Environmental Law Commons^™

Life Becoming Hazy: The Withdrawal Of The United States From The Paris Agreement And How The Youth Of America Are Challenging It, Anne Ustynoski

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

This Comment covers the ways in which each presidential administration has viewed the United States’ role and responsibilities in combating climate change. It discusses the ways in which the Clean Air Act has evolved and changed, as well as the ways in which the United States has been involved in environmental protection initiatives undertaken by the United Nations. The Comment also examines the ways in which individual states and groups have taken the initiative to combat climate change. Finally, this Comment discusses alternative approaches to combating climate change. For example, it focuses on how youths in America are arguing that …

Sustainable Development Arrested By U.S. Criminal Law, Steven Ferrey

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The International Law Commission And The Progressive Development And Codification Of Principles Of International Environmental Law, Nilüfer Oral

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Survey Of Greenhouse Gas Considerations In Federal Environmental Impact Statements And Environmental Assessments For Fossil Fuel-Related Projects, 2017-2018, Madeleine Siegel, Alexander Loznak

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Climate change is already generating enormous costs to the environment and public health both in the United States and around the world. These costs will only escalate over the time with increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), U.S. federal agencies must assess the environmental effects of proposals for major federal projects, plans and programs before deciding if they should proceed. To conduct a meaningful environmental review of proposed projects, federal agencies must carefully consider how these projects contribute to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions – particularly for projects concerning fossil fuel extraction, transport, …

State Hazard Mitigation Plans & Climate Change: Rating The States 2019 Update, Dena P. Adler, Emma Gosliner

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Between 1980-2019, the U.S. endured 250 climate and weather disasters that each cost more than $1 billion, resulting in a total cost exceeding $1.7 trillion. Climate change contributes to a variety of hazards including extreme precipitation, drought, sea level rise, storm surge, heat waves, and flooding, and this effect will worsen over time. While the onset of natural disasters may be unavoidable, forgoing the opportunity to plan for changing conditions and increasing risks puts citizens in the path of preventable danger. Further investing in pre-disaster preparation or other resilience-building activities can save considerable money down the road – and many …

Free-Movement Agreements & Climate-Induced Migration: A Caribbean Case Study, Ama Francis

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Climate-induced migration has become a global challenge. Climate change intensifies the frequency and severity of disasters, thereby increasing the number of people displaced by extreme weather events. Adverse climate impacts are already exacerbating patterns of human mobility, and will do so to a greater degree in the future. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) reports that approximately 265 million people have been displaced by natural hazards since 2008. Over 17 million people were internally displaced by disasters in 2018 alone. While the majority of climate migrants are displaced within their home countries, many people are forced to move abroad.

The …

Breaking The Cycle Of "Flood-Rebuild-Repeat": Local And State Options To Improve Substantial Damage And Improvement Standards In The National Flood Insurance Program, Dena Adler, Joel Scata

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Congress established the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in 1968 to reduce flood damages nationwide and ease the Federal government’s financial burden for providing disaster recovery. Today, approximately 22,000 communities in all 50 states and U.S. territories participate in the NFIP. The program has 5.1 million flood insurance policies providing $1.3 trillion in coverage. Due largely to recent flood disasters, the NFIP is over $20.5 billion in debt.

A proportionally small number of properties insured through the program are repeatedly flooded, repaired, and rebuilt. These properties, known as “severe repetitive loss” (SRL) properties, contribute disproportionally to the rising debts of …

Three Legal Visions Of A ‘Green New Deal’, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who has rocketed to such fame that she is now widely known simply as AOC, and Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), co-father of Waxman-Markey, the cap-and- trade bill that narrowly passed the House in 2009 but died in the Senate, have introduced identical resolutions to create a “Green New Deal.” H. Res. 109, S. Res. 59.

Corporate Governance For Sustainability, Andrew Johnston, Jeroen Veldman, Robert G. Eccles, Simon Deakin, Jerry Davis, Marie-Laure Djelic, Katharina Pistor, Blanche Segrestin, William M. Gentry, Cynthia A. Williams, David Millon, Paddy Ireland, Beate Sjåfjell, Christopher M. Bruner, Lorraine E. Talbot, Hugh Christopher Willmott, Charlotte Villiers, Carol Liao, Bertrand Valiorgue, Jason Glynos, Todd L. Sayre, Bronwen Morgan, Rick Wartzman, Prem Sikka, Filip Gregor, David Carroll Jacobs, Roger Gill, Roger Brown, Vincenzo Bavoso, Neil Lancastle, Julie Matthaei, Scott Taylor, Ulf Larsson-Olaison, Jay Cullen, Alan J. Dignam, Thomas Wuil Joo, Ciarán O'Kelly, Con Keating, Roman Tomasic, Simon Lilley, Kevin Tennent, Keith Robson, Willy Maley, Iris H-Y Chiu, Ewan Mcgaughey, Chris Rees, Nina Boeger, Adam Leaver, Marc T. Moore, Leen Paape, Alan D. Meyer, Marcello Palazzi, Nitasha Kaul, Juan Felipe Espinosa-Cristia, Timothy Kuhn, David J. Cooper, Susanne Soederberg, Andreas Jansson, Susan Watson, Ofer Sitbon, Joan Loughrey, David Collison, Maureen Mcculloch, Navajyoti Samanta, Daniel J.H. Greenwood, Grahame F. Thompson, Andrew R. Keay, Alessia Contu, Andreas Rühmkorf, Richard Hull, Irene-Marie Esser, Nihel Chabrak

Faculty Scholarship

The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the practices of shareholder primacy drive company directors and executives to adopt the same short time horizon as financial markets. Pressure to meet the demands of the financial markets drives stock buybacks, excessive dividends and a failure to invest in productive capabilities. The result is a ‘tragedy of the horizon’, with corporations and their shareholders failing to consider environmental, social or even their own, long-term, economic sustainability.

With less than a decade left to address the threat of climate change, and with consensus emerging that businesses need …

Administrative States: Beyond Presidential Administration, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Presidential administration is more entrenched and expansive than ever. Most significant policymaking comes from agency action rather than legislation. Courts endorse “the presence of Presidential power” in agency decisionmaking. Scholars give up on external checks and balances and take presidential direction as a starting point. Yet presidential administration is also quite fragile. Even as the Court embraces presidential control, it has been limiting the administrative domain over which the President presides. And when Presidents drive agency action in a polarized age, their policies are not only immediately contested but also readily reversed by their successors.

States complicate each piece of …

Overview Of Climate Change Litigation, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Climate change litigation is a global phenomenon. According to a database maintained by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, as of February 4, 2019 a total of 1,297 climate cases had been filed in courts or other tribunals worldwide. Of these, 1,009 — 78 percent — were from the United States, Australia was a distant second, with ninety-eight, followed by the United Kingdom with forty-seven. No other country had as many as twenty. The cases were filed in twenty-nine countries and six international tribunals, led by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which had forty-one.

A Softer, Simpler View Of Chevron, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Kennedy's concurrence in Pereira gives reason to hope that the Court may be finally catching on to the difficulties it created by Chevron's opening language, as distinct from its inherent reasoning. When courts quote language like "precise question" and "permissible" to limit themselves (as Justice Scalia and others unfortunately tended to reinforce by their quotations from the opinion), they stray not only from judicial function but also from the statute (APA) that instructs them how to review, and which strangely the opinion does not mention. But Chevron actually (a) independently found and defined a statutory gap within which …

Belonging While Black At Lake Merritt: The Black Spatial Imaginary And Place-Making In Oakland, Ca, Betel Solomon Tesfamariam

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis aims to demonstrate how the processes of gentrification and displacement are interrelated processes that invent new ways of perpetuating anti- blackness in the U.S. I demonstrate this through an engagement with Christina Sharpe’s (2016) analysis of the imagery of the wake, the ship, the hold, and the weather as axis points that position Black life in the afterlife of slavery—how the conditions of slavery are ongoing today—presenting the racist encounters at Lake Merritt as illustrative examples. In her most recent book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe (2016) deploys an interdisciplinary approach to critically theorize …

Reviving The Environmental Justice Potential Of Title Vi Through Heightened Judicial Review, Rachel Calvert

University of Colorado Law Review

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act has unrealized potential to correct the racialized distribution of environmental hazards. The disparate impact regulations implementing this sweeping statute target the institutional discrimination that characterizes environmental injustice. Agency decisions routinely deny claims that federal funds are contributing to projects that disproportionately pollute minority communities, allegedly in violation of Title VI disparate impact regulations. These dismissals are effectively final, as trends in civil rights jurisprudence have essentially foreclosed would-be litigants' opportunities for meaningful judicial review. Their last remaining avenue for recourse is to trigger an arbitrary and capricious review of agency actions, but the …

Mitigating Climate Change Through Transportation And Land Use Policy, Alejandro E. Camacho, Melissa L. Kelly, Nicholas J. Marantz, Gabriel Weil

Scholarly Works

A number of U.S. state and local governments have adopted strategies for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transportation and land development. Although some have made significant progress in reducing GHG emissions from the power sector, transportation emissions in most states continue to rise. This Article details the range of existing and proposed state interventions to reduce transportation sector GHG emissions, analyzes the trade offs of these strategies, and offers recommendations to improve and supplement such initiatives, including strategic use of planning mandates and funding and technical assistance. Additionally, regulating land use, shifting transportation spending, removing barriers to implementing road …

The National Flood Insurance Program At Fifty: How The Fifth Amendment Takings Doctrine Skews Federal Flood Policy, Christine A. Klein

UF Law Faculty Publications

The National Flood Insurance Program (“NFIP”) of 1968 marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2018. Despite the program’s long history, few appreciate that the NFIP was never intended as a permanent federal subsidy for flood-prone properties along rivers and coastlines abandoned as commercially unviable by the private insurance industry. Instead, Congress provided flood insurance at below-cost rates as only an interim solution until state and local governments enacted permanent self-help land-use regulations that would restrict development in risky areas. By encouraging local governments to enact floodplain regulations, Congress intended to shift the costs of development in known flood areas back to …

Discordant Environmental Laws: Using Statutory Flexibility And Multi-Objective Optimization To Reconcile Conflicting Laws, Mary Jane Angelo

UF Law Faculty Publications

The current morass of federal environmental laws has led to significant conflicts among statutes and the manner in which agencies implement them. In recent years, this quagmire of environmental laws has hindered the progress of a number of high-profile environmental regulatory programs and restoration projects. Neither the Courts nor legal scholars have developed approaches to resolving conflicts in a manner that harmonizes environmental statutes while at the same time protecting the most critical environmental resources. A standard methodology that optimizes the multiple objectives of environmental statutes and their implementing programs would greatly enhance decision-making and ensure that the most salient …

Environmental Law. Disrupted, Inara Scott, David Takacs, Rebecca Bratspies, Vasessa Casado Perez, Robin Kundis Craig, Keith Hirokawa, Blake Hudson, Sarah Krakoff, Katrina Fischer Kuh, Jessica Owley, Melissa Powers, Shannon Roesler, Jonathan Rosenbloom

Articles

The U.S. regulatory environment is changing rapidly, at the same time that visible and profound impacts of climate change are already being felt throughout the world, and enormous, potentially existential threats loom in the not-so-distant future. What does it mean to think about and practice environmental law in this setting? In this latest in a biannual series of postings and essays, the authors, members of the Environmental Law Collaborative (ELC), have taken on the question of whether environmental law as we currently know it is up to the job of addressing these threats; and, if not, what the path forward …

Rainwater Harvesting: Legal Frameworks In The United States, Singapore And Other Countries, Julian Conrad Juergensmeyer, Audrone Vysniauskaite Durham

Faculty Publications By Year

With increasing climate change effects worldwide, rainwater harvesting is likely to become more and more important to ensure reliable alternative water supply and to conserve the environment. This article examines two goals to be accomplished through rainwater harvesting: (1) augmenting water supply for proposed development's use through regulations that have been formulated to make the proposed development responsible for at least a portion of the water supply needed to support the new development; and (2) managing stormwater runoff. The results show that many, perhaps most, rainwater harvesting programs, as exemplified by efforts in Singapore and elsewhere around the world, succeed …

Controlling Biogenic Volatile Organic Compounds For Air Quality, Brian Sawers

Indiana Law Journal

This Article tells a story that is true but seems completely wrong: Trees can make air pollution worse. Smog and ground-level ozone require two chemical ingredients to form: nitrous oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). On a warm, sunny day, these two precursors combine to form smog and ground-level ozone, a pollutant. While NOx are pollutants that are largely human-created, VOCs can originate with plants. In fact, emissions of just one type of VOC from trees exceed all human-caused emissions.

This Article presents new research on the impact of plants, especially trees, on air quality. The science is complicated …

Past Invasive Species Advisory Committee (Isac) Members, National Invasive Species Committee

National Invasive Species Council

United States Department of the Interior

National Invasive Species Council

Invasive Species Advisory Committee (ISAC)

Past ISAC Members:

Class 9 (2016-2019)

Class 8 (2011-2016/2017)

Class 7 (2011-2012/2014)

Class 6 (2009-2011/2012)

Class 5 (2008/2009-2010)

Class 4 (2006-2008)

Class 3 (2004-2006)

Class 2 (2002-2004)

Class 1 (1999-2001)

Pipelines & Power-Lines: Building The Energy Transport Future, James W. Coleman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The United States is in the middle of three profound energy revolutions — with booming production of renewable power, natural gas, and oil. The country is replacing coal power with renewable and natural gas power, reducing pollution while saving consumers money. And it has dramatically cut its oil imports while becoming, for the first time in half a century, an important oil exporter. The U.S. is on the cusp of an energy transformation that will provide immense economic and environmental benefits.

This new energy economy will require massive investment in energy transport — especially power lines to bring wind and …

How International Oil Companies Could Assist Greece To Achieve The Sustainable Development Goals: A Conversation Starter, Alexandra Sdoukou, Andreas Tornaritis, Perrine Toledano

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

This policy paper wishes to be a timely contribution towards a fruitful debate among stakeholders; it urges International Oil Companies (IOCs) to examine how the critical Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for Greece can be integrated into their core business so that the oil and gas industry can contribute to the country’s sustainable growth.

Bridging The Information Gap: How Access To Land Contracts Can Serve Community Rights, Lara Wallis, Sam Szoke-Burke

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Land contracts (also known as investor-state contracts, or concession agreements) show what commitments a forestry, farming or renewable energy company has made and what the government has said the company can do on the land. These promises define the positive and harmful effects the company’s project could have on community members’ livelihoods and human rights, and on the environment.

Accessing land contracts is a crucial strategy for local organizations. This briefing note explains how local organizations can use land contracts and the Open Land Contracts repository (OpenLandContracts.org) to help communities to:

• Understand company and government obligations related to a company …

Just Transitions, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

The transition to a low-carbon society will have winners and losers as the costs and benefits of decarbonization fall unevenly on different communities. This potential collateral damage has prompted calls for a “just transition” to a green economy. While the term, “just transition,” is increasingly prevalent in the public discourse, it remains under-discussed and poorly defined in legal literature, preventing it from helping catalyze fair decarbonization. This Article seeks to define the term, test its validity, and articulate its relationship with law so the idea can meet its potential.

The Article is the first to disambiguate and assess two main …

The Standing Dead: An Analysis Of Nonhuman Personhood In U.S. Jurisprudence, Morgan Voight

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Strictly Leakage: How Minnesota Export Subsidies Pay For Climate Pollution, Hudson B. Kingston

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Wotus: The Water Definition Battle That Defines The Nation, Kole W. Kelley, Cassandra N. Bantz

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Approach To Constitutional Principles And Environmental Discretion In Canada, Lynda Collins, Lorne Sossin

Articles & Book Chapters

One of the most important and least scrutinized areas of environmental policy is the exercise of administrative discretion. Those committed to environmental action tend to focus on law reform, international treaties, and political commitments - for example, election proposals for carbon taxes and pipelines, or environmental protections in global protocols and trade agreements. Many proponents of stronger environmental protection have focused their attention on the goal of a constitutional amendment recognizing an explicit right to a healthy environment, while others seek recognition of environmental protection within existing Charter rights. As the rights conversation evolves, advocates must continue to grapple with …

Environmental Justice And The Hesitant Embrace Of Human Rights, Dayna Nadine Scott

Articles & Book Chapters

This chapter explores some of the tensions inherent in employing ‘rights strategies’ in environmental justice movements. Using the example of a judicial review application brought by Indigenous environmental justice activists in Canada demonstrates the symbolic power of using rights-based language for environmental justice, but also underscores the serious procedural, logistical and resource barriers that frustrate these groups in their attempts to deploy litigation tactics. Legal scholars need to think critically about ‘rights-talk’ and confront the hard questions about its utility for advancing environmental justice. In working with communities, we must learn to listen to what communities want before we default …