Environmental Law Commons^™

Accountability For Pesticide Poisoning Of Undocumented Farmworkers, Elizabeth Lincoln

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

Crafting A Standard: Environmental Crimes As Crimes Against Humanity Under The International Criminal Court, Jessica Durney

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

Harvey, Irma, And The Nfip: Did The 2017 Hurricane Season Matter To Flood Insurance Reauthorization?, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has become a coastal hurricane insurance program—a fact that is bankrupting it. As a result of climate change, the ocean surrounding the United States is both rising and becoming warmer, and hurricanes and other coastal storms are projected to become both more frequent and more destructive. While no particular hurricane can yet be blamed exclusively on climate change, these projections nevertheless have real implications for the future of the NFIP.

In 2017, Congress was gearing up to reauthorize the NFIP just as the United States entered its worst hurricane season in over a decade. …

A Response To Dismantling Monuments, John C. Ruple

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This article refutes the main arguments made in Dismantling Monuments, which recently appeared in the Florida Law Review. It shows that national monument designations have been used to protect large landscapes for more than a century, and that no legal challenge to a monument’s size has ever succeeded. It then explains why the weight of evidence suggests that Congress, in passing the Antiquities Act, intended to endow the President with the power to designate national monuments; but that Congress did not intend to vest the President with the power to dramatically reduce them. It also dispels notions that in reducing …

Peddling Ignorance: A New Falsity Standard For Scientific Knowledge Fraud Cases, Wes Henricksen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Food, Fracking, And Folly, Melissa Mortazavi

Faculty Articles

Few industries in the United States carry the clout and capital of the oil and gas and agricultural sectors. Economic behemoths, their booms and busts shape the destinies of states, define national policy, and secure the life or death of small towns across the United States. Like it or not, the agriculture and oil and gas industries have strong lobbies and vehement and mobilized constituencies. Recent years have seen both sectors facing public push-back on modern trends in extraction, growth, and methods of production. In response to these developments, these industries have used their considerable political capital to seek new …

Using Drones To Fight Slavery In The Fields: An Examination Of The Practicality And Constitutionalityof Applying 21st Century Technology To A 21st Century Problem, Claire Wilkens

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

Compacts Of Free Association-Type Agreements: A Life Preserver For Small Island Sovereignty In An Era Of Climate Change?, Philip G. Dabbagh

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

Using Eias In Our Research, Madison E. Condon

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

A description of how researchers at the Columbia Water Center use environmental impact assessments in their research projects.

Human Rights And Article 6 Of The Paris Agreement: Ensuring Adequate Protection Of Human Rights In The Sdm And Itmo Frameworks, Romany M. Webb, Jessica A. Wentz

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Article 6 of the Paris Agreement recognizes the right of Parties to cooperate in the implementation of their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) through both market- and non-market-based approaches. One market-based approach is outlined in Article 6.2 which provides for “the use of internationally transferred mitigation outcomes [(ITMOs)] towards” NDCs. This is widely seen as establishing a “bottom-up” approach, whereby “mitigation outcomes,” representing emission reduction credits, can be transferred internationally and then become ITMOs. It can be contrasted with other market-based approaches that are “top-down,” involving centralized programs supporting emission reduction projects. One such program is created in Article 6.4 of …

Prison Preparedness And Legal Obligations To Protect Prisoners During Natural Disasters, William Omorogieva

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Since at least 2004, the intensity of hurricanes and the damage they have caused in America has increased significantly. After the turbulent hurricane season of 2017, citizens should recognize the elevated risks to safety that occur when individuals stay put, especially during high-intensity hurricanes (Category 3 and higher). States of emergency and evacuation orders have been declared recently in many states and cities that anticipated extreme hurricane conditions. However, even with increased calls for evacuations, warnings from public officials, and around the clock media coverage, a significant portion of the population has continued to be overlooked during times of natural …

Expertise Scientifique Et Lien De Causalité Dans Le Cadre Du Contentieux Climatique: Le Point De Vue De La Doctrine Américaine, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Au cours des dernières années, il y a eu une augmentation remarquable du nombre d’actions judiciaires visant à demander aux Gouvernements et aux acteurs privés de rendre des comptes de leur inaction face aux changements climatiques. La « science de l’attribution » du changement climatique – c’est-à-dire la capacité de détecter les changements environnementaux et de les attribuer à l’augmentation des émissions de gaz à effet de serre – joue un rôle central dans bon nombre de ces actions : elle permet en effet de fonder à la fois l’attribution d’événements extrêmes au changement climatique et d’émissions de gaz à …

Microgrids And Resilience To Climate-Driven Impacts On Public Health, Justin Gundlach

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

“Resilience” has burst into the lexicons of several policy areas in recent years, owing in no small part to climate change’s amplification of extreme events that severely disrupt the operation of natural, social, and engineered systems. Fostering resilience means anticipating severe disruptions and planning, investing, and designing so that such disruptions, which are certain to occur, are made shallower in depth and shorter in duration. Thus a resilient system or community can continue functioning despite disruptive events, return more swiftly to routine function following disruption, and incorporate new information so as to improve operations in extremis and speed future restorations. …

Climate Change Impacts On The Bulk Power System: Assessing Vulnerabilities And Planning For Resilience, Justin Gundlach, Romany M. Webb

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

As the scale, speed, and implications of climate change come into focus, stakeholders in the electricity sector are finding it increasingly difficult to turn a blind eye. However, many have opted to attend to climate impacts in a piecemeal fashion, often merely responding to particular extreme events – or types of extreme events, such as coastal storms or floods – and failing to consider the larger phenomenon. This is true of the bulk power system (BPS) in regions overseen by Independent System Operators and Regional Transmission Organizations (collectively, ISO/RTOs), none of which have comprehensively assessed their systems’ vulnerabilities to climate …

The Built Environment, Justin Gundlach, Jennier Klein

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

The built environment, which includes not only buildings but infrastructure, mediates several important climate impacts on public health and is also subject to diverse legal requirements. It is a subject of particular focus for policy efforts aimed at promoting adaptive responses to climate change on the part of institutions and individuals. This chapter presents key examples of public health impacts that arise from climate change but are mediated – possibly mitigated, possibly exacerbated - by elements of the built environment. It also describes the process and substance of adaptive responses to those impacts. Having presented these physical and policy contexts …

Join The Parties: 25+ Ways To Promote Participation In Multilateral Environmental Agreements, Susan Biniaz

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Negotiators of multilateral environmental agreements are frequently faced with the challenge of striking the right balance between stringency of commitment and breadth of participation. A perfect agreement on paper, with strong commitments and a robust compliance mechanism, might attract too few Parties (or too few key Parties) to achieve the agreement’s environmental objective. Conversely, broad participation in a weak agreement might also fail to accomplish the agreement’s goals.

This paper focuses on the various ways in which negotiators have worked to encourage participation in multilateral environmental agreements. In some cases, they involve steps taken before and during the negotiation of …

From Prohibition To Mandate: The Problem Of Cost In Environmental Regulation, Cameron Franey

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Root And Branch: The Thirteenth Amendment And Environmental Justice, Mehmet K. Konar-Steenberg

Faculty Scholarship

Forty years since the birth of the environmental justice movement, environmental injustice persists. One reason is the failure to identify a viable constitutional root for environmental justice doctrine in either the Fourteenth Amendment or Commerce Clause. Accordingly, this essay argues that the Thirteenth Amendment might provide a fertile environment for a flourishing law of environmental justice.

Part I will describes how environmental justice’s distributive justice vision was at odds with environmental law’s positivist, proceduralist core, and how that difference helps to account for the constitutional difficulties that followed. Part II describe one of those difficulties: the disparate impact problem and …

Indeconstructible: The Triumph Of The Environmental “Administrative State”, Stephen M. Johnson

Articles

Shortly after the 2017 Presidential inauguration, a senior advisor to the President proclaimed that a top priority of the Administration would be the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” A primary target of the Administration’s deconstruction efforts was the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and federal environmental regulations.

While the President can use a variety of tools, including the appointment power, budget power, treaty power, and executive orders, to influence the manner in which the EPA and other agencies interpret and enforce laws, the President has very little power to unilaterally “deconstruct the administrative state.” The “administrative state” is a creation …

Troubled Water: Building A Bridge To Clean Energy Through Small Hydropower Regulatory Reform, Samuel J. Panarella

Faculty Law Review Articles

This Article is presented in four Parts. Part II outlines the history of hydropower regulation in the U.S., including the environmental, geographic, and human effects of big dam hydropower development that ultimately engendered the onerous regulations currently governing all hydropower development. Building off of this history, Part III discusses America’s hydropower potential, the available methods for tapping it, and the possible environmental impacts of these methods. Part IV provides an overview of the current regulations governing small hydropower. Part V concludes by proposing areas where the regulatory framework for low-impact small hydropower should be reformed to properly and responsibly encourage …

Using The Supreme Court's Enigmatic Commerce Clause Holding In Sebelius To Challenge Congress's Broken Renewable Fuel Standard, Corey J. Walker

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Public Participation During Reactive, Crisis-Driven Drought Planning Versus Proactive, Preparedness Planning, C. Anna Ulaszewski

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Droughts are occurring globally and should be recognized as a global issue and drought planning should use a proactive approach on the part of the world community. However, much drought planning, even in developed and highly developed countries, is reactive and programs are often poorly coordinated sometimes with unforeseen negative consequences for marginalized and disenfranchised populations. Literature pertaining to planning strategy for existing, drought crises is nominal and often contributes to patterns of reactiveness and resulting inequity. To gain a better understanding of crisis-driven planning and the participatory process, this gap was viewed through the lenses of institutional analysis and …

Climate Change Disinformation, Citizen Competence, And The First Amendment, James Weinstein

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Holding The Harmful Harmless: Lessons From Gold King Mine, Timbre Shriver

University of Colorado Law Review

The disaster at Love Canal focused the nation's attention on hazardous waste sites left behind by years of corporate recklessness and mismanagement. To fill the regulatory gap and prevent future incidents like Love Canal, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). The statute not only empowers the EPA to retroactively hold parties responsible for the mismanagement of hazardous waste, but it also provides a funding mechanism-Superfund-to ensure that the most dangerous sites are cleaned up even when responsible parties cannot be found or, more likely, are insolvent. However, an often-overlooked provision in the CERCLA framework grants …

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 …

Disproportionate Realities: The Climate Justice Implications Of Mitigation Policies Across Scales, Tinuviel Carlson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Global climate change will have disproportionate effects on low-income and minority communities around the world producing important justice challenges. As national governments increasingly rely on local governments, civil society, and private transnational actors to establish and implement climate actions policies, it is important to assess whether and how these newly emergent actors can address these justice challenges. First this thesis examines concepts of justice in relation to climate change across different scales in order to develop a comprehensive conceptual framework of climate justice. This conceptual framework expands the scale of the international climate justice movement address local concerns. Further, the …

Decarbonizing Light-Duty Vehicles, Amy L. Stein, Joshua P. Fershee

UF Law Faculty Publications

Reducing the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050 will require multiple legal pathways for changing its transportation fuel sources. The Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP) authors characterize transforming the transportation system as part of a third pillar of fundamental changes required in the U.S. energy system: “fuel switching of end uses to electricity and other low-carbon supplies.” The goal is to shift 80%-95% of the miles driven from gasoline to energy sources like electricity and hydrogen. Relying upon the DDPP analysis, this Article, excerpted from Michael B. Gerrard & John C. Dernbach, …

Protecting Florida's Marine Life With Conservation Drones, Daniel Grammes

St. Thomas Law Review

This comment analyzes drones under current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and focuses on the issues contributing to unsustainable fisheries in Florida. Part II explains the basic concept of drones and discusses privacy issues through the Fourth Amendment as well as Florida marine patrol statutes that are relevant to an analysis of drone technology. Part III highlights that Florida's fisheries are at an unsustainable level because there are not enough Florida marine patrol officers and the simplicity of disposing illegally harvested wildlife into the ocean. Part IV suggests that Florida adopt legislation authorizing a drone enforcement program for marine patrol. Part V …

Framing The Global Pact For The Environment: Why It's Needed, What It Does, And How It Does It, Teresa Parejo Navajas, Nathan Lobel

Fordham Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

Federalism, The Environment And The Charter In Canada, Dayna Scott

Articles & Book Chapters

This Chapter reviews the key jurisprudential developments in relation to the division of powers in Canada, exploring how the shared jurisdiction over the “environment” created by sections 91 and 92 of the Constitution has historically and continues to shape environmental law and policy. In addition to this federal-provincial struggle, the chapter considers the current trend towards local regulation of environmental matters according to the principle of ‘subsidiarity’, and the growing recognition of the ‘inherent jurisdiction’ of Indigenous peoples. The contemporary dynamics are explored through two critical policy case studies highlighting barriers to environmental justice: safe drinking water on reserves, and …