Recent Projects

The National Environmental Policy Act requires agencies to take a hard look at the environmental impacts of their decisions, prior to acting. In this case, the Surface Transportation Board, after conducting an environmental review, permitted a proposed railway that would transport oil in Utah’s Uinta Basin. The D.C. Circuit found that the Board’s environmental analysis failed to properly consider the indirect effects of the railway, including increased drilling and pollution impacts in the Gulf Coast, due to an influx of crude oil and increased refinery operations. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in June 2024 on the question “whether the National Environmental Policy Act requires an agency to study environmental impacts beyond the proximate effects of the action over which the agency has regulatory authority.” We argue the Court should affirm the D.C. Circuit’s ruling and interpret NEPA–in line with longstanding precedent–to require agencies to consider reasonably foreseeable effects. 

PJM Interconnection, which operates and plans the transmission grid in the mid-Atlantic region, has begun a stakeholder process on its implementation of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Order No. 1920, including scenario development. Under Order No. 1920, one mandatory input into this process is policy-driven retirements of generation resources. PJM requested feedback on how it should forecast policy-driven retirements. Policy Integrity's comments explained that PJM should not rely exclusively on generation owners' self-reports of their intentions to retire or continue operating their units, because generation owners face incentives to make strategic but erroneous reports to benefit other generation assets in their portfolios. Instead, Policy Integrity recommended a specific three-step approach. 

EPA finalized greenhouse gas emission limits for existing coal-fired and new natural gas-fired power plants in May 2024. These limits were issued under authority from Section 111 of the Clean Air Act. Policy Integrity submitted an amicus brief in merits litigation before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, addressing the relationship between regulation of new and existing sources under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act and the applicability of this Court’s past decisions reviewing EPA’s discretion on technical findings under Section 111.

Policy Integrity submitted an amicus brief in support of the Department of the Interior and BOEM's 2024-2029 five-year leasing plan for Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) resources, raising three main points. First, we review how the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act's (OCSLA) legislative history supports Interior's consideration of downstream effects when valuing OCS oil and gas resources. Second, Policy Integrity explained how Interior's decades-long regulatory practice in creating five-year leasing plans included consideration of downstream environmental effects in various ways, like assessing the relative environmental impacts of using different energy sources. Third, Policy Integrity explained why standard valuation practices support Interior's consideration of downstream public costs from OCS resource consumption alongside downstream private benefits from that same consumption.

The Institute for Policy Integrity submitted comments in the New York Public Service Commission’s Proceeding on Motion of the Commission in Regard to Gas Planning Procedures, responding to a notice posing various questions about non-pipeline alternatives (NPAs). Our comments focused on how NPAs can be compared fairly to conventional infrastructure alternatives.

EPA's Science Advisory Board (SAB) seeks comments on its review report of the EPA’s Draft Revised Environmental Justice Technical Guidance (EJTG), which reviews the methods and procedures described in EPA’s Draft Revised EJTG for evaluating environmental justice concerns in regulatory actions. Policy Integrity submitted comments making four key recommendations that the SAB can use to advise EPA.

In August 2024, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a Draft Integrated Material Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement as part of its Lower Columbia River Channel Maintenance Plan. In the EIS the Corps cited values for the social cost of greenhouse gases (SC-GHG) from the calculator on Policy Integrity’s Cost of Carbon Website. The Corps also citied our Cost of Carbon website when describing the SC-GHG in the Draft EIS.

EPA revised the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for Particulate Matter (PM) in March. The state of Kentucky and others filed a lawsuit in the D.C. Circuit arguing that EPA should have considered costs when setting its 2024 NAAQS for PM. We filed an amicus brief explaining that EPA appropriately assessed costs in its separate regulatory impact analysis, that considering regulatory costs would not lead to a less stringent standard, and that there is no history of EPA considering costs when revising the NAAQS.

In response to congressional interest in marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) the Congressional Research Service prepared a brief report on the subject. In the document, CRS cited our recent report on expert consensus about carbon dioxide removal to support that claim that “[some stakeholders] may invoke a moral hazard argument against CDR because they prefer policies and actions to reduce GHG emissions prioritized over those aimed at removing emitted GHG from the atmosphere.”