Recent Projects

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.

Policy Integrity submitted comments to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in response to its Request for Information about how it can most effectively distribute its share of Inflation Reduction Act funding. This $19 billion in funding, which is allocated across NRCS's core conservation programs, must be given out to support agricultural practices that reduce or sequester greenhouse gas emissions. Our comments encourage NRCS to award the funding to practices that will maximize net social benefits and to increase the transparency of its project-ranking process. We urge NRCS to consider a range of factors in its analysis, including a practice's potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, produce knowledge, and offer ecosystem services.

In response to the Department of Energy’s recent request for information on its categorical exclusions, we submitted a comment letter recommending that the Department rescind its 2020 regulation establishing categorical exclusion B5.7 for discretionary authorizations to export liquefied natural gas. As our comment letter explains, long-term expansion of export capacity may lock in fossil-fuel usage over the long term and thereby impede global decarbonization efforts. Yet when promulgating its categorical exclusion rule, the Department erroneously argued that indirect climate effects are not relevant to its assessment of applications for export authorization, and based its sweeping categorical exclusion on that improper legal conclusion. Our comment letter provides a proper understanding of the Department’s broad authority, which compels the agency to robustly consider impacts on climate change as part of its authorization process.

The Texas Public Utility Commission (PUCT) requested public input as part of an ongoing effort to ensure the reliability of its wholesale electricity market design following Winter Storm Uri. We submitted comments on how the PUCT can achieve its reliability goals in a manner that ensures just and reasonable rates for consumers. For any new mechanism it may deem necessary, we encouraged the PUCT to choose a design that accords with economic principles. Such a design would compensate both dispatchable and non-dispatchable resources according to their reliability value, include an efficient penalty structure for non-performance of generation units, reduce uncertainty for market participants, and mitigate market power exercise.

Together with Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative, we prepared a policy brief and supplemental comments defending the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) proposed rule on transmission planning reform from arguments that the proposal would trigger the major questions doctrine. We review previous transmission planning regulations and orders by FERC to explain that the major questions doctrine does not apply because the proposed rule is neither unheralded nor transformative.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently solicited public input on how to implement the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which provides $27 billion to support zero-emission technologies and other projects that reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of air pollution, including in low-income and disadvantaged communities. We recommended that EPA require funding applicants to submit cost-benefit analyses for their proposed projects and, where otherwise consistent with statutory requirements, use the results of such analyses to prioritize funding allocations. We further recommended that such analyses account for significant unquantified effects, include assessments of distributional impacts, and consider the project’s potential to increase (or reduce) resilience to climate change. Finally, we suggested that, in tracking the success of the program, EPA identify climate resilience as a relevant program outcome.