Law Commons^™

Stop Biting The Hand That Feeds Us: Safeguarding Sustainable Development Through The Application Of Nepa's Environmental Impact Statement To International Trade Agreements, Jose A. Egurbide

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Valuing The Environment: Noaa's New Regulations Under The Oil Pollution Act Of 1990, Ronald M. Pierce

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Symposium - Supply And Demand: Barriers To A New Energy Future, Michael P. Vandenbergh, J. B. Ruhl, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law Review

Like many fields, energy law has had its ups and downs. A period of remarkable activity in the 1970s and early 1980s focused on the efficiencies arising from deregulation of energy markets, but the field attracted much less attention during the 1990s. In the last decade, a new burst of activity has occurred, driven largely by the implications of energy production and use for climate change. In effect, this new scholarship is asking what efficiency means in a carbon- constrained world. Accounting for carbon has induced scholars to challenge the implicit assumption of the early scholarship that the price of …

Can We Regulate Our Way To Energy Efficiency? Product Standards As Climate Policy, Noah M. Sachs

Vanderbilt Law Review

Alternative energy supplies get most of the attention in the climate change debate, but reducing energy demand should be the dominant strategy for cutting global greenhouse gas emissions. Dozens of technical studies have concluded that improving the efficiency of automobiles, furnaces, motors, consumer electronics, lighting, air conditioners, and other energy-using products is the cheapest and fastest way to achieve dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.' In fact, avoiding catastrophic global heating largely depends on how fast energy efficient technology can be deployed over the next few decades.

Energy efficiency can be promoted through multiple policies, such as energy taxes, a …

Truths We Must Tell Ourselves To Manage Climate Change, Robert H. Socolow

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1958, Charles David Keeling began measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide (C02) in the atmosphere, at a site 11,000 feet above sea level near the top of Mauna Loa on the "big island" of Hawaii. The time series of monthly averages, the "Keeling Curve," is the iconic figure of climate change (see Figure 1). The curve oscillates and rises. The annual oscillations (whose details are seen in the Figure's inset) are the consequences of the seasonal breathing of the northern-hemisphere forests, which remove C02 from the atmosphere during their growing season and return C02 to the atmosphere as their …

Good For You, Bad For Us: The Financial Disincentive For Net Demand Reduction, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law Review

Energy policy debates often focus on increasing the supply of renewable energy, but energy demand merits equal attention. Low- carbon energy sources will not be able to displace fossil fuels at the levels necessary to achieve climate goals if global demand continues to grow at projected rates. To meet the widely endorsed goal of 50% global carbon emissions reductions by 2050, including 80% reductions from developed countries, global emissions from fossil fuel use will need to decline by more than seven billion tons from projected levels by 2050. Major new sources of low-carbon energy will become available, but it is …

Personal Environmental Information: The Promise And Perils Of The Emerging Capacity To Identify Individual Environmental Harms, Katrina Fischer Kuh

Vanderbilt Law Review

A variety of modern technologies reveal individual behaviors that have environmental consequences with increasing clarity. Smart meters and related technologies detect detailed information about when and how individuals use electricity within the home. Radio frequency identification ("RFID") chips embedded in recycling collection bins track household recycling behaviors, including everything from whether the household is recycling to whether its members properly separate their recyclables. Regulators use aerial imagery and geographic information systems ("GIS") technology to detect violations of local building codes and the illegal filling of wetlands. Interactive "ecomaps" allow city residents to compare environmental performance by zip code. Even information …

Harmonizing Commercial Wind Power And The Endangered Species Act Through Administrative Reform, J. B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law Review

What could be greener than wind power? That's easy-saving endangered species! The wind power industry has learned the hard way what timber companies, federal land management agencies, hydropower generators, state highway departments, real estate developers, small coastal villages, the Environmental Protection Agency, farmers, major metropolitan governments, and more like them around the nation know all too well-never, ever take your eyes off the Endangered Species Act ("ESA"). It may be green and one of the darlings of our nation's renewable energy future, but wind power has no "green pass" to get out of the ESA.

The reason wind power has …

Environmental Law And Fossil Fuels: Barriers To Renewable Energy, Uma Outka

Vanderbilt Law Review

Renewable energy is gaining momentum around the globe, but the United States has only just begun to change its energy trajectory away from fossil fuels. Today, only about 10% of electricity in the United States is generated from renewable energy, and most of that comes from hydroelectric power plants that have been operating for many years. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects 30% of new capacity over the next twenty years will utilize renewable resources, without significant changes in U.S. energy policy, but at that pace renewable energy will still account for only 16% of generated electricity. These prospects stand …

Harm Means Harm: Babbitt V. Sweet Home Chapter Of Communities For A Great Oregon, Laurie M. Stone

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bringing A Complaint Under The Nafta Environmental Side Accord: Difficult Steps Under A Procedural Paper Tiger, But Movement In The Right Direction, Michael J. Kelly

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is The United States V. Olin Decision Full Of Sound And Fury Signifying Nothing?: The Future Of Retroactive Liability Of The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, And Liability Act, Kevin J. Slattum

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Energy Ratings Hit Commercial Real Estate - California Lights The Way, Jonathan Cahill

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

The Energy Star Program has been extremely successful for consumer appliances and electronics, but can this success translate to commercial real estate? In the United States, commercial buildings account for nearly nineteen percent of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. Consequently, energy rating of buildings has become an increasingly attractive way to combat pollution and lower energy consumption. Despite this, the United States does not yet have a federal policy requiring energy usage disclosure for buildings. This has left state and local governments to lead the way in innovative and effective reporting regimes. California's response to this regulatory vacuum is Assembly Bill …

Preserving Legal Avenues For Climate Justice In Florida Post-American Electric Power, Allison Fishman

Florida Law Review

No abstract provided.

Adapting Laws For A Changing World: A Systemic Approach To Climate Change Adaptation, Victor B. Flatt

Florida Law Review

This Essay suggests that policy responses in climate change adaptation must be addressed and that focusing on adapting laws may be a good way to undertake this work. Following a review of existing scholarship and normative theories concerning law generally, environmental law, climate change, and adaptation, this Essay then proposes a template for approaching the adaptation of laws. This template would (1) examine where climate change puts pressure on the operation of laws; (2) seek to alter the implementation of that law or to alter the law itself to hew closely to the law’s original purposes; and (3) make these …

Critical Habitat And The Challenge Of Regulating Small Harms, Dave Owen

Florida Law Review

This Article investigates how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the courts are implementing the Endangered Species Act’s prohibition on “adverse modification” of “critical habitat.” That prohibition appears to be one of environmental law’s most ambitious mandates, but its actual meaning and effect are contested. Using a database of over 4,000 “biological opinions,” interviews with agency staff, and a review of judicial decisions considering the adverse modification prohibition, this Article assesses the extent to which the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the courts are relying on the adverse modification …

Balancing Compassion And Risk In Climate Adaptation: U.S. Water, Drought, And Agricultural Law, Robert W. Adler

Florida Law Review

It is inevitable that the world will experience a significant amount of global warming before efforts to mitigate the buildup of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere can even begin to succeed. Therefore, adaptation to climate change impacts, as well as mitigation, will be necessary to deal with climate disruption. In designing climate change adaptation efforts, a looming issue is how to balance the need and compassionate impulse to provide financial and other relief to victims of climate disruption impacts with the equally compelling need to reduce the overall risk of those impacts. U.S. water, drought, and agricultural law and …

Planetarian Identity Formation And The Relocalization Of Environmental Law, Sarah Krakoff

Florida Law Review

Local food, local work, local energy production-all are hallmarks of a resurgence of localism throughout contemporary environmental thought and action. The renaissance of localism might be seen as a retreat from the world’s global environmental problems. This Article maintains, however, that some forms of localism are actually expressions, appropriate ones, of a planetary environmental consciousness. This Article’s centerpiece is an in-depth evaluation of local climate action initiatives, including interviews with participants, as well as other data and observations about their ethics, attitudes, behaviors, and motivations. The values and identities being forged in these initiatives form the basis for timely conceptions …

An Empirical Assessment Of Climate Change In The Courts: A New Jurisprudence Or Business As Usual?, David Markell, J.B. Ruhl

Florida Law Review

With the demise of climate legislation in Congress, and the Supreme Court’s rejection of climate-related lawsuits brought under federal common law, rapt attention has turned to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) efforts to bring greenhouse gases into the regulatory fold. Certainly, as the works in this special issue of the Florida Law Review demonstrate, EPA is not the only important player in the climate arena; indeed, as I will reluctantly suggest, the Agency’s efforts here appear to be waning rather than waxing. Even so, before turning to other aspects of the problem of climate change, discussed in other works in …

Introduction: Climate Change At Epa, Lisa Heinzerling

Florida Law Review

With the demise of climate legislation in Congress, and the Supreme Court’s rejection of climate-related lawsuits brought under federal common law, rapt attention has turned to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) efforts to bring greenhouse gases into the regulatory fold. Certainly, as the works in this special issue of the Florida Law Review demonstrate, EPA is not the only important player in the climate arena; indeed, as I will reluctantly suggest, the Agency’s efforts here appear to be waning rather than waxing. Even so, before turning to other aspects of the problem of climate change, discussed in other works in …

United States Flood Control Policy: The Incomplete Transition From The Illusion Of Total Protection To Risk Management, A. Dan Tarlock

Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum

No abstract provided.

The End Game Of Deregulation: Myopic Risk Management And The Next Catastrophe, Thomas O. Mcgarity, Rena I. Steinzor

Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum

No abstract provided.

Warning: May Cause Warming, Marcy N. Moody

Vanderbilt Law Review

Browsing the aisles of her local grocery store, a shopper may come across a dusty unmarked bin with carrots in it. She may see a shelf of brightly colored cereal boxes touting their contents' health benefits. Elsewhere in the store may be an iced container of sustainable shrimp from Thailand with a circled blue checkmark next to it. Perhaps there are local leeks, organic okra, or eggs from free- ranging chickens. The shopper may select the cereal on the basis of its health claims, the shrimp on the basis of its environmental friendliness, or maybe just the carrot because she …

Federal Constitutions, Global Governance, And The Role Of Forests In Regulating Climate Change, Blake Hudson

Indiana Law Journal

Federal systems of government present more difficulties for international treaty formation than perhaps any other form of governance. Federal constitutions that grant subnational governments virtually exclusive regulatory authority over certain subject matter may constrain national governments during international negotiations—a national government that cannot constitutionally bind subnational governments to an international agreement cannot freely arrange its international obligations. While federal nations that grant subnational governments exclusive regulatory control obviously place value on stringent decentralization and the benefits it provides in those regulatory areas, the difficulty lies in striking a balance between global governance and constitutional decentralization in federal systems. Recent scholarship …

Introduction: Legal Scholarship, The Disaster Cycle, And The Fukushima Accident, Daniel A. Farber

Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum

No abstract provided.

Disaster Justice: The Geography Of Human Capability, Robert R.M. Verchick

Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum

No abstract provided.

Disaster Mythology And Availability Cascades, Lisa Grow Sun

Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum

No abstract provided.

Insurance Against Catastrophe: Government Stimulation Of Insurance Markets For Catastrophic Events, Véronique Bruggeman, Michael Faure, Tobias Heldt

Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum

No abstract provided.

Can Governments Ensure Adherence To The Polluter Pays Principle In The Long-Term Ccs Liability Context?, Paul Bailey, Elizabeth Mccullough, Sonya Suter

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Coupling Environmental Justice With Carbon Trading, Joseph Lam

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.