Recent Projects – News

The Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law has launched a new data tool that estimates the health and mortality costs to society from industrial air pollution. Polluting facilities in many industries generate air pollutants that form ozone and particulate matter, which harm the health of Americans and can lead to death, asthma, heart attacks, and many other respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses. The new calculator fills a void that resulted from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) decision to no longer quantify the impacts of air pollution on human health in regulatory analyses.

The Institute for Policy Integrity has received a $750,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to quantify and monetize high-priority effects of proposed regulations and strengthen the interdisciplinary community of researchers doing policy-relevant research on the costs, benefits, and distributional effects of regulations.

In February 2026, EPA rescinded its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles contribute to air pollution that endangers public health and welfare. With that withdrawal, EPA repealed all greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and trucks. EPA primarily argues that the Clean Air Act provision authorizing vehicle emission standards does not extend to greenhouse gases. EPA also argues that regulation is unwarranted because U.S. vehicle emissions would have a relatively small impact on global temperature and sea-level rise. But EPA’s repeal is wrong on numerous accounts. As our resources explain, legal precedent and scientific and economic evidence justify U.S. climate regulations:

Policy Integrity will now include a standard request in comments submitted to federal agencies that the agency disclose if it used artificial intelligence (A.I.) tools in the rulemaking process, and if it did, what tasks it used A.I. tools for, what A.I. tools it used, what steps it took to review inputs and outputs and minimize the risk of hallucination and bias, and what specific prompts and instructions it provided to the A.I. tools.

Our new tracking tool features estimates of the economic and public health damages from the Trump Administration’s environmental deregulatory actions. The Trump Administration and Congress have moved rapidly to weaken or repeal significant regulations that protect human health and the environment, improve energy-efficiency for consumer products, and limit emissions of pollutants. 

The Trump Administration has removed publications and documents related to the social cost of greenhouse gases (SC-GHG) from the Environmental Protection Agency’s social cost of carbon webpage. To preserve this information, the Institute for Policy Integrity is publicly hosting select documents related to the SC-GHG on our Cost of Carbon website.

Today, Richard Revesz, one of the nation’s leading voices in environmental and regulatory policy, returned to his faculty position at NYU School of Law after the conclusion of his public service leave. Revesz also returned to the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law as its Faculty Director. Revesz co-founded Policy Integrity in 2008 and served as its Director for nearly a decade.

The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) has appointed Policy Integrity’s Executive Director, Dr. Burçin Ünel, to serve on its Environmental Advisory Council. The Council provides NYISO with information, analysis, and expert perspectives on state and federal environmental policies to help it better achieve its mission of maintaining reliability of the bulk electric system and administering competitive wholesale electricity markets. In her role on the Council, Dr. Ünel will use her expertise in utility regulation and energy policy to help NYISO build and maintain New York's “grid of the future.”

Energy storage can play an important role in a transition to clean energy, but only if it’s deployed within an effective policy framework. The Connecticut Public Utility Regulatory Authority (PURA) adopted our recommendations to target its energy storage incentives to areas with the highest differential between the highest and lowest marginal emissions rates so batteries could ultimately lead to reductions in emissions. In addition, PURA directed the Connecticut Green Bank to review our comments when setting the scope of the program's marketing plan.

In its updated climate damage estimates for greenhouse gas emisisons, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cited Policy Integrity scholarship and analysis dozens of times and adopted some of our key arguments. EPA calculated damages based on averaging three damage functions, one of which was based on a paper by Peter Howard and Thomas Sterner. In setting the scope of damages to examine, the agency also adopted Policy Integrity's argument for the need to consider global damages. EPA similarly relied on our arguments about the need to use lower discount rates when assessing the value of future damages.