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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Environmental Soft Law As A Governance Strategy, Cary Coglianese
Environmental Soft Law As A Governance Strategy, Cary Coglianese
All Faculty Scholarship
Soft law governance relies on nongovernmental institutions that establish and implement voluntary standards. Compared with traditional hard law solutions to societal and economic problems, soft law alternatives promise to be more politically feasible to establish and then easier to adapt in the face of changing circumstances. They may also seem more likely to be flexible in what they demand of targeted businesses and other entities. But can soft law actually work to solve major problems? This Article considers the value of soft law governance through the lens of three major voluntary, nongovernmental initiatives that address environmental concerns: (1) ISO 14001 …
Decarbonization In Democracy, Shelley Welton
Decarbonization In Democracy, Shelley Welton
All Faculty Scholarship
Conventional wisdom holds that democracy is structurally ill-equipped to confront climate change. As the story goes, because each of us tends to dismiss consequences that befall people in other places and in future times, “the people” cannot be trusted to craft adequate decarbonization policies, designed to reduce present-day, domestic carbon emissions. Accordingly, U.S. climate change policy has focused on technocratic fixes that operate predominantly through executive action to escape democratic politics — with vanishingly little to show for it after a change in presidential administration. To help craft a more durable U.S. climate change strategy, this Article scrutinizes the purported …
Clean Energy Justice: Charting An Emerging Agenda, Shelley Welton, Joel B. Eisen
Clean Energy Justice: Charting An Emerging Agenda, Shelley Welton, Joel B. Eisen
All Faculty Scholarship
The rapid transition to clean energy is fraught with potential inequities. As clean energy policies ramp up in scale and ambition, they confront challenging new questions: Who should pay for the transition? Who should live next to the industrial-scale wind and solar farms these policies promote? Will the new “green” economy be a fairer one, with more widespread opportunity, than the fossil fuel economy it is replacing? Who gets to decide what kinds of resources power our decarbonized world? In this article, we assert that it is useful to understand these challenges collectively, as part of an emerging agenda of …
Electricity Markets And The Social Project Of Decarbonization, Shelley Welton
Electricity Markets And The Social Project Of Decarbonization, Shelley Welton
All Faculty Scholarship
Decarbonization is the process of converting our economy from one that runs predominantly on energy derived from fossil fuels to one that runs almost exclusively on clean, carbon-free energy. If pursued on the scale that experts believe necessary to prevent dangerous climate change, the infrastructure changes required to decarbonize the United States will have significant social and cultural implications. States aggressively pursuing decarbonization have adopted policies reflecting their understanding that decarbonization is a social project implicating numerous value choices. Various state decarbonization policies combine the aim of decarbonization with job promotion, economic development, income redistribution, urban revitalization, open-space preservation, and …
Clean Electrification, Shelley Welton
Clean Electrification, Shelley Welton
All Faculty Scholarship
To combat climate change, many leading states have adopted the aim of creating a “participatory” grid. In this new model, electricity is priced based on time of consumption and carbon content, and consumers are encouraged to adjust their behavior and adopt new technologies to maintain affordable electricity. Although a more participatory grid is an important component of lowering greenhouse gas emissions, it also raises a new problem of clean energy justice: utilities and consumer advocates claim that such policies unjustly benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, given the type of consumer best able to participate in the …
The Effect Of Allowing Pollution Offsets With Imperfect Enforcement, Hilary A. Sigman, Howard F. Chang
The Effect Of Allowing Pollution Offsets With Imperfect Enforcement, Hilary A. Sigman, Howard F. Chang
All Faculty Scholarship
Several pollution control regimes, including climate change policies, allow polluters in one sector subject to an emissions cap to offset excessive emissions in that sector with pollution abatement in another sector. The government may often find it more costly to verify offset claims than to verify compliance with emissions caps, and concerns about difficulties in enforcement may lead regulators to restrict the use of offsets. In this paper, we demonstrate that allowing offsets may increase pollution abatement and reduce illegal pollution, even if the government has a fixed enforcement budget. We explore the circumstances that may make it preferable to …
The Ecological Advantages Of Nuclear Power, Fred P. Bosselman
The Ecological Advantages Of Nuclear Power, Fred P. Bosselman
All Faculty Scholarship
Major electric utilities are deciding whether to build nuclear power plants. How will their decision affect ecological processes and systems, both in the United States and globally? The article makes three arguments: (1) if nuclear power plants are not built, the gap will be filled by more coal-fired power plants; (2) the impact of coal-fired power plants on ecological processes and systems is likely to be increasingly disastrous; and (3) nuclear power’s ecological impacts are likely to be neutral or even positive.
Problems Of Equity And Efficiency In The Design Of International Greenhouse Gas Cap-And-Trade Schemes, Jason S. Johnston
Problems Of Equity And Efficiency In The Design Of International Greenhouse Gas Cap-And-Trade Schemes, Jason S. Johnston
All Faculty Scholarship
This article argues that international greenhouse gas (GHG) cap-and-trade schemes suffer from inherent problems of enforceability and verifiability that both cause significant inefficiencies and create inevitable tradeoffs between equity and efficiency. A standard result in the economic analysis of international GHG cap and trade schemes is that an allocation of initial permits that favors poor, developing countries (making such countries net sellers in equilibrium) may be necessary not only to further redistributive goals but also the efficiency of the GHG cap and trade scheme. This coincidence of equity and efficiency is, however, unlikely to be realized under more realistic assumptions …
From The States Up: Building A National Renewable Energy Policy, Shelley Welton
From The States Up: Building A National Renewable Energy Policy, Shelley Welton
All Faculty Scholarship
In 2006, a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report concluded that “[r]educing the nation’s dependence on oil and carbon dioxide emissions in the next 25 years is not unlike the 1960s challenge to put a man on the moon.” In fact, this analogy may be understated. While the scope of the two challenges is similarly daunting, the consequences of failure are potentially much more serious in the case of the energy challenge. One key component of addressing this challenge will be changing the ways in which the U.S. meets its seemingly insatiable electricity demand. The environmental, foreign policy, health, and …