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Mandating Disclosure of Climate-Related Financial Risk
Climate change presents grave risk across the U.S. economy, including to corporations, their investors, the markets in which they operate, and the American public at large. Unlike other financial risks, however, climate risk is not routinely disclosed to the public. This report, authored by Policy Integrity and the Environmental Defense Fund, urges the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue new, mandatory disclosure rules focused on climate risk.
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Corporate Climate Risk: Assessment, Disclosure, and Action
Conference Brief
On October 2, 2020, the Institute for Policy Integrity and the Volatility and Risk Institute at NYU Stern School of Business convened a conference bringing together investors, companies, researchers, and regulators to discuss climate-related financial risks and identify opportunities to better assess, report, and act on them. This brief summarizes some of the major points of discussion from the conference, which featured different perspectives on various policy, economic, and legal issues.
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Improving Environmental Justice Analysis
Executive Order 12,898 and Climate Change
Distributional and equity concerns have typically received short shrift in federal administrative decisionmaking, particularly with regard to actions with climate-change impacts. This report aims to aid advocates and policymakers in meaningfully addressing the disparate climate impacts of federal actions.
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Comments to Connecticut on Energy Storage and Emissions
The Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) issued a straw program design for electric storage. We submitted comments that support PURA's efforts to make energy storage part of its overarching decarbonization agenda and provide feedback. It is important, as we explain, that PURA take into account the potential emissions consequences of energy storage operations in designing its performance-based incentive.
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Comments to NHTSA on Delay of CAFE Penalties Increase
The National Highway Traffic Safety Admnistration's interim final rule delays the application of its 2016 inflation adjustment of the penalty for violating the corpoate average fuel-economcy (CAFE) standards. We submitted comments explaining that the rule is untimely under the Inflation Adjustment Act, whose deadlines to amend the intial catch-up inflation adjustment expired years ago.
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Amicus Brief on the SAFE Rule
We filed an amicus brief explaining how NHTSA and EPA's decision to finalize a rule that, even under their own analysis, will be net-costly to society, is arbitrary and capricious.
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Bostock and the End of the Climate Change Double Standard
Guided by the blueprint of all three Bostock opinions, this article, published in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, performs a deep dive into the legislative materials surrounding the enactment of the Clean Air Act of 1970, uncovering a treasure trove of sources that had not previously been part of the public discourse. It shows how, under the interpretive approach of each of the three opinions, greenhouse gases are unquestionably pollutants for the purposes of the Clean Air Act. Because the approaches in the majority and dissents in Bostock—and thus a majority of the current Court—all point in the same direction, the era of greenhouse gas exceptionalism should now be over.
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Federal Court Voids Trump’s Counterproductive ACE Rule
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously struck down the Trump administration’s toothless replacement of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s power sector. Richard Revesz and Dr. Burçin Ünel’s article on energy storage and greenhouse gas emissions was cited in the court’s opinion.
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Comments on OCC’s Fair Access Financial Services Rule
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) proposed a rule that would preclude banks from taking climate risks into account when making decisions regarding the provision of financial services. We submitted joint comments explaining how OCC fails to consider or justify serious costs imposed by the rule. Climate risks pose a significant threat to the economic and operational health of firms in the energy sector and to the stability of the financial system as a whole.
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Amicus Briefs on Navigable Waters Protection Rule
In April, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Army Corps of Engineers published the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, which considerably restricts the waters and wetlands that are federally protected under the Clean Water Act. We filed briefs in the Northern District of California and District of South Carolina focusing on the agencies’ economic analysis, which the agencies use to obscure the rule’s anticipated harms. We later filed in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Northern District of New York, the District of Massachusetts, and the District of Maryland.