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This spring, the Biden administration proposed or enacted eight major environmental regulations, including the nation’s toughest climate rules, launching what experts say are the most ambitious restrictions on polluting industries by the administration in a season.
Piloting it all is a man most Americans have never heard of, running a little-known agency.
But Richard Revesz has begun to change the basic math that underpins federal regulations designed to protect human health and the environment. And those calculations could affect American lives and the economy for years to come.
Mr. Revesz, 65, the obscure but powerful head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is effectively the gatekeeper and final word on all new federal regulations. It has become known as a place where new rules proposed by government agencies, especially environmental standards, will die – or at least be weakened or delayed.
But Mr. Revesz, a climate law expert and former dean of New York University Law School, joined the Biden administration in January to revise the script. Every time a major regulatory proposal has landed on his desk, Mr. Revesz uses his authority to strengthen legal analysis and make it more stringent.
What’s more, he has proposed a new method of calculating potential regulatory costs that will increase the legal and economic justification for the rules to protect them from the expected court attacks.
With a halo of snowy curls and a Spanish lilt – a vestige of his childhood in Argentina – Mr. Revesz is known as “Ricky” to everyone from law students to legal opponents. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan called him a “legend.” John Podesta, a senior climate adviser to Mr. Biden who also served in top roles in the Obama and Clinton administrations, considers Mr. Revesz a hero.
Conservatives see Mr. Revesz differently.
“He’s a gobbledygook professor!” said Elizabeth Murrill, Louisiana’s attorney general, who plans to join Republican attorneys general from other states to challenge Mr. Biden’s climate regulations. “They make up these numbers to try to justify destroying the fossil fuel industry and the petrochemical industry, to justify bankrupting people and ruining their lives. And they say it’s all justified because of the future, because they say they’re saving the planet.
The climate regulations proposed by the Biden administration, along with the $370 billion in clean energy funding from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, will put the United States at the forefront of the fight to curb global warming.
When federal agencies write regulations, it is the role of the White House regulatory chief to ensure that they are legal and cost-effective.
But the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (known for short as OIRA, which rhymes with Elvira) often concludes that proposed environmental, health and safety regulations will be too costly for businesses.
“In the past, OIRA has been a brake on regulation,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “They have slowed down and especially reduced environmental regulations.”
The pattern is generally true regardless of which party is responsible. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard economist who headed the regulatory office during the Obama administration, reviewed proposals from the EPA to reduce asthma-related pollution and decided the costs to industry were too high, despite the health benefits. The rule was overturned, upsetting environmentalists.
But in April, Mr. Revesz proposed to change the way the Federal agency tally and consider the costs and benefits of the proposed regulations related to everything from climate change to consumer protection in a way to make many more people likely to see the light of day.
So far, the analysis has been based primarily on the cost of current regulation to industry, compared to the benefits to society. Mr. Revesz’s changes will emphasize how the regulations will benefit future generations.
This will have special meaning when it comes to climate regulation, as scientists say the impact of the greenhouse gases emitted today will be felt in the future, in the form of rising seas, more damaging storms, droughts, wildfires and displacement .
“This means that the federal government will not only give weight to the economic costs this year or next year, but ignore the benefits for our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren,” said Robert Stavins, professor of energy. and economic development at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
The changes would affect the metrics the federal government uses to calculate the losses caused by planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution. Under the Obama administration, White House economists calculated the figure to be about $50 per ton. Under the Trump administration, they dropped to less than $5 per ton. Applying Mr. Revesz’s formula shoots up the cost to nearly $200 a ton.
Plug those numbers into, say, the EPA’s proposal to tighten tailpipe emissions — regulations designed to increase sales of electric vehicles while ending the use of gasoline cars — and the economic benefits could add up to more than $1 trillion, far greater than the estimated cost to the industry.
“It’s a very powerful change,” Mr. Revesz said.
He also believes that the government should consider the impact of the proposed regulations on different sections of the population. The current method considers the impact of the proposed regulation on the population as a whole. But poor and minority communities face greater pollution, so they stand to gain more from these pollution limits.
Mr. Stavins and several other economists say the approach Mr. Revesz takes is the most accurate way to analyze the impact of climate rules. “This is the right way to think about it and the right way to do it,” Mr Stavins said.
Critics say the changes would lead to greater government intervention in American life and hurt businesses by increasing costs in an already recession-ridden economy.
“If they make decisions based on this change, that will have a huge impact on all kinds of Federal programs,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, a lawyer with Bracewell LLP, which represents fossil fuel companies and electric utilities. “It will definitely justify more aggressive regulation, especially on greenhouse gas emissions, and it will almost certainly increase the cost of energy, which flows into the cost of goods and services.”
Susan Dudley, who headed the regulatory office in the George W. Bush administration and now directs the Center for Regulatory Studies at George Washington University, said Mr. Revesz appeared to be trying to push a progressive agenda.
“To me there is a danger – the previous guidelines from Reagan, Clinton and Bush all seemed neutral, objective and focused on efficiency,” he said. “I think it won’t survive a Republican administration.”
Mr. Revesz said he was simply modernizing the calculation method that was last updated during the George W. Bush administration. In 2003, government economists estimated the impact of regulation on future generations by considering the average interest rate on government bonds over the past 30 years. Mr. Revesz took the same step to create metrics.
“If you do exactly the same arithmetic with exactly the same formula as the latest 30 years,” the result puts more dollar value in future life, Mr. Revesz said in a recent discussion at George Washington University.
A future administration can change the calculations again. But if that happens, “it will be clear that they are acting politically and acting against science and economics,” he said.
Mr. Revesz’s proposed method of calculating costs and benefits is expected to be completed by the fall and used to justify Mr. Biden’s climate regulations when they are enacted early next year.
Mr. Revesz began thinking about costs and benefits as a child in Buenos Aires. His parents had fled to Argentina from Hungary and Romania during World War II; his grandparents and four of his six aunts were killed in Auschwitz.
Argentina provided a short respite from the chaos; in the 1960s, a military dictatorship destroyed the country.
“I have to get up for school at 6:30, but we don’t get heat in our building until 8, and it’s actually quite cold in winter,” he recalled in an interview. “So when the alarm goes off, instead of waking up immediately, I will turn on the radio, because if there is a coup or an attempted coup or a general strike, there will be no school. And the probability of this happening is high enough to be known before I immediately get out of bed into the cold.
He came to the United States in 1975 at the age of 17, two weeks before starting at Princeton on a full scholarship. After graduation, Mr. Revesz earned a master’s degree in environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became an American citizen during his second year at Yale Law School, where he served as editor of the Yale Law Review. A clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall followed and in 1985, he began teaching at New York University School of Law, where he was dean from 2002 to 2013. From 2014 to 2022, he directed the American Law Institute, a century-old organization led by by judges, law professors and legal experts.
He founded an NYU-affiliated think tank, the Institute for Policy Integrity, which developed an approach to analyzing the costs and benefits of environmental regulations that Mr. Revesz brought to the White House.
During the Trump administration, he applied the theory: as the White House rolled back regulation after regulation, state Democratic attorneys general sued to fight back. Mr. Revesz helped shape some of the winning arguments.
“He’s a great resource for us,” said Brian Frosh, a former Maryland attorney general.
After President Biden was elected, Mr. Revesz joined the transition team and immediately impressed the incoming White House political staff.
“There are a million academics around the transition,” said Collin O’Mara, president of the National Wildlife Federation, who worked on Biden’s transition team. “But Ricky came right out. He was incredibly specific about how to make the agency work better, how to make things stand up in court. There was a lot of conversation about how to avoid the fate of Obama’s rule, and he was very clear.
Mr Revesz was on Mr Biden’s short list to lead the EPA – but the president’s advisers wanted to bring him straight to the White House.
When he was nominated, Jonathan Adler, a conservative law professor at Case Western University, wrote on Twitter: “He was the obvious choice for this position, so one wonders what took him so long.”
In an interview, Mr. Adler said, “If you want to go to court and file a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s regulations, you don’t want Ricky Revesz to step up his defense.”
Jim Tankersley contribute reports.
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