Environmental Law Commons^™

Solving The Stranded Asset Problem Of Retiring Coal Plants: An Evaluation Of Regulatory Approaches, Matthew Appel

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Meeting the Biden administration's goal of cutting greenhouse gases by at least 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 will necessarily require transitioning the U.S. energy system away from carbon-intensive fossil fuels like coal. However, coal plants that are retiring early in states with regulated electricity markets usually still have undepreciated book value that has not yet been recovered from ratepayers. If not handled correctly, these "stranded assets" could have financial consequences for utility companies and cause them to actively oppose the energy transition. This Note aims to evaluate possible solutions to this problem. Through the prism of ratemaking legal …

Financing Pathways For The Energy Transition: A Regional Approach, Ana M. Camelo Vega

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

The success of the global energy transition critically requires a shift from a solely national focus to a regional perspective. Regional cooperation is not just a beneficial opportunity; it is an imperative for the future of sustainable energy. Clean energy solutions are inherently regional, necessitating interconnected systems and collaborative frameworks. This regional focus is essential for addressing the complex challenges of the energy transition, requiring comprehensive engineering, institutional, and financial solutions.

This comprehensive report highlights the crucial financing pathways needed to achieve a successful clean energy transition, focusing on four key regions: Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and …

Taking The Lead On Climate Action And Sustainable Development: Recommendations For Strategic National Transition Planning At The Centre Of A Whole-Of-System Climate Response, Mark Manning, Riona Bowhay, Megan Bowman, Peter Knaack, Lisa E. Sachs, Agnieszka Smolenska, Fiona Stewart, Thomas Tayler, Perrine Toledano, Harald Walkate

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

As the global economy transitions to a just, low-emissions, climate-resilient, and nature-positive future, we can expect every sector to transform. However, systemic transformation requires strategic transition planning, effective coordination, and communication across the economy. To facilitate this, governments can play a decisive role by managing change and setting incentives and constraints for private actors. Similarly, private sector actors can enhance their corporate strategies and financing decisions to support this transition. Transition plans serve as a roadmap to transformation by outlining a strategic vision and identifying capital needs, external factors, and dependencies.

CCSI is collaborating with experts at CETEx, King’s College, …

Legal Hurdles And Pathways: The Evolution (Progress?) Of Climate Change Adjudication In Canada, Camille Cameron, Riley Weyman, Claire Nicholson

Dalhousie Law Journal

Citizens, civil society, and environmental justice organizations are increasingly turning to courts to find solutions to climate change challenges. As of November 2022, the number of climate change litigation cases throughout the world was at least 2.5 times higher than in 2017. A dominant wave of this litigation is one in which claimants assert that governments’ failures to take appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures violate claimants’ rights. We analyze this jurisprudence in this article, with a focus on the recent Ontario Superior Court of Justice decision in Mathur v Ontario. While the claims in this case were dismissed, it is …

From Trade To Rights And Green Governance: Unveiling The East African Court Of Justice’S Jurisprudential Metamorphosis, Mihreteab Tsighe Taye

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Understanding Climate Change Adaptation And Gentrification Through The Framework Of Uneven Coastal Development In Keansburg, New Jersey, Zachary Paganini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the rapid acceleration of coastal development in the United States despite projections of climate change-induced sea level rise. Like no other developed country, the U.S. has transformed its fragile coastline into sites for leisure, consumption, and retirement. These spaces now face the prospect of more frequent and severe storms, as well as land loss and inundation, due to climate change. This dilemma has sparked debates around coastal resilience, adaptation, retreat, and climate gentrification.

While many studies seek to measure perceptions of climate change risk and vulnerability, this dissertation reverses the question by positioning risk perceptions as an …

Implementing The Inflation Reduction Act: Progress To Date And Risks From A Changing Administration, Romany M. Webb, Martin Lockman, Emma Shumway

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (“IRA”) is the largest investment in climate change mitigation and adaptation in American history. The IRA appropriates more than $142 billion to carry out activities designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect against the impacts of climate change. This includes up to $37 billion in appropriations for federal loans and loan guarantees, and nearly $105 billion allocated for grants, awards, and other direct spending by federal agencies. In addition, the IRA creates and expands a number of tax credit programs designed to support a broad range of climate-related activities, including investments in clean …

New York Falling Behind In Implementing Bold Climate Law, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

In July 2019, shortly after Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), I wrote in an op-ed, “The champagne corks are still popping. But the realization is dawning that implementing the new law will be really, really hard. New York is boldly going where no state has gone before … It will take a great deal of sweat and treasure (no one knows just how much), as well as a continuation of the political will that brought us to this point.”

We still do not know how much sweat and treasure will be required, but …

A Crosswinds Of Corporate Accountability: Corporate Climate Liability In The Canadian Legal Abyss, Hassan M. Ahmad

All Papers

This chapter queries the absence of corporate-related climate cases in Canadian courts. It first retells the recent history of corporate accountability in Canadian courts for human rights-related harms. While initial cases faltered on jurisdictional and justiciability grounds, the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2020 decision in Araya v. Nevsun Resources Ltd. was arguably a watershed moment in Canadian corporate accountability law that, in conjunction with climate litigation commenced against government actors, should have bolstered the prospect of corporate climate litigation. On the contrary though, post-Nevsun corporate accountability claims have been minimal and, to date at least, have not pursued allegations …

Toxic Discretion: Environmental Inequality And The Discretionary Function Exception, Sarah E. Barritt

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

Environmental racism is far reaching and insidious, and each of these devastating instances and the institutional factors that led to them could and should be the subject of entire books in their own right. The EPA and other agencies of the United States government are complicit in multiple ways, not least of all through their abject failures to properly regulate private industry pollution in BIPOC communities. However, this Note has cabined its analysis to the government’s failure to warn these communities of environmental contamination, and what happens when it hides behind the discretionary function exception in ensuing litigation. To provide …

An Interdisciplinary Analysis Of Freshwater Wetlands With A Focus On Ecosystem Functions And Services, Michael Viteritto

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Wetlands are one of the most productive ecosystems on Earth, though they only occupy a very small portion of the planet’s surface. They are highly sensitive ecosystems that have been undergoing an extended period of loss because of anthropogenic stress. Freshwater wetlands number among the most numerous on the planet, and in the United States they make up the overwhelming majority of wetland area. Geographically isolated wetlands (GIWs) are not directly connected to other surface water in a watershed. Freshwater wetlands provide a number of beneficial ecosystem services including climate control, erosion protection, nutrient removal and storage, flood control, food …

Global Guidance For Just Transition Policy: Policy Brief, Anna Dell'amico, Martin Dietrich Brauch, Lara Wallis, Alexandra A.K. Meisea

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

In 2015, the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted Guidelines for a Just Transition Towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All, providing authoritative and valuable international guidance for just transitions. CCSI has conducted a comparative analysis of the application of the ILO Guidelines in South Africa and Germany and examined the extent to which the ILO Guidelines address energy transition challenges facing developing countries.

This CCSI Policy Brief summarizes the comparison between South Africa’s and Germany’s just transition policies and the ILO Guidelines. It also summarizes CCSI’s findings and recommendations to shape further guidance on just energy transition policymaking from …

Global Guidance For Just Transition Policy, Anna Dell'amico, Martin Dietrich Brauch, Lara Wallis, Alexandra A.K. Meisea

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

In 2015, the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted Guidelines for a Just Transition Towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All, providing authoritative and valuable international guidance for just transitions. CCSI has conducted a comparative analysis of the application of the ILO Guidelines in South Africa and Germany and examined the extent to which the ILO Guidelines address energy transition challenges facing developing countries.

The CCSI report, Global Guidance for Just Transition Policy, provides detailed context on South Africa’s and Germany’s national socio-political and energy conditions and policies, and comprehensively examines the legal and policy instruments adopted by both countries …

Climate Allocation Compass, A Framework For Real-World Decarbonization (Compass-Frwd), Perrine Toledano, Ajay S. Jagdish, Maria Diez Andres, Ana M. Camelo Vega, Rob Furdak, Christina Bastin, Matt Goldklang, Jane Smyth

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

Climate finance currently falls far short of what's required to achieve net-zero targets. In a collaboration with the Man Group, we offer a framework setting out how investors can help to close this gap.

Key takeaways:

1. To address the global climate finance gap,CCSI and Man Group have developed the Climate Allocation Compass, a Framework for Real-World Decarbonization (‘Compass-FRWD’).
2. Compass-FRWD is a six-step asset allocation framework designed to guide strategic capital investment across multiple portfolios. It does so by setting financing targets relative to real-world emission gaps, thereby prioritizing sectors and geographies according to decarbonization needs.
3. Compass-FRWD provides a cyclical, investor-level …

Transforming Grassland Conservation: Challenges And Opportunities Across Law, Policy, And Human Dimensions, Conor D. Barnes

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Great Plains social-ecological systems are facing growing pressure from complex, ‘wicked’ problems. Addressing these problems will require integrating ecological resilience and complex systems thinking concepts into our legal framework in order to better reflect the changing ecological reality of the Great Plains and promote flexibility and adaptability in the face of that change. In this dissertation, I examine how past and present policy priorities have affected social-ecological systems on the Great Plains, and how ecological resilience and complex systems thinking might be applied to grassland management policy. In Chapter 2, I examine the rapid progress made in the adoption of …

Bridging Silos: Environmental And Reproductive Justice In The Climate Crisis, Sara A. Colangelo

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The climate crisis is a perilous yet underexamined example of the intersection of environmental injustice and reproductive injustice. The physical manifestations of the climate crisis affect key elements of reproductive justice: women’s rights to have children, to not have children, and to parent children in healthy, sustainable communities. Reams of studies document climate disaster-driven gender violence, loss of access to healthcare and reproductive services, as well as direct and deadly health effects of climate change on maternal health, fetal development, infants, and children. Despite these profound impacts, the environmental and reproductive justice movements remain largely siloed, particularly in the legal …

Criminalizing Ecocide, Rebecca Hamilton

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Amid widespread acknowledgment that we live on a planet in peril, the term “ecocide” packs a powerful rhetorical punch. Extant regulatory approaches to environmental protection feel insufficient in the face of the triple threat of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. International criminal prosecution for ecocide, by contrast, promises to meet the moment, and a recent proposal to introduce ecocide into the canon of core international crimes is gaining traction. Assuming the push to criminalize ecocide continues to gain momentum, this Article argues that the primary (and perhaps, sole) benefit that international criminal law can offer in this context is …

Permit Proposals: Summary Of Recommendations, Luis Pablo Alvarez

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

All scenarios for meeting greenhouse gas reduction targets require faster deployment of renewable energy projects. However, the current permitting processes, while designed to ensure environmental and public safety as well as public participation, often delay progress. The challenge is to speed up renewable energy development without compromising environmental and community protections. This white paper by the Sabin Center reviews 15 reports from reputable institutions that identify steps to streamline the permitting process. These recommendations offer strategies to reduce time and costs in advancing renewable energy projects.

This report will be updated from time to time. Readers who identify errors in …

Sidestepping Substance: How Administrative Law Plays An Outsized Role In Shaping Environmental Policy And Why Recalibration Is Necessary, Sanne H. Knudsen

Articles

Administrative law and environmental law are companion fields. Still, they are not interchangeable. They promote different values. And yet, sometimes when courts resolve environmental disputes by relying on administrative doctrines, courts elevate the values of administrative law over those codified in environmental statutes. This is particularly concerning when courts rely on judicially-created administrative law doctrines to sidestep congressional intent as expressed by the substantive aims of environmental statutes.

To reduce the risk of sidestepping—whether inadvertent or intentional—this Article critically examines how administrative law doctrines can undermine environmental law. Drawing on prominent case examples, including the Supreme Court decision in Sackett …

The Chronic Growing Problem: Environmental And Social Justice Concerns With Indoor Cannabis Grows, Gina S. Warren

Cardozo Law Review

The rapid legalization of recreational marijuana across states has created environmental and social justice issues, particularly with indoor cultivation. Despite its federal illegality, twenty-four states and various territories have legalized marijuana, igniting a surge in indoor cultivation that bears significant environmental and social consequences. Indoor cultivation facilities require massive energy inputs, resulting in grid strain, pollution, and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, the placement of these facilities often occurs in historically marginalized low-income communities, furthering environmental injustice and social harms, as these areas are disproportionately affected by the pollutants emitted from the cultivation processes, such as molds, bacteria, …

Law School News: Mandell-Boisclair Justice Camp Prepares Young Scholars To Become Future Lawyers, Social Justice Advocates 7-26-2024, Jordan J. Phelan, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

It’S Getting Hot In Here: Maine’S Right To Food As A Mechanism To Address The Impact Of The Warming Of The Gulf Of Maine On Lobster, Rachel Fischer

Maine Law Review

In United States v. Washington, the Ninth Circuit considered a series of treaties called the Stevens Treaties between the Washington state government and a group of twenty-one Native American nations in the pacific northwest. The court held that embedded in a treaty right to take fish was a promise by the Washington state government that fish would still exist in that region. This case ultimately required the state government to protect the region’s fish against environmental degradation. In the age of climate change, this case provides a model for states like Maine to impose a duty on the state government …

Green Amendments And Ham: How Green Amendment Jurisprudence Can Inform Maine’S Right To Food, Sarah M. Everhart

Maine Law Review

Maine’s constitutional right to food is the first state constitutional right to food and the extent of the rights created by the amendment is largely unknown. The right to food, as enacted in Article I, Section 25 of the Maine Constitution, provides: Section 25. Right to food. All individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to food, including the right to save and exchange seeds and the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well-being, as long as an individual does not commit trespassing, …

The Court’S Abject Failure At Statutory Construction: Sackett V. Environmental Protection Agency, Sam Kalen

Catholic University Law Review

The essay critiques the Supreme Court’s novel approach toward statutory construction in Sackett (2023). The Sackett Court considered whether the Ninth Circuit applied the appropriate test to determine whether the Sackett’s property contained wetlands regulated under the Clean Water Act (CWA). In doing so, the Court cast aside what has been considered the operative test for assessing jurisdiction, the significant nexus test. In lieu of that test, the majority articulated a considerably constrained understanding of the CWA’s reach. This essay explores how it reached that understanding and why some of the Justices’ analysis is as problematic as the operative conclusion. …

Sustaining America's Non-Jurisdictional Wetlands Post-Sackett Through Conservation, Shawna Bligh

UMKC Law Review

Part I of this Article discusses the functional role of wetlands in meeting the intended purpose of the Clean Water Act (“CWA”). The intended purpose of the CWA is to "restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Nation's waters." The Court's decision in Sackett undermines the intended purpose of the CWA. Wetlands play an essential role in meeting this objective. Wetlands are hydrologically connected to and an embedded part of the overall aquatic ecosystem. The Sackett decision leaves wetlands subject to further degradation.

Part II of this Article provides an overview of the CWA, how we …

Emerging Clean Energy Choices In Canada’S Net-Zero 2050 Transition: The Role Of Nuclear In The Low Carbon And Clean Hydrogen Context, Rudiger Tscherning, Jesse Dias

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

The paper argues that nuclear energy could play a significant role in decarbonizing the production of low carbon hydrogen from natural gas feedstock with associated carbon storage, as part of a wider shift towards ‘net-zero’ in Canada’s natural resources value chain. It examines regulatory readiness for small modular reactors in the oil, gas, and low-carbon energy sector of Canada’s energy jurisdiction, and calls for the speedy design and development of a single ‘go-to’ regulatory framework for nuclear energy in Alberta.

Résumé
L’article soutient que l’énergie nucléaire pourrait jouer un rôle important dans la décarbonisation de la production d’hydrogène décarboné à …

The Road To Energy Justice As A Result Of Interdisciplinary Cooperation In The Energy Policy Field, Michał Domagała, Katarzyna Maćkowska

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

This article pertains to the role of law in regulating the energy market. Justice and solidarity in this area require a debate that should not be fragmented but must, instead, take place in an interdisciplinary manner. The key question that arises relates to the role that the law should play in the area of energy transformation, and thus, whether it should only be a tool for the implementation of political plans and action strategies, or whether it should, in itself, stimulate or determine the transition framework, or be a regulator of transformation. The article tackles selected problems related to Demand …

The Loss & Damage Fund: Will It Leave Greenland Behind?, Natalie L. Nowatzke

Ocean and Coastal Law Journal

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) maintains three pillars of international climate governance: (1) mitigation, (2) adaptation, and (3) loss and damage. Loss and damage, the newest pillar, refers to the negative effects of climate change that transpire despite mitigation and adaptation measures. This notion has manifested into the newly operationalized Loss and Damage Fund, which is designed to compensate developing nations for the losses and damages that occur. This Comment identifies a gap in the Loss and Damage Fund, which will leave Greenland left out of receiving compensation, despite being extremely vulnerable to climate change, because …

A Greater Purpose For Icebergs: Iceberg Trade To Combat The Effects Of Climate Change, Lee A. Foden

Ocean and Coastal Law Journal

Three-fourths of the planet’s freshwater is stored in glaciers, and as the glaciers melt, humans are forfeiting their greatest freshwater resource. Climbing global temperatures, attributable to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, accelerate glacial melt while intensifying drought and water scarcity. This Comment identifies a way to relocate our greatest freshwater resource before it melts into the salty sea. Further, this Comment discusses how an iceberg trade could ensure the right to water by creating access to freshwater for all. Finally, this Comment introduces the iceberg trade as an equitable remedy to be employed by the Paris Agreement in the …

Sea Ice And The Law Of The Sea: The Myth Of Article 234, Amanda H. Lynch, Charles H. Norchi

Ocean and Coastal Law Journal

The sea ice of Article 234 of UNCLOS represents not the physical ice of the Arctic Ocean but a negotiated myth of ice as it affects the Arctic littoral states. The stability of this prescription is threatened by anthropogenic climate change causing a preferential evacuation of ice from the eastern Arctic compared to the western Arctic, as well as expectations for a possible future ice-free Arctic. This is leading to an intensification of claims on marine space. The irreducible uncertainties of the future trajectory of Arctic change demands a dynamic response. The myth of Article 234 will ultimately align with …