This spring the Biden administration proposed or implemented eight major environmental regulations, including the nation’s toughest climate rule, rolling out what experts say are the most ambitious limits on polluting industries by the government in a single season.
Richard Revesz, a climate law expert and former dean of the New York University School of Law, joined the Biden administration in January as head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Each time a major regulatory proposal has landed on his desk, Revesz has used his authority to strengthen its legal analysis and make it more stringent. What’s more, he has proposed a new method of calculating the cost of potential regulation that would bolster the legal and economic justifications for those rules to protect them against an expected onslaught of court fights.
“If they make decisions based on this change, that will have huge impacts on all kinds of federal programs,” Bracewell’s Jeffrey Holmstead told The New York Times. “It will certainly justify much more aggressive regulation, especially of greenhouse gas emissions, and that would almost certainly increase the cost of energy, which flows through to the cost of goods and services.”