Law Commons^™

Investment Promotion Agencies And Sustainable Fdi: Moving Toward The Fourth Generation Of Investment Promotion, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment, World Association Of Investment Promotion Agencies

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

In April and May 2010, CCSI supported WAIPA to conduct its annual survey. This report, Investment Promotion Agencies and Sustainable FDI: Moving toward the Fourth Generation of Investment Promotion, benchmarks the responses of IPAs regarding sustainable FDI and its four dimensions (economic development, environmental sustainability, social development, governance) and finds, among other things, that these are unevenly addressed by investment promotion strategies and investment incentives. The report also draws attention to the desirability of attracting sustainable FDI, rather than focusing on volume of investment alone.

In 2017, CCSI also helped the World Association of Investment Promotion Agencies (WAIPA) to conduct …

Introductory Comments: The Current State Of Climate Change Law, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The three words that best characterize the current state of climate change law are fragmentation, uncertainty, and insufficiency.

Model Green Building Ordinance For Municipalities Open For Comment, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

In 2009, the residential and commercial building sector was responsible for more than 50 percent of total annual U.S. energy consumption, 74 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption, and 39 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

There has been a growing movement to encourage “green buildings” – those that generally use water, energy and materials more efficiently than conventional buildings, and utilize design, construction and siting features to reduce their negative environmental impacts.

Defining The Challenge In Implementing Climate Change Policy, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

When Jonathan Cannon, Michael Vandenbergh, and I started planning this conference last summer, we planned to call it “Implementing Climate Change Legislation.” We assumed that by today a new law aimed at addressing climate change would be in place, or at least would be in the final polishing stage, in the United States. We even imagined that the federal agencies would be rolling up their sleeves to implement not only the new U.S. climate law but also our part of the comprehensive climate pact that the nations of the world had agreed to in Copenhagen.

Litigation Under Seqra Declining, Exemption Use Is Rising, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), the statute that requires the preparation of environmental impact statements (EISs) for discretionary actions by state and local governments that may have a significant effect on the environment, has long been by far the most fertile source of environmental litigation in New York. That is still so, but the volume has declined, probably because much of such litigation grows out of disputes over proposed construction projects, and there are fewer of those in the recent recession.

Colorado’S Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act: Encouraging Conversion Of Coal Plants To Natural Gas, Jonathan Talamini

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

The State of Colorado's recently-enacted Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act (CACJA) requires utilities to create plans that reduce NOx emissions by 70% at a specified portion of their coal-fired electricity generation facilities by the end of 2017. It allows utilities to use many different methods to achieve those reductions, but encourages and incentivizes the replacement of coal-based generation with natural gas. Utilities must seek approval for their plans from state agencies and must work closely with those agencies in designing the plans. This paper discusses the legal, political, and economic context for CACJA, and highlights the bill's advantages and disadvantages as …

Municipal Green Building Ordinances In The U.S., Marne Sussman

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Numerous municipalities in the U.S. have created green building ordinances over the past few years. These ordinances are cataloged and examined in the municipal green building ordinance spreadsheets on the website of the Center for Climate Change Law. To better understand the decisions that need to be made in developing a model green building ordinance, this paper discusses the different choices made by the municipalities that developed the ordinances identified in the spreadsheets and notes areas of consensus among municipalities.

Cap-And-Trade Under The Clean Air Act?: Rethinking Section 115, Hannah Chang

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Section 115 of the Clean Air Act, addressing international air pollution, is widely-dismissed as a viable avenue for mitigation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) because of a misplaced assumption that National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) must be established for GHGs before Section 115 authority can be exercised for GHGs. This paper explores the statutory language and legislative history of Section 115 to refute this conventional view, and argues that Section 115 can play a role in facilitating the establishment of a cap-and-trade program for GHGs without the establishment of NAAQS for GHGs.

"It's Not Easy Being Green": Local Initiatives, Preemption Problems, And The Market Participant Exception, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

This Article considers whether the market participant exception should be interpreted to exempt local climate change and sustainability initiatives from the "ceilings" imposed by existing environmental laws and pending federal climate change legislation. In the decades-long absence of federal action on climate change, local governments – along with the states – positioned themselves at the forefront of climate change and sustainability planning. In fact, state and local actions account for most of the nation's greenhouse gas reduction efforts to date. Yet, front-running localities are being limited by a preemption doctrine that fails to account for both the motives behind their …

Model Green Building Ordinance Proposed For Adoption By New York Municipalities, Michael B. Gerrard, Jason James

Faculty Scholarship

After failing to pass in the 111th Congress, comprehensive federal climate legislation appears stalled until at least 2013. Regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under existing federal law, while progressing, has encountered challenges. Even state initiatives, such as California's A.B. 32, lie on less than certain ground. But not all action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions must be taken on the federal or state level. Through regulating buildings, municipalities can play a crucial role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions while improving the health and welfare of their local communities.

In 2009, the residential and commercial building sector was responsible for more …

The Epa’S Proposed Transport Rule: Implications For Climate Change Regulation, Jessica A. Wentz

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

On July 6, 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a Clean Air Act rulemaking to reduce sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from power plants in the eastern United States. If it survives legal scrutiny, the rule will impose a hybrid cap-and-trade program with state-specific SO2 and NOx emission budgets and limited interstate trading. This paper discusses the rule's requirements, how it compares to its predecessor (the Clean Air Interstate Act), the projected impact on air quality and public health, and implications for future climate change policy.

Preemption And Alteration Of Epa And State Authority To Regulate Greenhouse Gases In The Kerry-Lieberman Bill, Bradford Mccormick, Hannah Chang

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

The recently-released discussion draft of the Kerry-Lieberman bill (KL), officially titled the American Power Act, contains numerous provisions that affect the role of states in addressing climate change as well as the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority under the Clean Air Act (CAA). Preemption has been the subject of intense debate and speculation since the passage of the Waxman-Markey climate bill (WM) in June 2009, and commentators have questioned whether KL’s preemption measures would (and should) have the effect of “a scalpel or a sledgehammer” on existing state and EPA authority. The following paper contributes to the discussion by summarizing …

The Politics Of Nature: Climate Change, Environmental Law, And Democracy, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars’ discussions of climate change assume that the issue is one mainly of engineering incentives, and that “environmental values” are too weak, vague, or both to spur political action to address the emerging crisis. This Article gives reason to believe otherwise. The major natural resource and environmental statutes, from the acts creating national forests and parks to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, have emerged from precisely the activity that discussions of climate change neglect: democratic argument over the value of the natural world and its role in competing ideas of citizenship, national purpose, and the role and …

Climate Regulation Without Congressional Action, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The apogee of congressional support for comprehensive climate change legislation came on June 26, 2009, when the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy Security Act (Waxman-Markey) by a vote of 219 to 212. Its Senate counterpart, the American Power Act, known first as Kerry-Lieberman-Graham and then just Kerry-Lieberman, never gained traction, and in July 2010 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) announced he would not bring it to the floor this year.

Many observers believe Republicans will take control of the House and possibly of the Senate after the Nov. 2, 2010, elections. Republican leadership in both chambers …

Epa's Impending Greenhouse Gas Regulations: Digging Through The Morass Of Litigation, Gregory E. Wannier

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

As the U.S. Congress has failed to pass meaningful climate legislation, the EPA has initiated a series of regulations under the Clean Air Act designed to recognize greenhouse gases as endangering human health and welfare, and set greenhouse gas emission standards for vehicle fleets and for major stationary sources. Unsurprisingly these efforts have been challenged in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. This paper discusses both the substantive and procedural issues surrounding the cases, all of which merit attention: in the absence of viable climate legislation these decisions will have important bearing on the extent to which the United States …

Climate Change And The Wto: Legal Issues Concerning Border Tax Adjustments, Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Climate change is a multi-faceted discussion: for the trading community, one of many contentious issues in the policy debate over how to deal with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is the appropriate role of Border Carbon Adjustments (BCAs)/Border Tax Adjustments (BTAs). The role of BCAs has been analyzed in a very large policy discussion literature, as well as in a significant number of academic writings in both law and economics. One can safely summarize the state of each of these literatures as bewildering: in the legal literature there is still no consensus as to whether such measures are legal under the …

Greenhouse Gas Disclosure Requirements Are Proliferating, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

While climate change legislation is mired in Congress, several units in the Obama administration have been using their existing statutory authority to adopt rules or guidance requiring extensive disclosures about greenhouse gases (GHGs) in a wide variety of contexts. Every registered public company, the operators of many industrial facilities, and those involved in significant federal actions are now or will soon be covered by one or more of these requirements.