Law Commons^™

Predicting Consumer Demand Responses To Carbon Labels, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Sharon A. Shewmake, Abigail Okrent, Lanka Thabrew

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Providing carbon footprint labels for all food products is a daunting and potentially infeasible project. Knowing how consumers substitute away from high carbon goods and what they choose as substitutes is essential for understanding which goods are likely to result in meaningful reductions in carbon emissions. This paper proposes a model to systematically estimate how consumers will respond to information from a carbon footprint label. Our model uses consumers' value of their individual carbon footprint with own- and cross-price elasticities of demand data on carbon emissions from life cycle analysis to simulate shifts in consumer demand for 42 food products …

Trends In Environmental Law Scholarship 2008-2014, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Linda K. Breggin, Jamieson Brock, Clarke Agre

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute's (ELI's) Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. ELPAR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the best ideas about environmental law and policy from the legal academic literature. As part of the article selection process each year, Vanderbilt University Law School students assemble and review the environmental law articles published during the previous academic year. In this Comment, we draw on the results of the ELPAR article selection process to report on trends in environmental legal scholarship for academic …

Climate Change: Leveraging Legacy, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Kaitlin T. Raimi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article explores whether a private governance initiative can harness
legacy concerns to address climate change. The socio-temporal trap is an
important barrier to climate change mitigation: The costs of reducing carbon
emissions will be incurred by this generation, but most of the benefits will
accrue to future generations. Research suggests that social influences—
including concerns about legacy—can induce individuals to overcome
collective action problems, but individuals know that future generations will
not have information about who acted today in ways meriting social sanctions
or rewards. Insufficient information may undermine three aspects of legacy-
driven behavior: the concern about how …

The Private Rationality Of Bottled Water Drinking, W. Kip Viscusi, Joel Huber, Jason Bell

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article examines evidence for the private rationality of decisions to choose bottled water using a large, nationally representative sample. Consumers are more likely to believe that bottled water is safer or tastes better if they have had adverse experiences with tap water or live in states with more prevalent violations of EPA water quality standards. Perceptions of superior safety, taste, and convenience of bottled water boost consumption of bottled water. Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to drink bottled water due to their relatively greater exposure to unsafe water and greater risk beliefs. The coherent network of experiences, beliefs, …

Reconceptualizing The Future Of Environmental Law: The Role Of Private Climate Governance, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The title of this Symposium, Re-conceptualizing the Future of Environmental Law, accurately captures the challenge facing environmental law scholars and policymakers in 2015. The success of environmental law in the future will not arise from doubling down on the approaches developed over the last 50 years. Instead, it will arise from our willingness to learn from the past without being bound by the conceptual frameworks that dominated the early development of the field.

In particular, a successful future for environmental law is more likely to emerge if we acknowledge that the environmental problems, policy plasticity, and regulatory institutions that shaped …

Does Learning About Climate Change Adaptation Change Support For Mitigation?, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Heather Barnes Truelove, Amanda R. Carrico, David Dana

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Many have speculated that increased attention to climate change adaptation will reduce support for mitigation. The Risk Compensation Hypothesis suggests that remedies to reduce the impacts of risky behaviors can unintentionally increase those behaviors. The Risk Salience Hypothesis suggests that information about adaptation may increase the salience of impacts, and therefore increase mitigation support. Experiment 1 presented participants with a news article about an irrigation technology described as a way to improve efficiency (Pure Control), reduce emissions (Mitigation Control), or reduce drought vulnerability (Adaptation). Political moderates in the adaptation condition rated climate change as a higher political priority and were …

Us Climate Policy Needs Behavioural Science, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Amanda R. Carrico, Paul C. Stern, Thomas Dietz

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In a rare move, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in a new draft rule known as 'The Clean Power Plan', has signalled that it will allow states and utilities to meet emissions standards by reducing electricity demand. The details of this regulation will have a substantial impact on its effectiveness, creating a tremendous opportunity to put integrated, multidisciplinary science to the practical end of mitigating climate change. Huge untapped potential exists for using knowledge about how the public responds to new technology, financial incentives and regulations. Financial incentives for home weatherproofing, for example, have varied tenfold in their impact …

The Relative Weights Of Direct And Indirect Experiences In The Formation Of Environmental Risk Beliefs, W. Kip Viscusi, Richard J. Zeckhauser

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Direct experiences, we find, influence environmental risk beliefs more than the indirect experiences derived from outcomes to others. This disparity could have a rational basis. Or it could be based on behavioral proclivities in accord with the well-established availability heuristic or the vested-interest heuristic, which we introduce in this article. Using original data from a large, nationally representative sample, this article examines the perception of, and responses to, morbidity risks from tap water. Direct experiences have a stronger and more consistent effect on different measures of risk belief. Direct experiences also boost the precautionary response of drinking bottled water and …

Beyond Gridlock, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Jonathan A. Gilligan

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Private climate governance can achieve major greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions reductions while governments are in gridlock. Despite the optimism that emerged from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, almost a quarter century later the federal legislative process and international climate negotiations are years from a comprehensive response. Yet Microsoft, Google and many other companies have committed to become carbon neutral. Wal-Mart has partnered with the Environmental Defense Fund to secure 20 million tons of GHG emissions reductions from its suppliers around the world, an amount equal to almost half the emissions from the US iron and …

Environmental Law In Austerity, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman, Jonathan Nash

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Given the political dynamic in play at the national level, with the country evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, and incumbent Tea Party and other politicians highly critical of the EPA, there is no reason to think this trend in decreasing environmental budgets will change any time soon. In some states the trend is even more pronounced. Fiscal austerity has become the new norm. The interesting questions are whether this matters for environmental law, how it matters, and what it means going forward.