Recent Projects – Environmental, Energy & Climate Justice

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. But, at the same time, it reaffirmed its commitment to performing benefit-cost analysis to analyze the consequences of regulations, including environmental regulations. These approaches are mutually inconsistent. A proper benefit-cost analysis simply cannot be done without considering distribution of a policy’s impacts. Often, the populations affected by government policies vary from the median in significant ways. Heterogeneity by age, race, income, and other factors is relevant to the assessment of the benefits and costs of particular policies for three principal reasons. On the benefits side, certain groups face higher levels of exposure to environmental harms and higher harms from exposure to an additional unit of pollution than does an average member of the population. Also, certain groups have higher vulnerability to particular exposures. And, on the cost side, certain groups bear higher burdens because of differences in geography, spending patterns, and other behaviors. This article provides a robust review of the scientific, epidemiological, and economic literature for each of these mechanisms, surveys what agencies have already done, and sets forth an agenda for future research.

This report, co-published with the Robert D. Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, examines the weak legal arguments the Trump Administration has used to roll back federal environmental justice programs. Most notably, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions about affirmative action do not render environmental justice initiatives categorically unlawful, although they do impose meaningful constraints. Just as importantly, nothing in the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College prevents the government from considering the historical legacies of racism, even if that decision generally restricts them from considering present-day racial demographics.

This report, co-published with the Robert D. Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, contextualizes and charts the second Trump Administration’s efforts to eliminate federal environmental justice initiatives. The administration’s actions, which conflict with more than 30 years of federal practice, are having dire consequences. But by showing that demands for environmental justice have persisted for decades, and will persist outside the federal government, this report illustrates that this Administration by no means marks the end of environmental justice, as either a movement or a governing agenda.

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. But, at the same time, it reaffirmed its commitment to performing benefit-cost analysis to analyze the consequences of regulations, including environmental regulations. These approaches are mutually inconsistent. A proper benefit-cost analysis simply cannot be done without considering distribution of a policy’s impacts. Often, the populations affected by government policies vary from the median in significant ways. Heterogeneity by age, race, income, and other factors is relevant to the assessment of the benefits and costs of particular policies for three principal reasons. On the benefits side, certain groups face higher levels of exposure to environmental harms and higher harms from exposure to an additional unit of pollution than does an average member of the population. Also, certain groups have higher vulnerability to particular exposures. And, on the cost side, certain groups bear higher burdens because of differences in geography, spending patterns, and other behaviors. This article provides a robust review of the scientific, epidemiological, and economic literature for each of these mechanisms, surveys what agencies have already done, and sets forth an agenda for future research.

This report explains that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) cannot assess the effects of new gas infrastructure without considering it in the context of the local, impacted community. The Natural Gas Act requires FERC to consider direct harms to overburdened communities in its infrastructure authorization decisions. And, further, in exercising its discretion, FERC remains bound by the general requirement that agencies must engage in reasoned decisionmaking, which does not allow agencies to “entirely fail[] to consider an important part of the problem.” A recent memorandum directing agencies to eschew environmental justice assessments in their environmental analyses cannot override these statutory obligations.

Thinking productively about New York’s options for achieving deep decarbonization requires policymakers, advocates, and other stakeholders to appreciate the state’s current suite of decarbonization programs both as a portfolio of disparate parts and considered in the aggregate. This report aims to further this effort by providing an overview of the state’s GHG emissions-mitigation policies.

In 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued stronger air quality standards for particulate matter that the agency concluded would save thousands of lives every year and yield billions of dollars in net benefits. Yet after the start of the Trump Administration, the new EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced his intention to weaken these standards and return them to their pre-2024 levels. On February 6, 2026, Administrator Zeldin went a step further, ignoring a legal deadline for the 2024 standards and flouting his obligation to identify parts of the country with unhealthy air quality. In this issue brief, we explain why the 2024 standards are lifesaving, necessary, and flexible and rebut several misleading myths.

This paper explores the number, accuracy, and impact of environmental justice analyses undertaken during the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rulemaking process. We inventory and evaluate the available EJ analyses for all economically significant final rules issued by the U.S. EPA between 2012 and 2024.