Law Commons^™

The International Response To Climate Change: An Agenda For Global Health, Lindsay F. Wiley, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As the international community negotiates a successor to the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), there is new reason to hope that meaningful action might be taken to prevent devastating climate change. Even the more ambitious mitigation targets currently under negotiation, however, will not be sufficient to avoid a profound effect on the public's health in coming decades, with the world's poorest, most vulnerable populations bearing the disproportionate burden. The influence of historic and current emissions will be so substantial that it is imperative to reduce global emissions while at the same time preparing …

Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Integrating Global Health Into The International Response To Climate Change, Lindsay F. Wiley

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The potentially groundbreaking negotiations currently underway on the international response to climate change and national implementation of commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) include a number of hotly contested issues: (1) what degree of climate change is acceptable as a basis for emissions targets, (2) to what extent and in what ways climate change mitigation should incorporate emissions reductions or increased sinks for developing countries, (3) whether the legal regime governing mitigation can take advantage of the huge mitigation potential of changed practices in the land use and agricultural sectors, (4) how adaptation should be …

Responsible Environmental Behavior, Energy Conservation, And Compact Fluorescent Bulbs: You Can Lead A Horse To Water, But Can You Make It Drink?, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Despite professing to care about the environment and supporting environmental causes, individuals behave in environmentally irresponsible ways like driving when they can take public transportation, littering, or disposing of toxic materials in unsound ways. This is the author's fourth exploration of how to encourage individuals to stop behaving irresponsibly about the environment they allege to care deeply about. The prior three articles all explored how the norm of environmental protection could be enlisted in this effort; this article applies those theoretical conclusions to the very practical task of getting people to switch the type of light bulb they use.

To …

The Problem With Particularized Injury: The Disjuncture Between Broad-Based Environmental Harm And Standing Jurisprudence, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Several recent events harmonically converged into the topic for this article. The first was a posting on Georgetown Law’s environmental law professors’ listserv by Professor John Bonine, which raised a number of questions about whether and how standing doctrine might be rethought in light of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Massachusetts v. EPA. That opinion relaxed the states’ standing burden because of the unique sovereign interests, finding that federalism bargaining earned states “special solicitude” when it came to meeting the Court’s standing requirements.

The second was a complaint filed by a consortium of regional environmental organizations, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, …

Civic Republicanism Provides Theoretical Support For Making Individuals More Environmentally Responsible, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The genesis for this essay is the recognition that individual behavior is contributing in a significant way to the remaining environmental problems we have. For a variety of reasons, ranging from the difficulty of trying to identify and then regulate all of these individual sources to the political backlash that might result if such regulation was tried, efforts to control that behavior have either failed or not been tried. The phenomenon of individuals as irresponsible environmental actors seems counter-intuitive given the durability of the environmental protection norm and polls that consistently show that people contribute to environmental causes, are willing …

Super Wicked Problems And Climate Change: Restraining The Present To Liberate The Future, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Climate change may soon have its “lawmaking moment” in the United States. The inherent problem with such lawmaking moments, however, is just that: they are moments. What Congress and the President do with much fanfare can quickly and quietly slip away in the ensuing years. This is famously so for environmental law. Subsequent legislative amendments, limited budgets, appropriations riders, interpretive agency rulings, massive delays in rulemaking, and simple nonenforcement are more than capable of converting a seemingly uncompromising legal mandate into nothing more than a symbolic aspirational statement. Climate change legislation is especially vulnerable to being unraveled over time for …

Assuming Personal Responsibility For Improving The Environment: Moving Toward A New Environmental Norm, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There is general agreement that we are nearing the end of achieving major gains in pollution abatement from traditional sources, that a significant portion of the remaining environmental problems facing this country is caused by individual behavior, and that efforts to control that behavior have either failed or not even been made.

The phenomenon of individuals as irresponsible environmental actors seems counterintuitive when polls show that people consistently rate protecting the environment among their highest priorities, contribute to environmental causes, and are willing to pay more to protect environmental resources.

This article is the author's second effort at understanding why …