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Vanderbilt University Law School

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Climate change

2012

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Law

An Empirical Assessment Of Climate Change In The Courts: A New Jurisprudence Or Business As Usual?, J.B. Ruhl, David L. Markell Jan 2012

An Empirical Assessment Of Climate Change In The Courts: A New Jurisprudence Or Business As Usual?, J.B. Ruhl, David L. Markell

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

While legal scholarship seeking to assess the impact of litigation on the direction of climate change policy is abundant and growing in leaps and bounds, to date it has relied on and examined only small, isolated pieces of the vast litigation landscape. Without a complete picture of what has and has not been within the sweep of climate change litigation, it is difficult to offer a robust evaluation of the past, present, and future of climate change jurisprudence. Based on a comprehensive empirical study of the status of all (201) climate change litigation matters filed through 2010, this Article is …


Global Public Goods, Governance Risk, And International Energy, Timothy Meyer Jan 2012

Global Public Goods, Governance Risk, And International Energy, Timothy Meyer

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Scholars and commentators have long argued that issue linkages provide a way to increase cooperation on global public goods by increasing participation in global institutions, building consensus, and deterring free-riding. In this symposium article, I argue that the emphasis on the potential of issue linkages to facilitate cooperation in these ways has caused commentators to underestimate how common features of international legal institutions designed to accomplish these aims can actually undermine those institutions’ ability to facilitate cooperation. I focus on two features of institutional design that are intended to encourage participation in public goods institutions but can create the risk …


Good For You, Bad For Us: The Financial Disincentive For Net Demand, Jim Rossi, Michael P. Vandenbergh Jan 2012

Good For You, Bad For Us: The Financial Disincentive For Net Demand, Jim Rossi, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article examines a principal barrier to reducing U.S. carbon emissions — electricity distributors’ financial incentives to sell more of their product — and introduces the concept of net demand reduction (“NDR”) as a primary goal for the modern energy regulatory system. Net electricity demand must decrease substantially from projected levels for the United States to achieve widely-endorsed carbon targets by 2050. Although social and behavioral research has identified cost-effective ways to reduce electricity demand, state-of-the-art programs to curtail demand have not been implemented on a widespread basis. We argue that electric distribution utilities are important gatekeepers that can determine …


Supply And Demand: Barriers To A New Energy Future, Jim Rossi, Michael P. Vandenbergh, J. B. Ruhl Jan 2012

Supply And Demand: Barriers To A New Energy Future, Jim Rossi, Michael P. Vandenbergh, J. B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Like many fields, energy law has had its ups and downs. A period of remarkable activity in the 1970s and early 1980s focused on the efficiencies arising from deregulation of energy markets, but the field attracted much less attention during the 1990s. In the last decade, a new burst of activity has occurred, driven largely by the implications of energy production and use for climate change. In effect, this new scholarship is asking what efficiency means in a carbon-constrained world. Accounting for carbon has induced scholars to challenge the implicit assumption of the early scholarship that the price of energy …


Good For You, Bad For Us: The Financial Disincentive For Net Demand Reduction, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Jim Rossi Jan 2012

Good For You, Bad For Us: The Financial Disincentive For Net Demand Reduction, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article examines a principal barrier to reducing U.S. carbon emissions — electricity distributors’ financial incentives to sell more of their product — and introduces the concept of net demand reduction (“NDR”) as a primary goal for the modern energy regulatory system. Net electricity demand must decrease substantially from projected levels for the United States to achieve widely-endorsed carbon targets by 2050. Although social and behavioral research has identified cost-effective ways to reduce electricity demand, state-of-the-art programs to curtail demand have not been implemented on a widespread basis. We argue that electric distribution utilities are important gatekeepers that can determine …