This legal heavyweight is fighting tirelessly for Biden’s environmental agenda

30 May 2023

If Donald Trump wins the 2024 GOP presidential nomination and defeats incumbent President Joe Biden in the general election, the United States will no doubt see a major rollback of Biden-era environmental policies. Trump was an aggressive promoter of fossil fuels, including coal, and a climate change denier; Biden, in contrast, realizes that climate change poses a major threat and that the U.S. needs to transition to a greener economy.

In an article published by The New York Times on May 30, environmental reporter Coral Davenport describes the role that attorney and Buenos Aires native Richard Revesz plays in the Biden Administration's environmental agenda. Since January, the 65-year-old Revesz (who has lived in the U.S. since 1975) has headed the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

"Each time a major regulatory proposal has landed on his desk," Davenport explains, "Mr. 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."

Davenport notes that Revesz has his admirers and his detractors. The admirers include Democrats like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and Biden climate adviser John Podesta. But Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill attacks Revesz as a "professor of gobbledygook" who is intent on "destroying the fossil fuel industry."

"The climate regulations proposed by the Biden Administration, together with $370 billion in clean energy funds from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, would catapult the United States to the forefront of the fight to constrain global warming," Davenport reports. "While federal agencies write regulations, it's the role of the White House regulatory chief to ensure that they are legally and economically sound…. In April, Mr. Revesz proposed to change the way federal agencies tally and weigh the costs and benefits of proposed regulations relating to everything from climate change to consumer protections in ways to make them much more likely to see the light of day."

Conservative law professor Jonathan Adler views Revesz as a legal bulldog.

Adler told the Times, "If you want to go to court and file lawsuits against the Biden Administration's regulations, you don't want Ricky Revesz mounting their defense."

Find the New York Times' entire report at this link (subscription required).

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