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Full-Text Articles in Law
Low Carbon Land Use: Paris, Pittsburgh, And The Ipcc, John R. Nolon
Low Carbon Land Use: Paris, Pittsburgh, And The Ipcc, John R. Nolon
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
This article describes strategies that local governments are employing to both mitigate and adapt to climate change, using their state-given powers to plan community development and to regulate private building. Local governments have significant legal authority to shape human settlements and, in so doing, lower CO2 emissions from buildings and vehicles, increase the sequestration of carbon by the natural environment, and promote distributed energy systems and renewable energy facilities that lower fossil fuel consumption. Local elected leaders are highly motivated to avoid the on-the-ground consequences of our changing climate. The effects of climate change manifest themselves at the local level, …
Incentive Compatible Climate Change Mitigation: Moving Beyond The Pledge And Review Model, Gabriel Weil
Incentive Compatible Climate Change Mitigation: Moving Beyond The Pledge And Review Model, Gabriel Weil
Scholarly Works
Climate change represents a global commons problem, where individuals, businesses, and nation-states all lack sufficient incentives to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to levels consistent with meeting their collectively agreed upon mitigation goals. The current "pledge and review" paradigm for global climate change mitigation, which many see as a major breakthrough, relies primarily on moral pressure, reputational incentives, and global public opinion to foster cooperation on mitigation efforts over and above those driven by maximization of narrow conceptions of national interests. Given the scale of the emissions reductions required to meet stated mitigation goals, the substantial economic costs of deep …
Federalism Hedging, Entrenchment, And The Climate Challenge, William W. Buzbee
Federalism Hedging, Entrenchment, And The Climate Challenge, William W. Buzbee
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The virtues and effects of federalism continue to generate political, judicial and scholarly ferment. While some federalism partisans champion exclusivity and separation, others praise the more common political choice to retain federal and state regulatory overlap and interaction. Much of this work, however, focuses on government learning or rule clarity, giving little or no attention to how different federalism choices can heighten or hedge risks of regulatory failure and policy reversal. These debates play out with unusual fervor and with high stakes in battles over climate change regulation. Despite broad agreement that any effective climate policy intervention must include national …