Recent Projects

In 2015, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established minimum criteria for the safe disposal of coal combustion residuals. At the time, EPA projected that the new rule would yield substantial health and environmental benefits. EPA now proposes to weaken the requirements of the 2015 rule but insists that doing so “will not change risks to human health and the environment” and thus will have no effect on the projected benefits of the 2015 rule. Our comments explain why EPA cannot reasonably assume that its proposed changes will have no effect on the 2015 rule’s projected benefits.

As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues its rulemaking to repeal the Clean Power Plan, we submitted two sets of comments that challenge EPA’s legal and economic arguments for undoing this important climate policy.

The Bureau of Land Management has proposed to rescind or revise its 2016 rule to limit methane emissions associated with natural gas production. The analysis for the original rule showed it to be hugely beneficial to the public, largely due to the avoided climate damages, for which BLM relied on the IWG’s Social Cost of Methane in the original analysis. Now, BLM has radically altered the analysis for the rule, claiming that the costs outweigh its benefits and the Bureau is justifying its decision to rescind or revise the rule based on this flawed rehashing of the effects, even though many of the problematic elements actually undercut BLM’s justification of the proposal to rescind or revise the rule. We submitted comments focused on this faulty analysis and also submitted joint comments on how BLM failed to appropriately value the Social Cost of Methane and other foregone benefits that would result from the rule’s rescission.

EPA is soliciting comments on the proposed withdrawal of its control techniques guidelines (CTG) for the oil and natural gas industry. EPA supports its proposed withdrawal of the CTG with an analytical memorandum on avoided costs and forgone emission reductions. The agency monetizes the alleged avoided costs down to the dollar, but EPA fails to monetize the forgone emission reductions. Our joint comments illustrate how the proposed withdrawal’s costs outweigh its benefits, by applying the Social Cost of Methane to EPA’s quantified foregone emissions reductions. We argue that by only quantifying the volume of forgone methane reductions, instead of monetizing the associated damages to the environment, public health, and welfare, EPA obscures the very real and readily monetizable negative consequences of its proposed withdrawal.

We recently submitted comments to Office of Surfacing Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) on its environmental assessment (EA) on modifying the federal mining plan for Bull Mountains Mine No. 1 in Montana. The EA evaluates a proposal to extend operations at an existing mine by nine years, which would produce an extra 86.7 million tons of coal. While the EA quantifies the tons of greenhouse gas emissions related to the project, OSM refused to use the social cost of greenhouse gases metric to monetize the climate effects of these emissions. Our comments explain why the agency’s refusal is arbitrary and unlawful in light of a growing body of case law, which holds that failure to monetize a project’s costs is impermissible if an agency justifies an action based on the project’s monetized benefits. Our comments also explain why the social cost of greenhouse gases metric is appropriate for projects of this scale, why the metric’s use is not limited to rulemakings, and how failing to adequately account for the project’s climate effects is a violation of NEPA.

We recently submitted comments to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on its environmental assessment (EA) for the Rivervale South to Market pipeline project in New Jersey. Once again, FERC quantified the tons of downstream greenhouse gas emissions that the project would generate, but the Commission did not use the social cost of greenhouse gases to monetize the climate effects of those emissions. In the EA, FERC incorrectly claims that it is impossible to determine the significance of a discrete amount of additional greenhouse gas emissions. Our comments dispel FERC’s arbitrary and misleading rationale and explain why failing to meaningfully analyze a project’s climate effects violates NEPA. Our comments also offer guidance for how the Commission should use the social cost of greenhouse gases metric based on the best available science and economics going forward.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is developing a comprehensive policy for integrating Distributed Energy Resource (DERs), like rooftop solar, into its energy system. A March 2018 administrative law judge ruling heavily cited our earlier comments in laying out a revised plan to require the state’s utilities to conduct a societal cost test to help compare the net benefits of different DER technologies. We submitted comments to the CPUC commending the agency for its revisions to the proposed analysis and recommending additional improvements.