Recent Projects

The Institute for Policy Integrity helped contribute to a significant legal victory, as a federal district court in California today overturned the Trump administration’s repeal of the Interior Department’s Valuation Rule. The Valuation Rule sought to ensure that states and the federal government receive the full value of royalties due for oil, gas, and coal extracted from public lands. While the administration has lost numerous court cases related to deregulation, this is the first decision overturning a repeal of a rule. Policy Integrity submitted an amicus brief in the case and comments on the original rule and the repeal efforts.

In our amicus brief, we argued that the repeal was unreasonable because of the agency’s inaccurate assessment of the repeal’s economic impact. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong’s opinion echoed some of the arguments from our brief and cited an academic article on deregulation written by Bethany Davis Noll and Denise Grab.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently released an Environmental Assessment (EA) for the Adelphia Gateway Project. FERC quantifies nearly 90,000 tons per year of direct carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions, but offers no meaningful analysis of the pipeline’s climate impacts. We submitted joint comments urging FERC to better weigh the significance of project’s impacts using the social cost of greenhouse gases methodology.

In the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Annova LNG Brownsville Project, the agency quantifies over 350,000 tons per year of direct operational carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions from the proposed natural gas terminal. But FERC fails to provide meaningful analysis of the resulting climate impacts. We submitted joint comments urging FERC to better contextualize the project’s impacts using the social cost of greenhouse gases methodology.

In January, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) authorized the construction and operation of the PennEast Pipeline Project, a 116-mile natural gas pipeline between Pennsylvania and New Jersey and associated facilities. FERC’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) showed that the project will result in an increase in greenhouse gas emissions but did little more than quantify those emissions, failing to fully analyze and consider the climate impacts of the project. We submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that demonstrates how FERC could have used the Social Cost of Carbon to analyze the pipeline’s climate impacts.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) prepared a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the Rio Grande LNG Project. Despite quantifying over 8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per year from operations, FERC does not account for the climate effects of these emissions. We submitted joint comments that offer a detailed rejection of FERC’s arbitrary and misleading rationale for failing to monetize the project’s climate effects. We urge the agency to apply social cost of greenhouse gases estimates.

We recently submitted comments to the Department of the Interior’s Royalty Policy Committee (“RPC”) in advance of the Committee’s third public meeting of the year. As we have discussed in past papers and public comments, existing royalty rates fail to account for the full costs of fossil fuel production, including local and global air pollution.

We recently submitted comments to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on a natural gas processing and storage facility and marine export terminal in Louisiana, the Calcasieu Pass Project. While the DEIS quantifies the tons of greenhouse gas emissions related to this project—almost 4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year from operations, plus hundreds of thousands of tons per year during construction—FERC fails to apply the social cost of greenhouse gas metric to fully account for the climate effects of these emissions. Once again, FERC resorts to flawed arguments used in other inadequate NEPA reviews to implicitly justify why the Commission chose not to use the social cost of greenhouse gases metric for the Calcasieu project. Our comments provide a detailed rejection of FERC’s arbitrary and misleading rationale for failing to use the social cost of greenhouse gases, and offer additional guidance on how to monetize climate effects consistent with the currently best available science and economics.

Following a Proposed Repeal of the 2015 Clean Water Rule, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Army Corp of Engineers issued a Supplemental Notice in July 2018 regarding the Proposed Repeal. We previously submitted comments to the agencies on the Proposed Repeal explaining that the economic analysis accompanying that Proposed Repeal was fundamentally flawed. In this notice, the agencies state that they are “not relying” on that economic analysis.