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Helping NYC Reach a Clean Air Milestone
New York City reached an environmental milestone today as the final deadline passed in a multi-year effort to eliminate the city’s dirtiest residential heating oils. Policy Integrity played a major role in shaping and supporting the NYC Clean Heat program, which has saved hundreds of lives by curbing air pollution.
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Supreme Court Sends EPA’s Mercury Rule Back to Circuit Court for Additional Review
Today, the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did not consider costs at the appropriate stage of the regulatory process before crafting the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. This rule, which regulates toxic emissions from power plants, will now be sent back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where the judges will decide how the EPA should proceed.
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Court Rejects Initial Challenges to Clean Power Plan
Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dismissed the first challenges to President Obama’s signature climate change initiative—the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. In the ruling, the judges said they would not take the unprecedented step of blocking the EPA’s regulation before a final rule has even been issued.
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Harmonizing Preservation and Production
How Modernizing the Department of the Interior’s Fiscal Terms for Oil, Gas, and Coal Leases Can Ensure a Fair Return to the American Public
Leasing federal lands for drilling and mining generates a huge amount of revenue for the United States, but the Department of the Interior, which oversees these leases, uses an antiquated fiscal system that deprives taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars. Our report analyzes how the fiscal terms for oil, gas, and coal leases could be modernized to ensure a fair return to the American public.
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Consumer Product Safety Commission Public Comments
Since 1996, there have been at least 285 incidents of child strangulation by window covering cords. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering a regulation to address this issue, and we recently submitted public comments on the Commission’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking. We offered a number of suggestions for improving upon the Commission’s preliminary analysis of the costs and benefits of eliminating cords from window coverings. These included recommendations that the Commission consider the prevention of parental grief as an unquantified benefit of regulation and that it perform separate cost-benefit analyses for each major category of covering (e.g., vinyl blinds, wood blinds, roman shades).
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Regulatory Report on Oil Dispersants
Our new regulatory report offers guidance on how how the EPA can improve its cost-benefit analysis for a new proposed rule regulating the dispersants used to clean up oil spills and other major pollution events.
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Comments on New Offshore Leasing Plan
Policy Integrity recently filed public comments on the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM’s) new offshore leasing proposal, suggesting that the agency update its use of “option value” to improve its valuation of offshore resources.
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Court Rules on Offshore Leasing Lawsuit
Policy Integrity senior advisor Michael Livermore represented the plaintiff in Center for Sustainable Economy v. Jewell, a lawsuit challenging the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM’s) 2012-2017 leasing plan for the Gulf of Mexico and the Alaskan coast. The Center for Sustainable Economy (CSE) argued that incomplete and flawed economic analysis leads the government to sell resource leases too quickly and too cheaply, potentially costing the American public billions of dollars and leading to high-risk drilling. Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled against CSE in the case. However, part of the ruling could lead to major changes in how the government values the natural resources it leases.
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Supreme Court Brief for Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Case
The Supreme Court will soon hear a challenge to the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (commonly known as the MATS rule). Policy Integrity has submitted an amicus brief in support of the EPA for this case.
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Policy Integrity Files Brief in Case Challenging EPA’s Clean Power Plan
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will soon hear the first set of cases challenging President Obama’s signature climate change initiative—the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. We recently filed an amicus brief for West Virginia v. EPA, one of the cases challenging the as-yet unfinalized regulation.