Recent Projects

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.

We filed an amicus brief in a case challenging the Bureau of Land Management's approval of over 300 oil and gas drilling permits in New Mexico. Our brief highlighted problems in the agency's analysis, which inappropriately minimized the climate impacts of new drilling through comparison to nationwide totals. We explained that the agency’s approach did not facilitate a rational analysis of the project's climate effects and failed to meet the National Environmental Policy Act’s requirement that agencies analyze the actual environmental impacts of their actions. In its decision ruling against the agency, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit cited our brief extensively and adopted many of our arguments against BLM’s comparison-based approach to assessing the significance of climate impacts.

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.

Energy storage can play an important role in a transition to clean energy, but only if it’s deployed within an effective policy framework. The Connecticut Public Utility Regulatory Authority (PURA) adopted our recommendations to target its energy storage incentives to areas with the highest differential between the highest and lowest marginal emissions rates so batteries could ultimately lead to reductions in emissions. In addition, PURA directed the Connecticut Green Bank to review our comments when setting the scope of the program's marketing plan.