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In January, the Council on Environmental Quality published interim guidance providing best practices to federal agencies on the consideration of climate change in environmental reviews conducted under the National Environmental Policy Act. The guidance provides helpful direction to agencies on assessing how proposed actions and their alternatives (1) will contribute to climate change through their greenhouse gas emissions; and (2) will potentially be affected or have their environmental consequences exacerbated by climate change impacts. Our comment commends CEQ on its thorough guidance and provides recommendations to strengthen both areas. 

We submitted comment letters to the Department of Energy (DOE) on its proposed rules to strengthen energy conservation standards for general service lamps and distribution transformers. Our comments applaud the agency for appropriately applying the social cost of greenhouse gases to estimate the climate benefits of the proposed standards. We also suggest that DOE apply additional analysis to each rule using draft updated climate-damage valuations that the Environmental Protection Agency released in November 2022.

We submitted comments to the Department of Energy (DOE) on its proposed rule to strengthen energy conservation standards for new and renovated federal buildings. Our comments offer support for the agency's choice to apply the social cost of greenhouse gases to estimate the climate effects of the proposed standards. We also suggest that DOE apply additional analysis using draft updated climate-damage valuations that the Environmental Protection Agency recently released.

We submitted comments to the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council (FAR Council) on ways to strengthen its proposed rule that would require certain categories of federal contractors to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risk, and in some cases set science-based targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Together with a coalition of environmental groups, we submitted comments to EPA on its draft update to the social cost of greenhouse gas estimates of climate damage. We commended the agency's extraordinary advances and recommended ways to further improve the accuracy of the metrics.

In December 2022, EPA issued a Supplemental Proposal to update, strengthen, and expand its proposed standards to regulate methane emissions from new and existing sources in the oil and natural gas sector. We submitted comments on EPA’s Supplemental Proposal and underlying Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) recommending that EPA strengthen its RIA to more fully capture the impacts of these standards by: (1) extending the timeframe of its analysis to quantify net benefits past 2035, (2) monetizing ozone health benefits related to methane emissions reductions, (3) better monetizing and quantifying co-benefits, and (4) better quantifying the impacts of the super-emitter response program or using a breakeven analysis if further quantification is not possible. We further recommended that EPA expand its distributional analysis of the impacts of the rule.

On October 20 2022, the FTC voted to grant the Institute for Policy Integrity’s petition for rulemaking and issue an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Unfair or Deceptive Fees Trade Regulation Rule. Commissioner Christine S. Wilson issued a dissenting statement in which she raised major questions doctrine concerns and asked for precedent that supports FTC's authority to promulgate this rule. We submitted a letter responding to Commissioner Wilson’s concern and providing regulatory antecedents supporting the FTC’s authority. In this letter, Policy Integrity shows that FTC's rule would not be unheralded nor represent a transformative change in the agency's authority, and therefore, it would not implicate the major questions doctrine.

Together with partner groups, we submitted joint comments to the Department of Energy (DOE) on its proposed rule to strengthen energy conservation standards for circulator pumps. Our comments applaud the agency for appropriately applying the social cost of greenhouse gases to estimate the climate benefits of the proposed standards. We also suggest that DOE apply additional analysis using draft updated climate-damage valuations that the Environmental Protection Agency recently released.

In November, the Bureau of Land Management proposed a regulation to reduce the waste of natural gas on federal lands through venting, flaring, and leakage. In our comment letter, we recommend avenues for BLM to bolster its legal and economic support for the proposal. In particular, we recommend that BLM more expressly disavow its prior position that waste-prevention regulations must benefit regulated industry, more closely evaluate the proposal’s effects to ensure that its analysis fully captures resulting benefits and royalty revenues, and recognize the significance of the rule’s climate benefits. 

In June 2022, the Institute for Policy Integrity jointly submitted three comments to the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding its Proposed Rule on the Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors. One of those comments highlighted regulatory precedents reaching back nearly sixty years that support the SEC's approach in the Proposed Rule. On January 30, 2023, we submitted as supplemental comments a recent article from Natasha Brunstein and Donald L. R. Goodson, Unheralded and Transformative: The Test for Major Questions After West Virginia, forthcoming in the William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review, which analyzes the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, 142 S. Ct. 2587 (2022). This new article bolsters the relevance of the regulatory precedents cited in Policy Integrity's previous joint comments as support for the Proposed Rule.