Publications

The Covid-19 pandemic has led federal, state, and municipal policymakers to adopt a number of measures that suspended, delayed, or relaxed a variety of environmental safeguards. Our report analyzes these pandemic-related policy shifts and their impacts on public health and the environment. We also provide guidance on how agencies can increase transparency about these actions, counteract detrimental effects, and preemptively create guidelines to improve responses in a future emergency.

In its analysis of the 2020 Steam Electric Reconsideration Rule, the Environmental Protection Agency failed to adequately provide quantitative estimates for numerous harms from steam electric power plants' wastewater streams and drew conclusions about the rule’s impacts that are undermined by a fair assessment of unquantified impacts. Our report identifies flaws in the 2020 Rule and details changes the agency can make to significantly improve its benefit-cost analysis.

This report examines the relationship between resource adequacy and renewable energy. It explores the impacts of renewables on the functioning of resource adequacy mechanisms and how different resource adequacy approaches affect renewable investment, finding that current approaches—with certain adjustments—are capable of ensuring that the lights stay on during a future that is powered largely by renewable energy.

Climate change presents grave risk across the U.S. economy, including to corporations, their investors, the markets in which they operate, and the American public at large. Unlike other financial risks, however, climate risk is not routinely disclosed to the public. This report, authored by Policy Integrity and the Environmental Defense Fund, urges the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue new, mandatory disclosure rules focused on climate risk.

On October 2, 2020, the Institute for Policy Integrity and the Volatility and Risk Institute at NYU Stern School of Business convened a conference bringing together investors, companies, researchers, and regulators to discuss climate-related financial risks and identify opportunities to better assess, report, and act on them. This brief summarizes some of the major points of discussion from the conference, which featured different perspectives on various policy, economic, and legal issues.