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Viewing recent projects in Environmental, Energy & Climate Justice
  • Comments on EPA’s Draft 2022–2026 Strategic Plan

    The comments encourage EPA to clearly articulate in its final strategic plan that the agency will incorporate environmental justice and equity into its rulemakings and regulatory impact analyses and recommends several steps toward that end. These include: analyzing the distributional consequences of regulatory alternatives; developing a standard approach to distributional analysis that accounts for the methodological considerations described in the comments; and conducting a distributional analysis of at least one economically significant regulation within the next year incorporating our recommendations.

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  • Comments to NRC on Addressing Environmental Justice

    Policy Integrity’s comments advise the NRC to look to FERC's efforts to improve stakeholder engagement and consideration of environmental justice impacts and iterate our recommendations in the related proceedings. We highlight the benefits from robust public participation, share best practices for stakeholder engagement, and recommend ways the Commission can improve its environmental justice analysis and incorporate the findings of that analysis into its review process under the National Environmental Policy Act.

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  • Making Regulations Fair Cover

    Making Regulations Fair

    How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Promote Equity and Advance Environmental Justice

    To achieve the Biden administration’s ambitious commitments to equity and environmental justice, agencies will need guidance on how to assess and weigh the distributional effects of policy options. This report recommends steps that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) can take to mainstream equity into agencies’ decisionmaking.

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  • Toward Rationality in Oil and Gas Leasing Cover

    Toward Rationality in Oil and Gas Leasing

    Building the Toolkit for Programmatic Reforms

    Leasing public lands and waters for fossil-fuel extraction drives a quarter of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. Our new report offers analytic tools for federal leasing decisions to drive policies that maximize economic and environmental welfare—nationally and locally.

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  • Comments to OMB on Advancing Equity and Supporting Underserved Communities

    In his Presidential Memorandum titled Modernizing Regulatory Review, President Biden called on OMB to identify measures to promote racial justice in the regulatory review process. We submitted comments outlining procedures and methodologies that OMB could apply to account for equity in the regulatory review process, with a focus on environmental injustice.

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  • Comments to New Jersey on Solar Incentives

    The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) released a straw proposal for its Solar Successor Program. We submitted comments addressing a question about solar projects' potential benefits to environmental justice (EJ) communities. Our comments encourage BPU to consider the inclusion of an environmental justice adder and reommend that BPU explore an adder that would deliver material benefits to EJ communities. 

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  • Distributional Consequences and Regulatory Analysis Cover

    Distributional Consequences and Regulatory Analysis

    Published in Environmental Law

    This article examines what it would take for the Biden effort at incorporating environmental justice into regulatory decisionmaking to succeed where the Clinton and Obama efforts failed. It argues that agencies will need to be provided with clear guidance on the methodologies used to conduct distributional analysis, and that the lack of a standardized approach is part of the reason prior efforts failed. It further argues that agencies will need to take seriously the already existing requirement of analyzing the distributional consequences of different regulatory alternatives. Otherwise, they will never be in a position to answer the key question in this area: when are the better distributional consequences of one alternative sufficient to overcome another alternative’s higher net benefits?

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  • Policy Shifts in a Pandemic Cover

    Policy Shifts in a Pandemic

    Assessing the Environmental Laws and Policies Weakened in Response to Covid-19

    The Covid-19 pandemic has led federal, state, and municipal policymakers to adopt a number of measures that suspended, delayed, or relaxed a variety of environmental safeguards. Our report analyzes these pandemic-related policy shifts and their impacts on public health and the environment. We also provide guidance on how agencies can increase transparency about these actions, counteract detrimental effects, and preemptively create guidelines to improve responses in a future emergency.

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  • Comments on New York PSC’s Initial Report on Power Grid Study

    The New York Public Service Commission (PSC) requested input on its initial report on the New York Power Grid Study. Our comments recommend steps the PSC can take to not only achieve emissions reduction goals, but also give appropriate priority to environmental justice.

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  • McTeer Toney Gives Testimony on Climate Risk Disclosure in House Committee Hearing

    Heather McTeer Toney, Climate Justice Liaison for the Environmental Defense Fund and Senior Advisor to Moms Clean Air Force, testified in a hearing on corporate climate risk held by the House Financial Services Committee. Included with her submitted testimony is our report with the Environmental Defense Fund on how the Securities and Exchange Commission can issue new, mandatory disclosure rules focused on climate risk.

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