Recent Projects

The Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act (“REINS Act”) would prevent agencies from issuing statutorily required rules unless approved by Congress. Our issue brief describes how this bill would create substantial burdens for Congress, worsen outcomes for the American public, and raise constitutional red flags by allowing Congress to repeal earlier statutes through inaction.

The Senate’s Regulatory Accountability Act would rewrite notice-and-comment rulemaking procedures and create extraordinarily burdensome hurdles in rule implementation by requiring trial-like public hearings. Our issue brief describes how this change to regulatory reform would give opponents of major public safeguards a valuable tool to delay implementation for years, without any regard to the harm that delay would impose on the health and safety of the American public.

To solve the unprecedented global commons problem posed by climate change, all nations must internalize the global externalities of their emissions. If not, collective efforts will never achieve an efficient, stable climate outcome. The United States’ practice of looking at the global impact of emissions has come under attack in courtrooms and academic journals, with some arguing that the U.S. should instead consider only the domestic impacts of climate change in its decisionmaking.

In a letter published in Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, we argue that federal agencies should continue to use a global number for Social Cost of Carbon, as developed by the Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon. First, the United States benefits tremendously if other countries set policy based on global rather than local effects. From a legal perspective, not only does international law—the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change—commit the United States to account for global effects, but domestic laws like the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act also either require or give discretion to agencies to consider global climate costs. Many seemingly “foreign” climate damages would actually spill over to harm the United States.

Scientific studies show that climate change will have, and in some cases has already had, severe consequences for society, like the spread of disease, increased food insecurity, and coastal destruction. The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a metric designed to quantify climate damages, representing the net economic cost of carbon dioxide emissions. Our issue brief on the Social Cost of Carbon details how this metric was developed and how it applies to federal regulatory policy.

Our issue brief on Jobs and Environmental Regulation addresses rhetoric on “job-killing regulations,” describing the lack of consistent evidence that regulations lead to long-term changes in the unemployment rate. It also provides information on how to analyze claims about job impacts.

Our issue brief on Regulatory Co-Benefits analyzes the importance of using unbiased economic analysis to consider all direct and indirect costs and benefits of any environmental safeguard.

This report contains a set of recommendations for the Trump Administration that, if implemented, would strengthen the process of regulatory review. These recommendations reflect the general consensus of a group of former Administrators and Acting Administrators from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs who served under both political parties.

This policy brief evaluates how willingness to pay (WTP) for a flood protection system varies with exposure to flood risk, using detailed flood maps and parcel-level data to identify households within and just beyond the 100-year flood plain in New York City. Past research has estimated that a homeowner’s WTP for flood insurance is largely contingent upon their risk level. However, no studies to date have analyzed the WTP for other forms of flood protection. We conducted a survey of single-family homeowners living in the 100- and 500-year flood plains in New York City, and found that WTP for flood control systems varies with the degree of risk that homeowners face. While the majority of residents living in the 100- year flood plain were willing to pay up to $10 a month to contribute to the cost of a seawall, the majority of residents living in the 500-year flood plain, an area that has a 0.2% risk of flooding in any given year, were only willing to pay up to $7 a month. These results are consistent with other studies demonstrating that risk—actual or perceived—plays a large role in individuals’ WTP for protection from floods.

On September 27, opponents of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan presented their case against the rule in a hearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The Clean Power Plan aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s existing power plants. A coalition of states, utilities, coal companies, and other industry groups have sought to block the rule since it was first proposed in June 2014, while a competing group of states, municipalities, power companies, environmental and public health organizations, and clean energy producers have intervened to support the EPA. Over the course of the seven-hour hearing, the petitioners challenging the Clean Power Plan asserted and implied a number of things that don’t stand up to scrutiny. This report sets the record straight on some of their more notable misstatements.

During the period of détente in the 1970s, a Norwegian proposal to construct an air pollution monitoring network for the European continent resulted in the first concrete collaboration between the communist and capitalist blocs after the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Known as the “European-wide monitoring programme” or EMEP, the network earned considerable praise from diplomats for facilitating cooperation across the Iron Curtain. Yet as this article argues, EMEP was strongly influenced by the politics of détente and the constraints of the Cold War even as it helped to decrease tensions. Concerns about national security and sharing data with the enemy shaped both the construction of the monitoring network and the modeling of pollution transport. The article proposes that environmental monitoring systems like EMEP reveal the ways in which observational technologies can affect conceptions of the natural world and the role of science in public policy.