Law Commons^™

California Climate Change Lawsuits: Can The Courts Help With Sea-Level Rise, And Who Knew What When?, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Between 1900 and 2005, sea level along the extensive California coast rose seven inches (17.8 centimeters), and sea level rise there is still accelerating. Indeed, as the U.S. Global Change Research Program reported in 2014, the California coast faces a multitude of economic and ecological challenges as a result of climate change.Small wonder, then, that the State of California and several California communities—especially those in the San Francisco Bay area—have brought a series of lawsuits against some of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, seeking both to slow the pace of climate change and to secure financial judgments …

Eulogizing Renewable Energy Policy, Lincoln L. Davies

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Across the globe, renewable energy policy is changing. The change is coming so quickly that it appears the world is now on the cusp of a new future. The renewable energy policy of the past is on its way out; a new and different policy is taking its place. That new policy has different end goals, implementing mechanisms, and strategies than its predecessors. This is not just policy evolution but a policy revolution. The labels of the past soon no longer will apply because they are being merged and blurred — and replaced. Using the U.S. electricity sector as its …

Cleaning Up Our Toxic Coasts: A Precaution And Human Health-Based Approach To Coastal Adaptation, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Hurricanes in the United States in 2005, 2012, and 2017 have all revealed an insidious problem for coastal climate change adaptation: toxic contamination in the coastal zone. As sea levels rise and violent coastal storms become increasingly frequent, this legacy of toxic pollution threatens immediate emergency response, longer term human health, and coastal ecosystems’ capacity to adapt to changing coastal conditions.

Focusing on Hurricane Harvey’s 2017 devastation of Houston, Texas, as its primary example, this Article first discusses the toxic legacy still present in many coastal environments. It then examines the existing laws available to clean up the coastal zone—CERCLA, …

Toward A National Conservation Network Act: Transforming Landscape Conservation On The Public Lands Into Law, Robert B. Keiter

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The United States has made a remarkable commitment to nature conservation on the federal public lands. The country’s existing array of national parks, wilderness areas, national monuments, wildlife refuges, and other protective designations encompasses roughly 150 million acres, or nearly 40 percent of the “lower 48” federal estate. A robust land trust movement has protected another 56 million acres of privately owned lands. Advances in scientific knowledge reveal that these protected enclaves, standing alone, are insufficient to protect native ecosystems and at-risk wildlife from climate change impacts and unrelenting development pressures. Abetted by existing law, conservation policy is now focusing …

Up For Grabs: The State Of Fossils Protection In (Recently) Unprotected National Monuments, John C. Ruple, Michael Henderson, Caitlin Ceci

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

On December 4, 2017, President Trump removed 2 million acres of land from the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. President Trump justified the reductions in part by claiming that many of the objects contained in the original monuments were already protected by other federal laws, and that the protections previously afforded to sixty-three percent of the land in the two original monuments were “unnecessary for the care and management of the objects to be protected within the monument[s].” This article explains why, contrary to the President’s assertions, plant and invertebrate fossils on the more than two million acres …

Law Professor Amicus Brief In Massachusetts Lobstermen's Association V. Ross Regarding The Legality Of The Northeast Canyons And Seamounts Marine National Monument, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This amicus brief discusses how, under domestic law, the President can establish national monuments, pursuant to the Antiquities Act, in the ocean. It focuses on the seabed's status as "land owned or controlled by the federal government" under U.S. law, as the Antiquities Act requires, and on the President's authority to regulate fishing within marine national monuments.

The Control Of Methane And Voc Emissions From Oil And Gas Operations In The Western United States, Arnold W. Reitze Jr.

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the regulation of hydrocarbon emissions, including the emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from the oil and gas industry in the western United States. It covers the regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Land Management, and other Federal agencies. It also discusses the state laws of the major oil and gas producing western states: California, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. It covers operations on public, state, and private lands, but it does not cover oil and gas operations on Indian lands that are the subject of the author’s previous article.

Harvest The Wind, Harvest Your Dinner: Using Law To Encourage An Offshore Energy-Food Multiple-Use Nexus, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Most scholars discuss the food-water-energy-climate nexus as it emerges on land. Less attention has been paid to the food-water-energy-climate nexus as it exists in the ocean, but that nexus exists—and it is beginning to be strained. This Article, a companion piece to the forthcoming “It’s Not Just an Offshore Wind Farm,” explores the international drive to combine offshore wind facilities with marine aquaculture, an emerging example of the water-energy-food nexus in the marine environment. Many nations are becoming increasingly interested in both offshore wind farms and open ocean marine aquaculture, but both enterprises take up considerable space in the marine …

Natural Resources And Natural Law Part I: Prior Appropriation, Robert W. Adler

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In recent years there has been a resurgence of civil disobedience over public land policy in the West, sometimes characterized by armed confrontations between ranchers and federal officials. This trend reflects renewed assertions that applicable positive law violates the natural rights (sometimes of purportedly divine origin) of ranchers and other land users, particularly under the prior appropriation doctrine and grounded in Lockean theories of property. At the same time, Native Americans and environmental activists on the opposite side of the political-environmental spectrum have also relied on civil disobedience to assert natural rights to a healthy environment, based on public trust …

Cultivating A Culture Of Environmental And Natural Resources Collaboration In Utah, Danya Rumore

Environmental Dispute Resolution Program

Unhealthy air quality. Growing demands for water in an arid state. Conflicts over public lands and how those lands should be managed. These are just a few environmental and natural resources challenges here in Utah that we hear “keep people up at night.” Such challenges are indeed daunting, and they will not be easily solved. However, in every challenge there is an opportunity. And when it comes to environmental and natural resources challenges, there is a powerful opportunity for people to work together to find mutually beneficial solutions that are, as consensus building guru Larry Susskind puts it, “fair, efficient, …