Environmental Law Commons^™

Sdlp After 20: Sustainable Development In The Anthropocene, David Hunter

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Overview: Will Great Power Politics Threaten Arctic Sustainability?, Yoon Hyung Kim, Oran R. Young, Robert W. Corell, Lawson W. Brigham, Jong Deog Kim, Arild Moe, Charles E. Morrison, David Vanderzwaag

Reports & Public Policy Documents

The eight Arctic states (Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Russian Federation, and the United States) wish to maintain a position of preeminence when it comes to dealing with matters of Arctic Ocean governance. However, major non-Arctic states, while recognizing the sovereign rights of the coastal states in their economic zones and on their continental shelves, have growing interests in the maritime Arctic relating to activities such as commercial shipping, oil and gas development, fishing and ship-based tourism. They are increasingly claiming to have a legitimate interest in being consulted when it comes to addressing matters relating to the …

Climate Change, Coming Soon To A Court Near You – Report One: Report Series Purpose And Introduction To Climate Science, Briony Eales

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Climate change is the defining challenge of our time. Without urgent climate action, humanity faces a world that cannot sustain civilization as we know it. People around the globe are demanding action, some with climate litigation. This four-part report series recognizes the inevitability of increased litigation in the era of climate change and judges need a tool kit to respond. Report One explains how judges from Asia and the Pacific contribute to climate governance, along with the Asian Development Bank’s rationale for producing this report series. It guides readers through some of the basics about climate change: What is causing …

How Agency Science Is Under Threat, Romany M. Webb

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

The Environmental Protection Agency has a tradition of scientific excellence. EPA has led groundbreaking research on acid rain, lead, chemical safety, and many other public health and environmental issues.

However, in the last four budget cycles, the Trump administration has proposed slashing funding for EPA research programs. When Congress has refused, administration officials have sought to prevent, hide, and discredit research in other ways. They have been remarkably successful despite the existence of agency policies designed to protect researchers against political interference.

Climate Change, Coming Soon To A Court Near You – Report Three: National Climate Change Legal Frameworks In Asia And The Pacific, Dena Adler, Hillary Aidun, Michael Burger, Ama Francis, Briony Eales, Maria Cecilia T. Sicango

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

National legal and policy frameworks underpin international climate action because they are the backbone of domestic responses to the climate emergency. Unless they support global objectives, local climate action stalls. Concerned by sluggish national responses to climate change or injured by its impacts, citizens are filing lawsuits, making courts central to national climate governance. To adjudicate these lawsuits, courts require current information about their climate change legal and policy frameworks. This report provides holistic syntheses of the climate legal and policy frameworks of 32 countries in Asia and the Pacific and discusses key legislative trends and climate-relevant constitutional rights.

Governing Cascade Failures In Complex Social-Ecological-Technological Systems: Framing Context, Strategies, And Challenges, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Cascade failures are events in networked systems with interconnected components in which failure of one or a few parts triggers the failure of other parts, which triggers the failure of more parts, and so on. Cascade failures occur in a wide variety of familiar systems, such as electric power distribution grids, transportation systems, financial systems, and ecosystems. Cascade failures have plagued society for centuries. However, modern social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) have become vast, fast moving, and highly interconnected, exposing these systems to cascade failures of potentially global proportions, spreading at breathtaking speed, and imposing catastrophic harms. The increasing potential for cascade …

What Happens When The Green New Deal Meets The Old Green Laws?, J. B. Ruhl, James Salzman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The multi-faceted infrastructure goals of the Green New Deal will be impossible to achieve in the desired time frames if the existing federal, state, and local siting and environmental protection statutory regimes are applied. Business, labor, property rights, environmental protection, and social justice interests will use them to grind the Green New Deal to a snail's pace. Using the renewable energy transition as the infrastructure case study, this Essay is a call to arms for the need to design New Green Laws for the Green New Deal. Part I briefly summarizes what we are learning about the pace and magnitude …

Beyond Green Infrastructure--Integrating The Ecosystem Services Framework Into Urban Planning Law And Policy, J. B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Despite the heavy emphasis in legal scholarship on federal and state governance of environmental policy, cities have had their champions as well. Legal scholars who stand out as having defined a position for local governance in the environmental domain include John Nolan, Jamison Colburn, Keith Hirokawa, Tony Arnold, and, on any such list, Julian Juergensmeyer. Indeed, in the United States and many other nations, cities have been leaders in many of the looming issues of environmental policy, including those with global dimensions, like climate change mitigation, and surely those with local focus, like climate change adaptation. In the United States, …

A Global Assessment Of The Law And Policy, J. B. Ruhl, J. Salzman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Through building waves of legal scholarship and litigation, a group of legal academics and practitioners is advancing a theory of the public trust doctrine styled as the “atmospheric trust.” The atmospheric trust would require the federal and state governments to regulate public and private actors to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to abate climate change.

Externalities As The Status Quo: Federal Application Of Environmental Charges In The United States, Robert Zupko

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Conceptualized as early as 1920 by English economist Arthur Cecil Pigou, but not formalized until later work in the 1970s and 1990s, “environmental charges” are a form of Pigouvian taxes that suggest the revenue burden of governance could be shifted from economic “goods” to environmental “bads”. While their association with Pigouvian taxes would suggest that environmental charges are applied as a policy instrument to encourage the reduction or elimination of environmental externalities, their application at the federal level in the United States suggests this is not the case. This report postulates that federally applied environmental charges accept environmental externalities as …

Global Investor-Director Survey On Climate Risk Management, Jens Frankenreiter, Kristin Bresnahan, Sophie L'Helias, Brea Hinricks, Nina Hodzic, Julian Nyarko, Sneha Pandya, Eric Talley

Scholarship@WashULaw

Changes in the global climate are having profound impacts on business operations, governance, and organizational management around the world. Boards of directors are searching for ways to account for these changes as they help guide their organizations, and investors are increasingly concerned about how these changes might impact their portfolios. This global survey, conducted by a team of researchers at the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia Law School and experts at LeaderXXchange, seeks to understand how — if at all — institutional investors and board directors incorporate climate-related issues in their investment decision …

Earth Mothers, Soy Boys, And Cool Dudes: Practicing Law While Protecting The Environment, Elizabeth J. Hubertz

Scholarship@WashULaw

As a public-interest environmental lawyer, this author explores gender in the legal profession. Specifically, gender in environmental law. Through a recognition of the gendered dimensions of environmental law, this Article explores the nature-culture binary, the relationship of meat to masculinity, and perceptions of the risks and threats of climate change.

The Fault In Our Stars: Challenging The Fcc's Treatment Of Commercial Satellites As Categorically Excluded From Review Under The National Environmental Policy Act, Ramon J. Ryan

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Mega satellite constellations, such as SpaceX's Starlink, have the ability to connect humans across the globe in a way never before possible. However, the unprecedented deployment of tens of thousands of satellites into orbit around Earth creates the risk of altering the night sky for astronomers and the public for decades to come, as well as the risk of polluting the environment through the use of toxic satellite components. The Federal Communications Commission considers commercial-satellite projects categorically excluded from environmental review despite the National Environmental Policy Act's requirement that federal agencies review projects for their environmental effects. A court would …

Environmental Law, Jocelyn Stacey

All Faculty Publications

In commemoration of their 50th anniversary, this chapter examines the Federal Courts’ role in shaping environmental law in Canada. The chapter uses well-known environmental principles – the precautionary principle, sustainable development and access to (environmental) justice – as focal points for examining environmental law as well as the legal culture of the Federal Courts. The chapter identifies four distinct interpretive roles that the Federal Courts have ascribed to the precautionary principle and it argues that three of these roles have the potential to generate more coherent and transparent doctrine that upholds the rule of law in the environmental context. In …

Responsible Scholarship In A Crisis: A Plea For Fairness In Academic Discourse On The Carbon Pricing References, Stepan Wood, Meinhard Doelle, Dayna Nadine Scott

All Faculty Publications

The Canadian federal government’s carbon pricing legislation has generated substantial public and academic debate. In this paper we argue that academic debate should adhere to standards for responsible conduct of research during crises such as the current climate emergency, and avoid the nastiness and distortion that infect populist political rhetoric and social media. We discuss the norms of responsible scholarship that apply to Canadian legal academics, with a focus on standards that demand scrupulous fairness to other scholars and to the materials one is analyzing. We argue that a recent article by Professor Dwight Newman on the Saskatchewan and Ontario …

Texas Landfills: The Need For Administrative Reform Of The Texas Commission On Environmental Quality’S Permitting Process, William Todd Keller Jr.

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming

New Environmental Crimes Project Data Shows That Pollution Prosecutions Plummeted During The First Two Years Of The Trump Administration, David M. Uhlmann

Other Publications

The latest data from the Environmental Crimes Project at the University of Michigan Law School shows a dramatic drop in pollution prosecutions during the first two years under President Donald J. Trump. The data, which now includes 14 years of cases from 2005–2018, shows a 70 percent decrease in Clean Water Act prosecutions under President Trump, as well as a more than 50 percent decrease in Clean Air Act prosecutions. The data again shows that most defendants charged with pollution crime commit misconduct involving one or more of the aggravating factors identified in my previous scholarship, so prosecutors continue to …

The Law And Science Of Climate Change Attribution, Michael Burger, Jessica A. Wentz, Radley Horton

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

There is overwhelming scientific agreement that human activities are changing the global climate system and these changes are already affecting human and natural systems. The observational record shows that the planet is getting significantly warmer, with eighteen of the nineteen warmest years on record occurring since 2001. Other observed changes include rising sea levels, ocean warming and acidification, melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, increases in the frequency and severity of extreme events, and a variety of impacts on people, communities, and ecosystems. There are multiple lines of evidence linking these changes to anthropogenic influence on climate.

Uncooperative Environmental Federalism 2.0, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised to curtail federal environmental regulation and empower the states. Has the Trump Administration made good on these pledges to reinvigorate cooperative federalism and constrain environmental regulatory overreach by the federal government? Perhaps less than one would think. This Essay provides a critical assessment of the Trump Administration’s approach to environmental federalism. Despite the Administration’s embrace of “cooperative federalism” rhetoric, environmental policy reforms have not consistently embodied a principled approach to environmental federalism in which the state and federal governments are each encouraged to focus resources on areas of comparative advantage.

Property's Problem With Extremes, Lynda L. Butler

Faculty Publications

Western-style property systems are ill-equipped to deal with extremes--extreme poverty, extreme wealth, extreme environmental harm. Though they can effectively handle many problems, the current systems are inherently incapable of providing the types of reform needed to address extreme situations that are straining the fabric of societies--situations that are stressing the integrity of core societal and natural systems to the breaking point. The American property system, in particular, is problematic. The system has a long tradition of strong individual rights and relies primarily on the efficiency norm to operate and shape the incentives of rights holders. The economic model that now …

Reflections On Rural Resilience: As The Climate Changes, Will Rural Areas Become The Urban Backyard?, Elizabeth Andrews, Jesse Reiblich

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

This Article discusses the impacts of climate change on rural communities, including how they can exacerbate current economic and environmental challenges there, such as increasing absentee landownership and nonexistent or failing septic systems. It focuses on the accompanying policy challenges in addressing these issues with an emphasis on efforts to address the needs of socially vulnerable communities. Additionally, it proposes key policy recommendations, including funding, planning for sea level rise, public education and communication, and addressing rural needs in the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (“TMDL”) process.

Not Yet America's Best Idea: Law, Inequality, And Grand Canyon National Park, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

Even the nation’s most cherished and protected public lands are not spaces apart from the workings of law, politics, and power. This Essay explores that premise in the context of Grand Canyon National Park. On the occasion of the Park’s 100th Anniversary, it examines how law — embedded in a political economy committed to rapid growth and development in the southwestern United States — facilitated the violent displacement of indigenous peoples and entrenched racialized inequalities in the surrounding region. It also explores law’s shortcomings in the context of sexual harassment and discrimination within the Park. The Essay concludes by suggesting …

Honoring Sally Jewell, Charles Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Administrative Law's Extraordinary Cases, Jonathan Skinner-Thompson

Publications

The Supreme Court's major questions doctrine is grounded in the Chevron framework. Reconstituting it as a "major rules" exception to Chevron or as a non-delegation principle are misguided and create greater uncertainty.

New York’S New Statute On Siting Renewable Energy Facilities, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

As part of a massive budget bill signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo on April 3, New York has adopted the Accelerated Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act (AREGCBA). It completely revamps the process under which large-scale renewable energy facilities and associated transmission lines receive state and local approvals.

Summary: Combating Climate Change With Section 115 Of The Clean Air Act, Jonathan Cannon, Ann E. Carlson, Greg Dotson, Michael B. Gerrard, Justin Gundlach, Jayni Foley Hein, Cale Jaffe, Michael A. Livermore, Jason A. Schwartz, Daniel Selmi, Jessica A. Wentz, Philip S. Barnett, Keith J. Benes, Alexandra E. Teitz

Faculty Scholarship

The scale and scope of the climate crisis calls for comprehensive nationwide efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. New legislation, passed by Congress and signed by the President, is the first and best option for climate action at the federal level. This could be a version of the Green New Deal, a carbon tax, sectoral limits, an emissions cap with compliance trading, or another approach. What matters most is that the legislation effectively cut the greenhouse gas emissions driving the world’s temperatures ever higher. Unfortunately, the prospect for federal legislation is uncertain, while strong and decisive action is needed now. …

Climate Reregulation In A Biden Administration, Michael Burger, Daniel J. Metzger, Hillary Aidun, Susan Biniaz

Faculty Scholarship

On January 20, 2017, Inauguration Day, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School launched the Climate Deregulation Tracker, the first of what would become numerous online trackers, news reports, academic analyses, and other resources designed to spotlight the Trump administration’s use and abuse of executive authority to pursue its agenda to cut back on government regulations and to promote the extraction and use of fossil fuels. The Climate Deregulation Tracker has had a relatively narrow purpose: to keep tabs on the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the federal government’s climate-related regulations and policies and help inform …

The Role Of Lawyers In Decarbonizing Society, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay concerns one current project to turn GHG reduction goals into actual laws that could achieve these goals. The project has four phases: (1) formulating the engineers’ recommendations; (2) identifying the existing laws that would help implement those recommendations, and the new laws that need to be written; (3) drafting the laws; and (4) attempting to persuade lawmakers at the federal, state, and local levels to adopt them. This Essay discusses each phase in turn. As will be shown, we are well into the third phase and starting the fourth, and are in need of volunteer lawyers to help …

Federal Legislative And Administrative Framework, John C. Dernbach, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 will necessitate significant changes to most of America’s physical assets, from its power generation and transmission infrastructure to its buildings, vehicles, factories, forests and farms. These broad changes will need to address all four pillars of deep decarbonization – electricity decarbonization, energy efficiency and conservation, electrification of transportation and buildings, and carbon capture – supplemented by significant reductions in emissions of non-CO₂ pollutants. Such comprehensive change will necessitate the coordinated action of most of the departments of the Federal Government, from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Energy (DOE) to Department of …

Reconciling Environmental Justice With Climate Change Mitigation: A Case Study Of Nc Swine Cafos, D. Lee Miller, Ryke Longest

Faculty Scholarship

For thirty years, the swine industry has externalized severe environmental and health harms onto poor communities of color in Eastern North Carolina. This “Big Pig” problem is caused by the confinement, consolidation, and concentration of industrial hog operations within the low, flat, and economically marginalized Coastal Plain. Big Pig’s rise was not inevitable. As recently as 1982, more than 11,000 small swine farms freckled nearly all of North Carolina’s 100 counties. Then came the “boom” of consolidation and industrialization that transformed hog production into a highly consolidated and vertically integrated industry.