Recent Projects

The Department of Interior delayed the effective date of a Trump-era rule that lowers the royalty burden on corporations extracting fossil fuels on public lands. We provided significant input on the review of the rule, helping guide ONRR’s decision to delay the rule and further examine its legality and impact.

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.

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.

The Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration used several gimmicks and faulty assumptions to skew the analysis of the rollback rule, obscuring just how harmful it is to the American public. We published a series of reports examining several of the flaws.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Department of Homeland Security’s “Public Charge” rule is both contrary to statute and arbitrary and capricious. Our amicus brief in the case played a key role in shaping the decision. The Ninth Circuit adopts our core arguments, emphasizing how Homeland Security fails to assess the rule's harms and draws conclusions that are contradicted by the record.

As the presidential transition begins, the Institute for Policy Integrity has outlined recommended policy priorities for the Biden administration on climate, energy, and environmental policy, and related social equity outcomes. It is crucial that the incoming administration undertake aggressive reforms that are grounded in science and economics. In recent months, we published a series of reports highlighting actionable, near- and medium-term policy recommendations in several key areas.

As the climate crisis intensifies, it is crucial that we effectively contextualize and consider how policies affect our climate. We have worked hard to ensure that governments, regulators, and courts account for the social cost of carbon in policy and decisionmaking—and a string of recent policy outcomes has created positive momentum.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced its decision to exclude 87,000 acres of public lands from an upcoming lease sale, agreeing with arguments raised by policymakers and environmental advocates, including Policy Integrity, that these public lands are too valuable for other uses to be designated for fossil fuel extraction.

In 2022, New Mexico’s largest utility company will retire the San Juan Generating Station, a coal-burning power plant that has operated since 1973. In light of the decision, the state’s Public Regulatory Commission (PRC) has adopted a plan to replace the plant’s power output with 100 percent renewable energy and battery storage. The plan is a significant victory for the community groups and environmental advocates that have pushed to expedite the clean energy transition, and our efforts helped pave the way for this decision.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California vacated the Bureau of Land Management's repeal of an Obama-era rule that was designed to reduce wasteful venting of methane from natural gas operations on federal lands. The court ruled in part that it was arbitrary for the Trump Administration to have reduced the estimate of the social cost of methane from $1300 per ton down to just $176 per ton by excluding from consideration any climate effect occurring outside U.S. borders. Policy Integrity has worked for years to build the case against the so-called “domestic-only” estimate of climate costs.