Digital Commons Network^™

Pricing, Decarbonization, And Green New Deals, David M. Driesen, Michael A. Mehling

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

This Article evaluates an emerging literature claiming that carbon pricing (emissions trading or carbon taxes) has not performed very well and therefore cannot be the basis for the sort of transformative change now required to address the climate crisis. This is an important claim, as carbon pricing has been viewed as being at the heart of global efforts to address one of our most important contemporary problems.

We provide theoretical and empirical support for these critics’ claim that carbon pricing by itself cannot catalyze the technological transformation now required, and that other approaches have done and will likely do better. …

Reanimating The Foreign Compacts Clause, Thomas Liefke Eaton

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

On October 23, 2019, the United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”) filed a complaint against the State of California “for unlawfully entering a cap and trade agreement with the Canadian Providence of Quebec.” In many ways, the complaint reflects a conventional disagreement between states and the federal government over the contours of federalism, but the complaint’s second cause of action, alleging a violation of the “Compacts Clause,” Article I, section 10(3) of the United States Constitution, is unique. The body of law and scholarship surrounding the Compacts Clause is often guesswork at best, for jurists and scholars alike, because typically …