Environmental Law Commons^™

Saving Our Wilderness (And Ourselves) Starts At Home: Local Conservation With An Emphasis On Watershed Protection, Brandon Mayes

NCCU Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

When Less Is More: Minimalism And The Environment, Crisol Lopez Palafox

Environmental and Earth Law Journal (EELJ)

No abstract provided.

Taking Back The Beach, Lora Naismith

Student Scholarship

The numerous effects of anthropogenic climate change, including sea-level rise, continue to make global changes to our environment. With greenhouse gas emissions come warmer temperatures, melting glaciers, and a higher sealevel. In an attempt to address the rising sea, communities have the option to protect the shoreline, alter structures to be able to remain in the area, or abandon the area as the sea rises. The Texas coast alone is home to roughly 6.5 million people and provides jobs to nearly 2.5 million of those people. As the sea continues to rise, the Texas coast is subject to more severe …

There Will Be Floods: Armoring The People Of Florida To Make Informed Decisions On Flood Risk, Natalie N. Barefoot, Daniela Tagtachian, Abigail L. Fleming, Gabriela Falla, Bethany Blakeman, Natalie Cavellier

Articles

In Florida, a peninsula surrounded by water with the second-lowest mean elevation in the country, there will be floods.[1] A global study ranking cities most vulnerable to losses from flooding lists Miami first in the United States and sixth globally; Tampa-St. Petersburg is listed as 16th globally.[2] Yet there are no state statutes or regulations in Florida that require a seller or landlord to make flood-related disclosures to homebuyers and renters. In contrast, while varying in scope, 29 states require flood-risk disclosures in real estate transactions.[3] Though Florida should be leading in this arena, in an evaluation of nationwide flood …

Seeking (Some) Climate Justice In State Tort Law, Karen C. Sokol

Washington Law Review

Over the last decade, an increasing number of path-breaking cases have been filed throughout the world, seeking to hold fossil fuel industry companies and governments accountable for their actions and inactions that have contributed to the climate crisis. This Article focuses on an important subset of those cases—namely, the recent surge of cases brought by states, cities, and counties all over the United States alleging that the largest fossil fuel industry actors, including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron, are liable in state tort law for harms caused by climate change.

The Article begins with a synthesis of the history of …

Climate Cages: Connecting Migration, The Carceral State, Extinction Rebellion, And The Coronavirus Through Cicero And 21 Savage, Nadia B. Ahmad

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Death Of Dillon’S Rule: Local Autonomy To Control Land Use, John R. Nolon

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In order for municipal governments to promote sustainable and green development, create safe densities and open spaces in response to the pandemic, protect lives and property in areas vulnerable to natural disasters, and to manage climate change, they must be able to influence the development and preservation of privately owned land. For them to control the negative impacts of oil and gas facilities, they must find power to regulate matters that are typically the prerogative of state agencies. To legalize emerging renewable energy technologies, they must have authority to make them permitted uses in their zoning ordinances, and to innovate …

Free, Prior And Informed Consent: Addressing Political Realities To Improve Impact, Tehtena Mebratu-Tsegaye, Leila Kazemi

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Indigenous and Tribal peoples’ right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) has transformative potential. Yet, there is a considerable gap between the theory and what happens in practice. Global actors supporting recognition of FPIC and effective prior consultation processes usually focus on normative standards and best practices. They concentrate much less on addressing the political challenges and opportunities that shape how these processes unfold.

With funding from the Ford Foundation, we looked at the politics of FPIC in Latin America, analyzing how the power and interests of the key players–across governments, companies and indigenous peoples–can determine the fate of …

The Comet Framework: Greenhouse Gas Data Transparency To Enable The Success Of Eu Climate Policy, Martin Dietrich Brauch, Solina Kennedy

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

To further and fully understand how to plan for the decarbonization of mining value chains, we need better data on carbon and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, neither consumers, corporates, or financial institutions know the embodied emissions in the products they produce or sell. While methods like life-cycle analysis and environmental product declarations exist, none use a verifiable, comparable, or widely adopted emissions reporting framework capable of sending supply chain signals.

To truly reform material supply chains, new solutions for markets, capital, and policy are required. COMET (the Coalition on Materials Emissions Transparency)—an alliance launched at Davos in January …

Back To The Future: Creating A Bipartisan Environmental Movement For The 21st Century, David M. Uhlmann

Articles

With a contentious presidential election looming amidst a pandemic, economic worries, and historic protests against systemic racism, climate action may seem less pressing than other challenges. Nothing could be further from the truth. To prevent greater public health threats and economic dislocation from climate disruption, which will disproportionately harm Black Americans, people of color, and indigenous people, this Comment argues that we need to restore the bipartisanship that fueled the environmental movement and that the fate of the planet—and our children and grandchildren—depends upon our collective action.

An Analysis Of The Human Rights Approach To Climate Change: The Right To A Healthy Environment, Intergenerational Equity And Climate Litigation, Unwana Emmanuel Udo

LLM Theses

Climate change litigation is a viable tool in the fight against climate change. For the past 2 decades, climate litigation has largely been based on torts and administrative law. However, courts have recently been quite receptive to human rights arguments in climate cases, thereby necessitating recognition of the human rights approach as an important facet of climate litigation. It is important for intergenerational equity to be integrated into the human rights approach to climate change. One of the major benefits of intergenerational equity to the human rights approach is its potential to catalyze the recognition of the right to a …

The Gap-Filling Role Of Private Environmental Governance, Jim Rossi, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Ian Faucher

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Private environmental governance provides new tools that can fill gaps in government regulatory regimes. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a valuable case study for testing the efficacy of private environmental governance because it is one of the largest utility carbon emitters and is largely insulated from near-term federal and state government pressure to reduce emissions. TVA is not on a trajectory to achieve the decarbonization targets necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, but private governance initiatives can motivate TVA to accelerate its decarbonization process. TVA's securities filings acknowledge that it faces material threats on the energy …

Climate Change And Government Negligence Liability In Massachusetts, Melissa Chalek

Marine Affairs Institute Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Responding To Nuisance Flooding Of Coastal Highways: Options For Massachusetts Municipalities, Melissa Chalek

Marine Affairs Institute Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Whither The Regulatory "War On Coal"? Scapegoats, Saviors, And Stock Market Reactions, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

Complaints about excessive economic burdens associated with regulation abound in contemporary political and legal rhetoric. In recent years, perhaps nowhere have these complaints been heard as loudly as in the context of U.S. regulations targeting the use of coal to supply power to the nation’s electricity system, as production levels in the coal industry dropped by nearly half between 2008 and 2016. The coal industry and its political supporters, including the president of the United States, have argued that a suite of air pollution regulations imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration seriously undermined coal companies’ …

Trauma-Centered Social Justice, Noa Ben-Asher

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article identifies a new and growing phenomenon in the American legal system. Many leading agendas for gender, racial, and climate justice are centered on emotional trauma as the primary injury of contemporary social injustices. By focusing on three social justice movements--#BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and Climate Justice--the Article offers the first comprehensive diagnosis and assessment of how emotional trauma has become an engine for legal and policy social justice reforms. From a nineteenth century psychoanalytic theory about repressed childhood sexual memories that manifest in female hysteria, through extensive medicalization and classification in the twentieth century, emotional trauma has evolved and expanded …

Law On The Half Shell: Applying A Right-To-Farm Framework To Virginia's Aquaculture Industry, Matt Woodward, Andrew Corso

Virginia Coastal Policy Center

Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, states responded to mounting land use conflicts by enacting Right-to-Farm or “RTF” laws. These laws serve to protect farmers and other agricultural producers by shielding their operations from nuisance suits. Virginia’s RTF law has helped to resolve land use conflicts and has helped to protect an agricultural industry that is both culturally and economically vital to the state.

Commercial shellfish activity has also historically proven vital to Virginia’s unique coastal identity and economy. Further, over the last several decades, Virginia’s diverse aquaculture industry has grown, making Virginia one of the leading producers of aquacultural …

Adaptive Management For Ecosystem Services, J. B. Ruhl, Robin Kundis Craig

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Managing the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is a widely-recognized land use problem plagued by a fractured geography of land parcels, management jurisdictions, and governance mandates and objectives. People who work in this field have suggested a variety of approaches to managing this interface, from informal governance to contracting to insurance. To date, however, none of these scholars has fully embraced the dynamism, uncertainty, and complexity of the WUI—that is, its status as a complex adaptive system. In focusing almost exclusively on the management of this interface to control wildfire, this scholarship largely ignores the fact that rampant wildfire is itself the …

Forks In The Road, Michael P. Vandenbergh, J. M. Gilligan

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Essay outlines a simple heuristic that will enable public and private policymakers to focus on the most important climate change mitigation strategies. Policymakers face a dizzying array of information, pressure from advocacy groups, and policy options, and it is easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Many policy options are attractive on the surface but either fail to meaningfully address the problem or are unlikely to be adopted in the foreseeable future. If policymakers make the right decision when confronting three essential choices or forks in the road, though, the result will be 60% to 70% …

“Something There Is That Doesn’T Love A Wall:” A Reflection On The Constitutional Vulnerabilities Of The Southwest Border Wall, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.