPA about its proposed rollbacks to the risk management program.
- Dena Adler and Kate Welty submitted comments to EPA on its proposed rescission of standards for certain ethylene oxide emissions.
- Jack Jones and Elizabeth B. Stein submitted comments to the New York State Public Service Commission about a recent industry petition to suspend or modify a state renewable energy program.
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