Recent Projects

Together with the Environmental Defense Fund and Professor Madison Condon of Boston University School of Law, we submitted three sets of comments to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in support of its Proposed Rule on the Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors (Proposed Rule). The Proposed Rule would require publicly traded companies to disclose important information about the extent to which climate change is already affecting their financial performance, their approach to climate-related risk management, their climate-relevant governance structures, and their greenhouse gas emissions, which serve as a proxy for exposure to risk from policy- and market-driven shifts to a clean-energy economy.

Together with partner groups, we submitted joint comments to the Department of Energy (DOE) on its proposed rule to strengthen energy conservation standards for room air conditioners and pool heaters. Our comments applaud the agency for appropriately applying the social cost of greenhouse gases to estimate the climate benefits of the proposed standards, even though the standards would be cost-benefit justified without considering any climate benefits. We also encourage DOE to expand upon its rationale for adopting a global damages valuation and for the range of discount rates it applies to climate effects.

In March 2022, EPA proposed standards to regulate emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter from heavy-duty vehicles beginning with Model Year 2027. Policy Integrity submitted comments recommending that EPA strengthen these crucial standards in order to fulfill EPA's statutory duty to set standards "reflecting the greatest degree of emission reduction achievable." We also made a number of recommendations designed to ensure that EPA is properly comparing regulatory alternatives and accounting for the benefits of strong regulation.

In this amicus brief, we explain how the Interagency Working Group based its climate-damage valuations on voluminous and expert science, and that its approach followed regulatory guidance and precedent. In particular, the brief supports the Working Group's selection of discount rates and geographic scope, explaining how those choices followed expert consensus and were consistent with agency treatment of other regulatory impacts.

In February, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released two policy statements that acknowledged the Commission’s role in shaping the nation’s transition to a low-carbon future and called for the consideration of climate impacts in pipeline certificate proceedings. Today, the Institute for Policy Integrity filed two comment letters to these proposed policy statements.

In one of our comment letters—filed jointly with over two dozen legal scholars from institutes across the country—we rebut arguments from opponents of the policies that the Commission lacks authority to consider climate effects in its oversight of natural gas infrastructure under the Natural Gas Act.

In our other comment letter, we explain that the policy statements serve as an important step toward ensuring that upstream and downstream emissions are properly considered in line with the Commission’s statutory obligations, but provide several suggestions for improvements.