Environmental Law Commons^™

Climate Change And Environmental Crises In Coastal Cities: Charleston Vs New York City, Nolan Rodriguez

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper addresses the increasing vulnerability that coastal communities face regarding climate crises and rising sea levels. Specifically, this paper investigates the environmental crises facing Charleston, South Carolina, and New York City. The geographical location of these cities places a more severe threat upon their environment, as opposed to urban collectives removed from the immediate effect of rising sea levels. A cross-examination of politics and economics is discussed in order to determine the causal relationship of each city’s engagement with its surrounding environment. This paper examines how each city is affected by climate change, what measures are in place to …

Natural Resources In The Arctic: The Equal Distribution Of Uneven Resrouces, Ganeswar Matcha, Sudarsanan Sivakumar

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

This paper analyses the governance machine in place at the Arctic and examines the application of the principles of “common heritage of mankind” at the Arctic. This paper also offers some tentative propositions aimed at protecting Out Bound investment rights and how the World Trade Organization or other countries, like the U.S., can intercede in the Arctic investment sphere and attempt to regulate along with the United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea.

Incentivizing Sustainability In American Enterprise: Lessons From Finnish Model, Vasa T. Dunham

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The disparate climate performances of Finland and the United States, two of the wealthiest countries in the world, bring to light the question of how corporate responsibility has been inspired in each jurisdiction. Having established the urgency of the climate crisis and the importance of corporate behavior in optimizing a given country’s approach to protection of the global environment, an examination of each nation’s legal frameworks may shed light on features of the corporate regime that are effective in advancing sustainability goals and those that are not.22 Part I of this paper establishes a comparative framework by providing background on …

Sabin Center For Climate Change Law Annual Report 2023, Sabin Center For Climate Change Law

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

This year the Sabin Center for Climate Change introduces its first annual report, which highlights and synthesizes our cutting-edge research and innovative engagements in 2023.

Remediation For Pfas Contamination: The Role Of Cercla Enforcement In Environmental Justice, Amanda F. Watson

Georgia Law Review

PFAS are a family of manufactured chemicals that are highly persistent in the environment. Most people in the U.S. have been exposed to PFAS, but different groups of people may have higher exposure due to their environments. In recent years, peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that PFAS are linked to numerous adverse human health effects. As a result, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken a variety of actions to address PFAS, including proposing to designate PFOS and PFOA, two chemicals in the PFAS family, as hazardous substances under CERCLA, or Superfund. CERCLA is the primary legal mechanism in …

Energy Justice And Renewable Rikers, Rebecca Bratspies

University of Miami Law Review

Unsustainable energy practices generate the lion’s share of global carbon emissions as well as staggering levels of deadly particulate pollution. Replacing the current dirty, fossil fuel-based system with affordable, clean energy is both a human rights imperative and a climate change necessity. This transition, which has already begun, creates the opportunity to do things differently. By confronting the structural racism embedded in existing energy structures, we can build a just transition rather than just a transition. This Article uses New York City’s Renewable Rikers project as a case study to explore how we might take advantage of the intersections between …

Seeding A Movement: Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Mariaelena Huambachano

University of Miami Law Review

For many Indigenous peoples, well-being is bound up with and inseparable from the natural world. But since colonialism, Indigenous traditions and access to traditional foods or foodways have been disrupted, imperiling their health and well-being. In this Article, I discuss the role of Indigenous cosmovision/worldview and Indigenous Food Sovereignty in achieving environmental justice. Specifically, in this Article, I discuss that despite, or perhaps because of, efforts to deny Indigenous peoples’ access to healthy and culturally appropriate foods, Indigenous Food Sovereignty took a rise of preciousness in informing natural regenerative food systems, and ultimately, “holistic/collective well-being.”

Evolving Legal Conceptions Of “Energy Communities”, Uma Outka

University of Miami Law Review

The concept of “energy communities” has had long-standing and evolving significance in the United States and in other countries around the world. Under the Biden Administration, the term “energy communities” has acquired new legal meanings that differ by context and continue to evolve. This Article traces the shifting meaning of “energy communities” and examines how it relates to other dominant references to “communities” in the context of energy law and policy, including environmental justice, low-income, underserved, and disadvantaged communities, as well as newer community-scale energy system innovations, such as community solar or “advanced energy communities.” International comparisons, such as with …

Public Health Impacts And Intra-Urban Forced Displacement Due To Climate Gentrification In The Greater Miami Area—Community Lawyering For Environmental Justice And Equitable Development, Theresa Pinto, Abigail Fleming, Sabrina Payoute, Elissa Klein

University of Miami Law Review

Because Miami-Dade County is “ground zero” for such climate effects as sea-level rise and increasingly hazardous, climate-driven Atlantic hurricanes, the coral rock ridge that runs along the Eastern coast of South Florida is a prime target for redevelopment and “climate” gentrification. Through a community and movement lawyering for environmental justice approach, we partnered with local community organizations to contribute to the ongoing work of community-driven equitable development. In partnership, we developed an environmental public health study to understand and document the public health effects on disadvantaged communities in Miami-Dade County from forced intra-urban displacement due to redevelopment that is being …

Labor Rights In The Anthropocene: The Effects Of Climate Change On Undocumented Farm Workers, Sophia Anderson

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Reforming The Federal Regulatory Review Process, Joanne Spalding, Andres Restrepo

FIU Law Review

For decades, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has overseen the development of federal regulatory policies with a strong emphasis on benefit-cost analysis. Despite its conceptual appeal, this analytic tool consistently shortchanges environmental and public health protection, with especially negative consequences for environmental justice communities. In this article, we address some of those shortcomings, focusing in particular on the standard agency practice of arithmetically discounting regulatory costs and benefits that accrue in the future. We propose that the OIRA abandon this practice as it relates to non-market goods, such as human lives saved, and instead work toward a …

Old And New Environmental Racism, Tseming Yang

Utah Law Review

Over the past five decades, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) moved from purposeful disregard of environmental racism to a public embrace of environmental justice as an organizational priority. Unfortunately, its efforts to address environmental discrimination remain a work-in-progress. This Article posits that the Agency’s core difficulties have arisen out of its reluctance to accept the continuing salience of race and the substantive implications for its regulatory work. It has blinded the Agency to the evolving manifestations of environmental discrimination and associated harms. The effect has been to impede the aggressive enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, particularly the discriminatory effects regulations …

Environmental (In)Justice: Evaluating The Factors That Led To The Jackson Water Crisis & Proposing A Solution For Environmental Justice In Mississippi, Emily Brennan

Mississippi College Law Review

40,000. That is the number of residents that were left without potable water for nearly five weeks during Jackson, Mississippi’s February 2021 water crisis. An unusual cold front rolled through, freezing plant equipment, bursting water pipes, and causing many in Jackson to lose access to running water. This was not, however, the first time that Jackson residents had endured hardships with regard to their drinking water—it was just the first time that national attention turned to, and has seemed to remain on, Mississippi’s capital city. Those in Jackson are all too familiar with water pipes bursting, low water pressure, boil …

A Seat At Whose Table? Analyzing Detroit’S Community Benefit Ordinance As A Tool For Environmental Justice, Sarah Draughn Gargaro

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as the “just treatment and meaningful involvement” of all people in the decisionmaking that affects the environment and human health. Since the origins of the modern American environmental justice movement in the 1980s, activists have emphasized the importance of self-determination. Environmental justice requires that decision making processes center the voices of the individuals impacted by decisions made about the distributions of environmental assets and harms. There is a significant challenge, however, in designing community engagement practices that meaningfully involve community members. Since the 1990s, community benefits agreements have been heralded as an effective …

Abolition And Environmental Justice, Allegra M. Mcleod

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During the coronavirus pandemic, movements for penal abolition and racial justice achieved dramatic growth and increased visibility. While much public discussion of abolition has centered on the call to divest from criminal law enforcement, contemporary abolitionists also understand public safety in terms of building new life-sustaining institutions and collective structures that improve human well-being, linking penal divestment to environmental justice. In urging a reimagination of public safety, abolitionists envision much more than decriminalization or a reallocation of police functions to social service agencies or other alternatives to imprisonment and policing. Instead, for abolitionists, meaningful public safety requires, among other things, …

Federal Environmental Justice Legislation And Regulations, Nadia B. Ahmad

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Natural Resource Systems And The Evolution Of Environmental Law, Monika Ehrman

Pace Environmental Law Review

Professor Monika Ehrman provides a pragmatic response to Elliott and Esty’s proposal to end all environmental externalities, which she refers to as an “environmental law moonshot.” She examines the value of transforming environmental law and dreaming big as Elliott and Esty recommend, while discussing the practical considerations of doing so. Her considerations include incentivizing technological advancement, compensating environmentally harmed communities to address systemic issues, and breaking down silos in environmental law.

The Importance Of Accessible Government Data In Advancing Environmental Justice, Frank D. Lomonte, Daniel Delgado

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

Part I of this Article sets forth the history and animating principles of the environmental justice movement in the United States during the 1970s, which developed as an adjunct to the larger civil rights movement. Part II then turns to the role of documents and data in exposing where toxins present a risk to public health and where documentation habitually falls short. It discusses how freedom of information laws can unlock access to the documents and data that quantify environmental hazards but also how those laws fail to produce reliable results because of the influence of regulated industries. Part III …

Intersectional Management: An Analysis Of Cooperation And Competition On American Public Lands, Robin M. Rotman, Abigail M. Hunt

Faculty Publications

The United States government holds public lands in trust for the whole of the American people. This article focuses on National Monuments under the Antiquities Act. It argues that the federal government should renew its approach to the management of these lands by incorporating principles of environmental justice and long- term environmental viability. The article begins by examining the historical and legal foundations of federal lands in the United States, with a focus on the Antiquities Act. It then reflects on recent litigation and political controversy surrounding Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, to illustrate how the …

How Many More Brazilian Environmental Defenders Have To Perish Before We Act? President Lula's Challenge To Protect Environmental Quilombola Defenders, Sarah Dávila A.

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

The Global South has been historically marginalized and continues to suffer from systemic oppression, impeding the realization of their human rights. Afro-descendants and other minority populations in the Global South live in disproportionately environmentally unsafe conditions and are disproportionately more vulnerable to climate change and environmental harm. One of those populations are Quilombolas. Quilombolas are Brazilian Afro-descendant communities who continue to fight to protect their community rights to ancestral lands, natural resources, and survival as a people. The Brazilian government under former Brazilian President Bolsonaro engaged in a persistent and systematic campaign to target, attack, and kill defenders, including Quilombola …

Litigation To Protect The Marine Environment: Parallels And Synergies With Climate Litigation, Randall S. Abate, Nadine Nadow, Hayley-Bo Dorrian-Bak

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

The world’s oceans are in crisis. Climate change impacts, biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, fisheries collapse, impacts to marine mammals, and vessel-based pollution are among the many threats the marine environment faces today. Fish biomass is predicted to drop by 3% to 25% by the end of the century due to climate change. Worse still, the amount of plastic in the world’s aquatic ecosystems is on track to hit 23 to 37 million tons per year by 2040.

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This Article reviews recent successes and obstacles in using litigation as a tool to address these concerns across several contexts in the …

Editor's Note, Juliette Jackson, Bailey Nickoloff

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The Sustainable Development Law and Policy Brief (“SDLP”) is celebrating twenty-two years of legal scholarship on issues related to environmental, energy, natural resources, and international development law. SDLP continues to provide cutting-edge solutions to these legal issues in the face of the global COVID-19 Pandemic, while also transitioning back into a “new normal.” This issue is no different, as we published articles challenging our lawmakers and policy heads to address the impending needs of our communities to develop more sustainable infrastructure—needs that are only exacerbated by man-made climate change. We are proud of the work published, and we are forever …

Death By Committee: Reviving Federal Environmental Justice Legislation To Mitigate Disproportionate Impacts On Vulnerable Communities, Sara Babcock

Pace Environmental Law Review

This Note proposes legislation that provides an avenue for protecting the right to a clean and healthy environment by requiring agencies to consider vulnerable communities before initiating large-scale federal projects. Part I lays out the emergence of environmental justice issues in the United States, including its turning point. Part II introduces both successful and failed attempts at federal environmental justice legislation and analyzes why federal environmental justice legislation continuously fails. Part III dis- cusses how executive environmental justice action becomes pointless to the overall progression of environmental justice and examines President Biden’s progress in the first year of his presidency. …

Toxic Criminals: Prosecuting Individuals For Hazardous Waste Crimes Under The United States Resource Conservation And Recovery Act, Dr. Joshua Ozymy, Dr. Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The U.S. Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (“RCRA”) contains criminal provisions which allow prosecutors to seek substantial penalties when individuals commit hazardous waste crimes involving significant harm or culpable conduct. However, our empirical understanding of enforcement outcomes is limited. We used content analysis of 2,728 criminal prosecutions derived from U.S. EPA criminal investigations from 1983 to 2021 and examined all prosecutions of individual defendants for RCRA violations. Our results show that 222 prosecutions were adjudicated, with over $72.9 million in monetary penalties, 755 years of probation, and 451 years of incarceration levied at sentencing. Seventeen percent of prosecutions centered on …

About Sdlp, Sdlp

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The Sustainable Development Law & Policy Brief (ISSN 1552-3721) is a student-run initiative at American University Washington College of Law that is published twice each academic year. The Brief embraces an interdisciplinary focus to provide a broad view of current legal, political, and social developments. It was founded to provide a forum for those interested in promoting sustainable economic development, conservation, environmental justice, and biodiversity throughout the world.

What Makes It A Just Transition? A Case Study Of Renewable Rikers, Rebecca Bratspies

Pace Environmental Law Review

This essay offers New York City’s Renewable Rikers as an example of what a just transition might look like in practice. Specifically, this essay describes how Renewable Rikers connects the need for non-polluting energy infrastructure with a broader conversation about decarceration and racial justice to build an inclusive pathway for prosperity and environmental health for all New Yorkers. The first part of this essay sets the stage with a brief overview of the climate crisis. Part two sketches the contours of what constitutes a just transition as that term is used in the Green New Deal Resolution. Part three situates …

State Sequestration: Federal Policy Accelerates Carbon Storage, But Leaves Full Climate, Equity Protections To States, Gabriel Pacyniak

Faculty Scholarship

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the UN’s expert science panel—has repeatedly found that limiting climate change to prevent catastrophic harms will require at least some use of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), and may entail substantial deployments of this technology. There is significant uncertainty, however, about the level of lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions achievable in practice from varying CCS applications; some applications could even lead to net increases in emissions. In addition, a number of these applications create or maintain other harms, especially those related to fossil fuel extraction and use. For these reasons, many environmental justice advocates …

Separating Litigation: How Seps Demonstrate The Need For Centralized Environmental Civil Litigation, Jon Paul Suttile

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

This Note will proceed in four parts to examine why enabling EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] litigation autonomy over reestablishing the EPA as a traditional independent agency is a better way of achieving uniform enforcement of environmental policy and regulations. Part I will address the history of independent agencies. Part II will briefly overview the arguments for and against independent agencies and discuss how Supreme Court precedent affects independent agency status. Part III will focus on whether the EPA would benefit from independent agency status. Lastly, Part IV will focus on the use of Supplemental Environmental Projects (“SEPs”) in settlement agreements …

Criminalizing Environmental Degradation And Devastation: New Prospects For The Icc Rome Statute, Kelly Pisimisi

American University International Law Review

Over the last decade, steadily increasing voices are ringing the tocsin to the international community for the impact of human activities on climate and their potential consequences on human life and dignity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its recent (6th) Assessment Report, confirmed this assertion. Greenhouse gas concentrations and emissions (particularly CO2), as well as the retreat of arctic glaciers and the subsequent sea level rise causing—among other issues—the acidification of the oceanic waters, are some of the most evident human-induced implications on climate and the environment.

Using State Law Before The Glaciers Thaw: Climate Torts After Bp V. Baltimore, Jillian Mayer

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

We are living in the beginning stages of Earth’s sixth mass extinction. Since the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, the burning of fossil fuels has released huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses (“GHGs”) into the atmosphere. The increased concentration of GHGs causes the atmosphere to retain more heat. Consequently, ecosystems and weather patterns shift and change faster than most plants, animals, and human societies can adapt. Climate change threatens global peace, crashes economies, and creates humanitarian crises.