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Brooklyn Law School

Natural Resources Law

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Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Energy and Utilities Law

Offshore Drilling: Combating Regulatory Uncertainty With Contract Law Protection, Jordan M. Steele May 2019

Offshore Drilling: Combating Regulatory Uncertainty With Contract Law Protection, Jordan M. Steele

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Offshore drilling accounts for billions of dollars in tax revenue every year. It is a pillar of the energy industry and is crucial to the economy. A recent flurry of deregulation, accelerating with the arrival of the Trump administration, highlights the tremendous impact politics has upon the profitability of this sector. The Secretary of the Interior, under the direction of the President, wields the power to regulate and make determinations into where, when, and how private companies can drill offshore. These private companies have contracts with the government for the opportunity to produce and develop oil or gas on the …

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Financing Green: Reforming Green Bond Regulation In The United States, Echo Kaixi Wang Jun 2018

Financing Green: Reforming Green Bond Regulation In The United States, Echo Kaixi Wang

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In recent years, green bonds have emerged as a way for the financial industry to contribute to environmentally friendly projects, combat climate change, and provide funds for green infrastructures across the world. While the green bond market has expanded drastically across large nations in Europe and Asia, market growth has stalled in the United States, in part due to a lack of promising regulations in the United States. Existing regulations on green bond issuance in the United States only exists in the form of non-binding international guidelines. This Note reviews the benefits and potentials of green bonds both as an …

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Paradoxes Of “Decarbonization”, David B. Spence Jan 2017

Paradoxes Of “Decarbonization”, David B. Spence

Brooklyn Law Review

Scholars and policymakers continue to debate the shape of a post-carbon world, and how fast the United States can “decarbonize” its energy sector. Recent trends—including the reduced costs of renewables, regulatory and market pressure on coal-fired power, and successful integration of large amounts of wind power into the grid—have fed optimism about the possibility of rapid and “deep” decarbonization. Unfortunately, however, encouraging ever-more substitution of renewables for fossil fuels creates unintended consequences—paradoxes—that stem in part from two sometimes unavoidable and under-appreciated truths. First, the three attributes we value in the electricity system—cost, reliability and environmental performance—are in tension with one …

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Breaking Energy Path Dependencies, Amy L. Stein Jan 2017

Breaking Energy Path Dependencies, Amy L. Stein

Brooklyn Law Review

Of the many barriers to clean energy development discussed in the literature, the power of the status quo is not normally one of them. Yet beyond the need for more transmission lines, the need to decouple electricity sales from revenue, or the need to amend our environmental laws to more fully capture the externalities of energy, efforts to develop clean energy are faced with over a century of institutional “stickiness” associated with the legal and regulatory framework governing energy. This article explores how path dependency theories can inform the practical legal efforts to overcome such stickiness, identifying the troublesome approaches …

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Environmental Injustice And The Pursuit Of A Post-Carbon World: The Unintended Consequences Of The Clean Air Act As A Cautionary Tale For Solar Energy Development, Shannon Elizabeth Bell Jan 2017

Environmental Injustice And The Pursuit Of A Post-Carbon World: The Unintended Consequences Of The Clean Air Act As A Cautionary Tale For Solar Energy Development, Shannon Elizabeth Bell

Brooklyn Law Review

Most policy decisions aimed at improving the environment have been conceived and implemented without attention to issues of environmental justice, creating what sociologist Julian Agyeman calls an “equity deficit” in the discourse and practice of environmental sustainability. This article presents the unintended consequences of the Clean Air Act (CAA) and its amendments as a cautionary tale for what can happen when environmental regulations are enacted without adequately considering environmental justice concerns. Although the CAA has been responsible for much good in the United States as a whole—including significant reductions in acid rain and health-harming pollutants—it has also brought significant harm …

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Life Cycle Analysis And Transportation Energy, Alexandra B. Klass, Andrew Heiring Jan 2017

Life Cycle Analysis And Transportation Energy, Alexandra B. Klass, Andrew Heiring

Brooklyn Law Review

As government actors and the private sector attempt to decarbonize the economy, the role of life cycle analysis (also know as life cycle assessment or LCA) has become increasingly important. In this essay, we explore the use of life cycle analysis in the transportation sector to assess its influence in federal and state policy efforts to move to a low-carbon energy future. We first define life cycle analysis and explain its use in evaluating the environmental impacts of all stages of a product from production, to use, to disposal. We then review the use of life cycle analysis in considering …

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Stranded Costs And Grid Decarbonizaiton, Emily Hammond, Jim Rossi Jan 2017

Stranded Costs And Grid Decarbonizaiton, Emily Hammond, Jim Rossi

Brooklyn Law Review

Energy law is well equipped to facilitate the transition to a decarbonized grid. Over the past half century, energy law has endured many stranded cost experiments, each helping firms and customers adjust to a new normal. However, these past experiments have contributed to a myopic regulatory approach to past stranded cost recovery by: (1) endorsing a preference for addressing all stranded costs only after energy resource investment decisions have been made; and (2) fixating on the firm’s financial costs and protection of investors, rather than on the broader impacts of each transition for the energy system. The current transition to …

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Legal Pathways To Deep Decarbonization: Lessons From California And Germany, John C. Dernbach Jan 2017

Legal Pathways To Deep Decarbonization: Lessons From California And Germany, John C. Dernbach

Brooklyn Law Review

In the December 2015 Paris Agreement, nations of the world agreed to reduce their net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by the second half of the century. For developed countries, accomplishing that goal requires a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by more than 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. As ambitious and even unachievable as that goal may seem, some developed countries have already made considerable progress in conceptualizing and even adopting legal approaches for achieving decarbonization. This paper describes the approaches being taken in two major developed country jurisdictions—California and Germany—and suggest lessons from that experience that could be …

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A Comparison Between Shale Gas In China And Unconventional Fuel Development In The United States: Water, Environmental Protection, And Sustainable Development, Paolo D. Farah, Riccardo Tremolada Jan 2016

A Comparison Between Shale Gas In China And Unconventional Fuel Development In The United States: Water, Environmental Protection, And Sustainable Development, Paolo D. Farah, Riccardo Tremolada

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

China is believed to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental, and investment-related issues will likely restrain its exploitation. China's capacity to face these hurdles successfully and produce commercial shale gas will have a crucial impact on the regional gas market and on China’s energy mix, as Beijing strives to decrease reliance on imported oil and coal, and, at the same time, tries to meet growing energy demand and maintain a certain level of resource autonomy. The development of the unconventional natural gas extractive industry will also provide China with further negotiating power …

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