Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Law
Rethinking Grid Governance For The Climate Change Era, Shelley Welton
Rethinking Grid Governance For The Climate Change Era, Shelley Welton
All Faculty Scholarship
The electricity sector is often appropriately called the linchpin of efforts to respond to climate change. Over the next few decades, the U.S. electricity sector will need to double in size to accommodate electric vehicles, at the same time that it transforms to run entirely on clean energy. To drive this transformation, states are increasingly adopting 100% clean energy targets. But fossil fuel corporations are pushing back, seeking to maintain their structural domination of the U.S. energy sector. This article calls attention to one central but under-scrutinized way that these companies impede the clean energy transition: Incumbent fossil fuel companies …
The Bounds Of Energy Law, Shelley Welton
The Bounds Of Energy Law, Shelley Welton
All Faculty Scholarship
U.S. energy law was born of fossil fuels. Consequently, our energy law has long centered on the material and legal puzzles that bringing fossil fuels to market presents. Eliminating these same carbon-producing energy sources, however, has emerged as perhaps the most pressing material transformation needed in the twenty-first century—and one that energy law scholarship has rightfully embraced. Yet in our admirable quest to aid in this transformation, energy law scholars are largely writing into the field bequeathed to us, proposing changes that tweak, but do not fundamentally challenge, last century’s tools for managing the extraction, transport, and delivery of fossil …
On Environmental, Climate Change & National Security Law, Mark P. Nevitt
On Environmental, Climate Change & National Security Law, Mark P. Nevitt
All Faculty Scholarship
This Article offers a new way to think about climate change. Two new climate change assessments — the 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA) and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel’s Special Report on Climate Change — prominently highlight climate change’s multifaceted national security risks. Indeed, not only is climate change a “super wicked” environmental problem, it also accelerates existing national security threats, acting as both a “threat accelerant” and “catalyst for conflict.” Further, climate change increases the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events while threatening nations’ territorial integrity and sovereignty through rising sea levels. It causes both internal displacement …
Deploying Machine Learning For A Sustainable Future, Cary Coglianese
Deploying Machine Learning For A Sustainable Future, Cary Coglianese
All Faculty Scholarship
To meet the environmental challenges of a warming planet and an increasingly complex, high tech economy, government must become smarter about how it makes policies and deploys its limited resources. It specifically needs to build a robust capacity to analyze large volumes of environmental and economic data by using machine-learning algorithms to improve regulatory oversight, monitoring, and decision-making. Three challenges can be expected to drive the need for algorithmic environmental governance: more problems, less funding, and growing public demands. This paper explains why algorithmic governance will prove pivotal in meeting these challenges, but it also presents four likely obstacles that …
Public Energy, Shelley Welton
Public Energy, Shelley Welton
All Faculty Scholarship
Many scholars and policy makers celebrate cities as loci for addressing climate change. In addition to being significant sources of carbon pollution, cities prove to be dynamic sites of experimentation and ambition on climate policy. However, as U.S. cities set climate change goals far above those of their federal and state counterparts, they are butting up against the limits of their existing legal authority, most notably with regard to control over energy supplies. In response, many U.S. cities are exercising their legal rights to reclaim public ownership or control over private electric utilities as a method of achieving their climate …
Problems Of Equity And Efficiency In The Design Of International Greenhouse Gas Cap-And-Trade Schemes, Jason S. Johnston
Problems Of Equity And Efficiency In The Design Of International Greenhouse Gas Cap-And-Trade Schemes, Jason S. Johnston
All Faculty Scholarship
This article argues that international greenhouse gas (GHG) cap-and-trade schemes suffer from inherent problems of enforceability and verifiability that both cause significant inefficiencies and create inevitable tradeoffs between equity and efficiency. A standard result in the economic analysis of international GHG cap and trade schemes is that an allocation of initial permits that favors poor, developing countries (making such countries net sellers in equilibrium) may be necessary not only to further redistributive goals but also the efficiency of the GHG cap and trade scheme. This coincidence of equity and efficiency is, however, unlikely to be realized under more realistic assumptions …
From The States Up: Building A National Renewable Energy Policy, Shelley Welton
From The States Up: Building A National Renewable Energy Policy, Shelley Welton
All Faculty Scholarship
In 2006, a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report concluded that “[r]educing the nation’s dependence on oil and carbon dioxide emissions in the next 25 years is not unlike the 1960s challenge to put a man on the moon.” In fact, this analogy may be understated. While the scope of the two challenges is similarly daunting, the consequences of failure are potentially much more serious in the case of the energy challenge. One key component of addressing this challenge will be changing the ways in which the U.S. meets its seemingly insatiable electricity demand. The environmental, foreign policy, health, and …