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Deploying The Wto Agreement On Government Procurement (Gpa) To Enhance Sustainability And Accelerate Climate Change Mitigation, Robert D. Anderson, Antonella Salgueiro, Steven L. Schooner, Marc Steiner
Deploying The Wto Agreement On Government Procurement (Gpa) To Enhance Sustainability And Accelerate Climate Change Mitigation, Robert D. Anderson, Antonella Salgueiro, Steven L. Schooner, Marc Steiner
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Mitigating climate change and promoting sustainability are defining challenges of our time. Public procurement has a vital role to play in responding to the current crises. This article makes the case that the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA), and specifically the Work Programme on Sustainable Procurement that has been initiated pursuant to the Agreement, can serve as important instruments to promote sustainable approaches to public procurement internationally, consistent with the goals of climate change mitigation.
The Work Programme, which was established at the time of the GPA’s modernization in 2012 and on which important work has …
Litigation To Protect The Marine Environment: Parallels And Synergies With Climate Litigation, Randall S. Abate, Nadine O. Nadow, Hayley-Bo Dorrian-Bak
Litigation To Protect The Marine Environment: Parallels And Synergies With Climate Litigation, Randall S. Abate, Nadine O. Nadow, Hayley-Bo Dorrian-Bak
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This paper reviews recent successes and obstacles in using litigation as a tool to address issues in several contexts in the marine environment. It surveys developments at the international, national, and sub-national levels and offers lessons from creative climate litigation strategies as a way to enhance litigation to protect the marine environment. It also recommends ways in which the ocean-climate nexus can provide mutual benefits in advancing the agendas of climate change regulation and ocean stewardship.
Judicial Review Of Scientific Uncertainty In Climate Change Lawsuits: Deferential And Nondeferential Evaluation Of Agency Factual And Policy Determinations, Robert L. Glicksman, Daniel Kim, Keziah Groth-Tuft
Judicial Review Of Scientific Uncertainty In Climate Change Lawsuits: Deferential And Nondeferential Evaluation Of Agency Factual And Policy Determinations, Robert L. Glicksman, Daniel Kim, Keziah Groth-Tuft
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Scientific determinations are often at the heart of environmental disputes. When those disputes take the form of litigation, the courts may be called on to determine whether an administrative agency’s treatment of the science warrants deference. For several reasons, judges are inclined to apply deferential review to agency factual and policy science-based determinations. Most judges are not trained in the language and methods of science. They may be reluctant to intervene on matters on which their lack of expertise risks producing uninformed judgments. If a statute delegates to an agency the responsibility of making those determinations, courts may be loath …
No Time To Waste: Embracing Sustainable Procurement To Mitigate The Accelerating Climate Crisis, Steven L. Schooner
No Time To Waste: Embracing Sustainable Procurement To Mitigate The Accelerating Climate Crisis, Steven L. Schooner
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Procurement professionals will increasingly be asked to play an important role in adapting to and mitigating the effects of climate change. Unfortunately, we don't have time to waste, either feeling hopeless or waiting for changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and subsequent efforts to implement new regulations. The time to start progressing up the learning curve is now. We need to talk - seriously, thoughtfully - about climate change and sustainable procurement, particularly early in the acquisition planning process. We need to rethink the value proposition, particularly with regard to factoring in the social costs of continuing to rely …
‘Warming Up’ To Sustainable Procurement, Steven L. Schooner, Markus Speidel
‘Warming Up’ To Sustainable Procurement, Steven L. Schooner, Markus Speidel
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Procurement professionals will play a critical role in the belated but necessary effort to slow the pace of climate change. That critical, evolved role will lie in sustainable procurement, which, if effectively implemented, will dramatically alter markets and fundamentally change purchasing behaviors. To be effective, procurement professionals will need to rethink how we define our profession, assess our outcomes, and bring value to our government customers. Successfully establishing a sustainable procurement regime will require dramatic change, including, among other things, overcoming the persistent tyranny of low price, understanding and adopting lifecycle costing, considering externalities in the value proposition, and, of …
Legal Adaptive Capacity: How Program Goals And Processes Shape Federal Land Adaptation To Climate Change, Robert L. Glicksman, Alejandro E. Camacho
Legal Adaptive Capacity: How Program Goals And Processes Shape Federal Land Adaptation To Climate Change, Robert L. Glicksman, Alejandro E. Camacho
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
The degree to which statutory goals are pliable is likely to affect significantly the ability of an agency with regulatory or management responsibilities to achieve those objectives in the face of novel challenges or changing circumstances. This Article explores this dynamic by comparing the degree of “give” provided by the goals of the regimes governing management of the five types of federal public lands in responding to the challenges posed by climate change. It asserts that the extent of climate change adaptation in which an agency engages is influenced by a program’s legal adaptive capacity — the mutability of the …
Stranded Costs And Grid Decarbonization, Emily Hammond, Jim Rossi
Stranded Costs And Grid Decarbonization, Emily Hammond, Jim Rossi
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Over the past half century, energy law has endured many stranded cost experiments, each helping firms and customers adjust to a new normal. However, these past experiments have contributed to a myopic regulatory approach to past stranded cost recovery by: (1) endorsing a preference for addressing all stranded costs only after energy resource investment decisions have been made; and (2) fixating on the firm’s financial costs and protection of investors, rather than on the broader impacts of each on the energy system.
The current transition to decarbonization is already giving rise to stranded cost claims related to existing energy assets …
Debunking Revisionist Understandings Of Environmental Cooperative Federalism: Collective Action Responses To Air Pollution, Jessica Wentz
Debunking Revisionist Understandings Of Environmental Cooperative Federalism: Collective Action Responses To Air Pollution, Jessica Wentz
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
The federal Clean Air Act initiated Congress's venture into cooperative environmental federalism in 1970. Forty-five years later, misconceptions about the nature of that venture (and similar examples of cooperative federalism under other federal environmental statutes) persist. In particular, some recent judicial decisions characterize environmental cooperative federalism as an equal partnership between the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the states. They also take umbrage at efforts by EPA to override state policies and initiatives that fail to conform to the minimum responsibilities that the statutes impose on the states, characterizing them as unlawful affronts to state sovereignty.
This chapter argues that …
Geoengineering And The Science Communication Environment: A Cross-Cultural Experiment, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, Tor Tarantola, Carol L. Silva
Geoengineering And The Science Communication Environment: A Cross-Cultural Experiment, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, Tor Tarantola, Carol L. Silva
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
We conducted a two-nation study (United States, n = 1500; England, n = 1500) to test a novel theory of science communication. The cultural cognition thesis posits that individuals make extensive reliance on cultural meanings in forming perceptions of risk. The logic of the cultural cognition thesis suggests the potential value of a distinctive two-channel science communication strategy that combines information content (“Channel 1”) with cultural meanings (“Channel 2”) selected to promote open-minded assessment of information across diverse communities. In the study, scientific information content on climate change was held constant while the cultural meaning of that information was experimentally …
Natural Gas: A Long Bridge To A Promising Destination, Richard J. Pierce Jr
Natural Gas: A Long Bridge To A Promising Destination, Richard J. Pierce Jr
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
In this essay, Professor Pierce argues that the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing of shale formations that has nearly doubled US gas supplies over the last six years has the potential to yield a century of enormous environmental and economic benefits to the US and to the world.
International Trade And Investment Law And Carbon Management Technologies, Steve Charnovitz
International Trade And Investment Law And Carbon Management Technologies, Steve Charnovitz
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases will require the development of carbon management technologies that are not currently available or that are not currently cost-effective. While market mechanisms such as carbon pricing must play a central role in stimulating the development of these technologies, governmental policy aimed at fostering carbon management technologies and lowering their costs must also play a part. Both types of policies will form part of an optimal greenhouse gas control portfolio. This article develops a framework of international trade and investment law insofar as they may affect carbon management technologies. While it is commonly perceived that international …
Governance Of Public Lands, Public Agencies, And Natural Resources, Robert L. Glicksman
Governance Of Public Lands, Public Agencies, And Natural Resources, Robert L. Glicksman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Climate change presents serious challenges to the agencies that manage the federal public lands. These changes require new management strategies that may be difficult to design and implement because of internal agency resistance to altering traditional ways of doing business. In addition, there is likely to be a lack of fit between some of the laws from which the agencies derive their management authority and the problems posed by climate change, which differ from those Congress envisioned when it adopted those laws and which undermine some of the key assumptions underpinning those laws. This chapter describes the manner in which …
The Polarizing Impact Of Science Literacy And Numeracy On Perceived Climate Change Risks, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Maggie Wittlin, Paul Slovic, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Gregory N. Mandel
The Polarizing Impact Of Science Literacy And Numeracy On Perceived Climate Change Risks, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Maggie Wittlin, Paul Slovic, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Gregory N. Mandel
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension. The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled. Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. An empirical study found no support for this position. Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. This result suggests that public divisions over …
Climate Change And The Puget Sound: Building The Legal Framework For Adaptation, Robert L. Glicksman
Climate Change And The Puget Sound: Building The Legal Framework For Adaptation, Robert L. Glicksman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
The scope of climate change impacts is expected to be extraordinary, touching every ecosystem on the planet and affecting human interactions with the natural and built environment. From increased surface and water temperatures to sea level rise and more frequent extreme weather events, climate change promises vast and profound alterations to our world. Indeed, scientists predict continued climate change impacts regardless of any present or future mitigation efforts due to the long-lived nature of greenhouse gases emitted over the last century. The need to adapt to this new future is crucial. Adaptation may take a variety of forms, from implementing …
Solar Energy Development On The Federal Public Lands: Environmental Trade-Offs On The Road To A Lower-Carbon Future, Robert L. Glicksman
Solar Energy Development On The Federal Public Lands: Environmental Trade-Offs On The Road To A Lower-Carbon Future, Robert L. Glicksman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
The federal government has endorsed more extensive use of the federal public lands for the production of solar power, both to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change and to bolster the security of domestic energy supplies. Spurred by grant money made available under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 2010 approved nine utility-scale solar projects on public lands in California and Nevada. These projects were designed to avoid adversely affecting the habitats of endangered and threatened species that frequent the desert southwest and cultural resources important to …
Equitable Utilization Of The Atmosphere: A Rights-Based Approach To Climate Change, Dinah L. Shelton
Equitable Utilization Of The Atmosphere: A Rights-Based Approach To Climate Change, Dinah L. Shelton
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This paper advocates for a rights-based approach to climate change. I argue that the government of a state may, and arguably, has the duty to assert and defend the rights of its inhabitants, rather than remaining passive and ultimately defending itself for alleged rights-violating acts and omissions. The premise underlying this approach is that governments exist for the purpose of protecting the sovereign rights of the state and the human rights of their inhabitants, past and future. First, the paper examines the rights of permanent sovereignty over natural rights. Second, it considers interstate cases on trans-frontier pollution, including the landmark …
Ecosystem Resilience To Disruptions Linked To Global Climate Change: An Adaptive Approach To Federal Land Management, Robert L. Glicksman
Ecosystem Resilience To Disruptions Linked To Global Climate Change: An Adaptive Approach To Federal Land Management, Robert L. Glicksman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Global climate change presents daunting challenges to the federal government’s ability to manage its lands and resources in ways that ensure that the priceless natural heritage that these land and resources comprise remains available in substantially unimpaired condition to both present and future generations of Americans. One of the challenges results from the fact that the laws governing the activities of federal land management agencies have outlasted the scientific assumptions on which those laws were based. In particular, Congress adopted many of those laws on the assumption that ecological systems tend toward a natural equilibrium. Subsequently, the science of ecology …