Environmental Law Commons^™

Alternative Spring Break 2018 Report, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

The New(Clear?) Electricity Federalism: Federal Preemption Of States’ “Zero Emissions Credit” Programs, Joel Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

This Article proposes and applies a “conscious disregard” test for resolving the upcoming appellate litigation that involves the conflict between federal authority over the electric grid and state laws providing subsidies to nuclear power plants in the form of “zero emissions credits” (ZECs). This test draws upon principles of conflict preemption, as elaborated in three recent Supreme Court decisions on the intersection of state and federal jurisdiction over the electric grid under the Federal Power Act. It provides that if a state law explicitly aims to directly affect wholesale electricity market prices, terms or conditions, its subsidy program is impermissible …

Free Trade In Electric Power, Joel Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

This Article develops the core legal framework of a new electricity-trading ecosystem in which anyone, anytime, anywhere, can trade electricity in any amount with anyone else. The proliferation of solar and other distributed energy resources, business model innovation in the sharing economy, and climate change present enormous challenges — and opportunities — for America’s energy economy. But the electricity industry is ill equipped to adapt to and benefit from these transformative forces, with much of its physical infrastructure, regulatory institutions, and business models a relic of the early days of electrification. We suggest a systematic rethinking to usher in a …

Viewer Disability And Television Accessibility: Closed-Captioning And Video Description Requirements In Today's Television Environment, Kimberlianne Podlas

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article examines the legal and practical challenges of ensuring accessibility for individuals with sensory impairments in the contemporary television landscape, highlighting gaps in current regulations and the role of voluntary industry efforts in advancing accessibility. It argues that while laws like the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provide a framework for accessibility, they fail to comprehensively address the complexities of modern streaming platforms and digital services. The analysis emphasizes the importance of both regulatory expansion and industry-led initiatives to achieve equitable access for all viewers.

The Flipside Of Michigan V. Epa: Are Cumulative Impacts Centrally Relevant?, Sanne H. Knudsen

Articles

This Article explores the flipside of Michigan--where the Court's logic can just as well support agencies in their public health and environmental protection efforts. In particular, taking Michigan as a blueprint, this Article argues that cumulative impacts are centrally relevant to environmental regulation and--like cost--deserve a systemic and meaningful role in agency decisionmaking, including in the threshold decision of when to regulate.

In doing so, this Article serves as a counterbalance to the weight of cost benefit rhetoric that would reduce environmental law off to a line item in a strained budget. In support of that thesis, this Article …

State Authority To Preempt Local Laws Regulating Renewable Energy Projects, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

The New York State Energy Plan, announced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2015, calls for a doubling to 50 percent of the portion of the electricity used in the state that comes from renewable sources by 2030. This would lower greenhouse gas emissions, create jobs, and reduce the use of fossil fuels, especially natural gas.

Much of this new renewable energy would be generated by wind and solar projects. Some if it would be from wind facilities to be built offshore in the Atlantic Ocean; the rest would be on the land.

Patterns Of Climate Change Litigation During Trump Era, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

Litigation about climate change took off in the early 2000s. Its focus has varied with the occupant of the White House. Under George W. Bush, most suits were brought by environmental groups and blue states, frustrated by the lack of federal action, seeking to push regulations or impede fossil fuel projects. Under Barack Obama, climate litigation was mostly industry and red states seeking to block regulations. And now under Donald Trump, it is largely about environmental groups and blue states trying to preserve the rules adopted under President Obama, and to seek novel remedies to get around federal hostility to …

New York Environmental Legislation In 2017, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

In 2017, New York State enacted multiple laws that tackle aspects of two major environmental issues facing the state: protecting water quality and advancing the state’s clean energy goals. In addition, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed laws concerning oil tankers on the Hudson, elephant welfare, food waste, and lead paint. He also approved a moratorium barring New York City’s plastic bag fee from taking effect. This annual survey reports on these developments and other environmental laws enacted in 2017.

Environmental Law, Eleventh Circuit Survey, Travis M. Trimble

Scholarly Works

In 2017, district courts decided several issues that the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit had never addressed. The United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia concluded that the Clean Water Act's (CWA) prohibition on the discharge of pollutants into waters of the United States without a permit extended to discharges into groundwater with a "direct hydrological connection" to surface waters within the Act's scope. The court also concluded that a state-permitted land application system, whereby wastewater is sprayed onto fields as means of treatment and disposal, constituted a "point source" within the meaning …

Allocating Property Interests In Ecosystem Services: From Chaos To Flowing Rivers, Kalyani Robbins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Geological Storage Of Co2 In Sub-Seafloor Basalt: The Carbonsafe Pre-Feasibility Study Offshore Washington State And British Columbia, David Goldberg, Lara Aston, Alain Bonneville, Inci Demirkanli, Curtis Evans, Andrew Fisher, Helena Garcia, Michael B. Gerrard, Martin Heesemann, Ken Hnottavange-Telleen, Emily Hsu, Cristina Malinverno, Kate Moran, Ah-Hyung Alissa Park, Martin Scherwath, Angela Slagle, Martin Stute, Tess Weathers, Romany M. Webb, Mark White, Signe White, Carbonsafe Cascadia Project Team

Faculty Scholarship

The CarbonSAFE Cascadia project team is conducting a pre-feasibility study to evaluate technical and nontechnical aspects of collecting and storing 50 MMT of CO2 in a safe, ocean basalt reservoir offshore from Washington State and British Columbia. Sub-seafloor basalts are very common on Earth and enable CO2 mineralization as a long-term storage mechanism, permanently sequestering the carbon in solid rock form. Our project goals include the evaluation of this reservoir as an industrial-scale CO2 storage complex, developing potential source/transport scenarios, conducting laboratory and modeling studies to determine the potential capacity of the reservoir, and completing an assessment of economic, regulatory …

Going Negative: The Next Horizon In Climate Engineering Law, Tracy Hester, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

As the global community struggles to turn the Paris Agreement’s commitments into meaningful emission reductions and the United States turbulently reverses its climate policies, the potential role of “negative emissions technologies” and other climate engineering approaches is drawing increasingly serious attention. These technologies are engineering on the grandest scale: climate engineering seeks to offset the effects of anthropogenic climate change by either altering the solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface or changing the composition of the atmosphere itself. Specifically, negative emissions technologies would directly remove greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the ambient air and help to remove accumulated atmospheric carbon dioxide …

Sequestering Carbon Dioxide Undersea In The Atlantic: Legal Problems And Solutions, Michael B. Gerrard, Romany M. Webb

Faculty Scholarship

Reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is vital to mitigate climate change. To date, reduction efforts have primarily focused on minimizing the production of carbon dioxide during electricity generation, transport, and other activities. Going forward, to the extent that carbon dioxide continues to be produced, it will need to be captured before release. The captured carbon dioxide can then be utilized in some fashion or injected into underground geological formations (e.g., depleted oil and gas reserves, deep saline aquifers, or basalt rock reservoirs) where it will hopefully remain permanently sequestered. This injection process is referred to as …

Legal Tools For Cities To Cope With Extreme Heat, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

Heat causes more deaths in the U.S. than any other natural hazard – more than floods, hurricanes, or tornadoes. As a result of climate change, it is getting worse. Average annual temperatures are now about 1.8°F higher than they were over the period 1895-2016, they will go up to about 2.5°F by mid-century, and if greenhouse gas emissions continue on the current path, they could rise almost 12°F by 2100, and heat waves that now occur once every 20 years could become annual events, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Green Finance: Leveraging Investment For Environmental Protection, Michael B. Gerrard, Charles E. Di Leva, John Rousakis, Douglas Sims

Faculty Scholarship

Some political narratives describe the relationship between environmental protection and economic growth as two inherently incompatible goals. As the global community turns its attention to implementing international climate agreements, this story is ceding ground to the realization that the economy must facilitate a transition to sustainability. With limited government funding available, private investments offer an opportunity to dramatically increase and leverage funding to address daunting environmental problems. Green financing will play a critical role in the shift to a green economy.

Governments, intergovernmental organizations, financial institutions, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are examining green financing mechanisms in earnest. Financial institutions …

Heat Waves: Legal Adaptation To The Most Lethal Climate Disaster (So Far), Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The worst heatwave in modern history occurred in Russia in 2010; its rare combination of extreme temperatures and long duration killed an estimated 55,000 people. Under an RCP 8.5 scenario, comparable heat waves could occur every two years in the eastern United States by the end of the century, and by then in Europe, the legendary heat wave of 2003 “would be classed as an anomalously cold summer relative to the new climate.” These increased temperatures and heat waves are not just occurring randomly. The science is clear that human activities – mostly greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation – are …

The Long Environmental Justice Movement, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The standpoint of environmental justice has become integral to environmental law in the last thirty years. Environmental justice criticizes mainstream environmental law and advocacy institutions on three main fronts: for paying too little attention to the distributive effects of environmental policy; for emphasizing elite and professional advocacy over participation in decision making by affected communities; and for adhering to a woods-and-waters view of which problems count as “environmental” that disregards the importance of neighborhoods, workplaces, and cities. This Article highlights the existence of a “long environmental justice movement” that, like the long movements for racial equality and labor organizing, put …

L’Évolution Des Actions En Justice Climatique Aux États-Unis, De George W. Bush À Donald Trump, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Les États-Unis ont plus de procès sur le climat que tous les autres pays dumonde réunis. La nature du litige a tendance à varier selon le parti qui détient la Maison Blanche. Pendant les administrations démocrates (Barack Obama), les poursuites ont tendance à être intentées par des sociétés industrielles et des États à tendance républicaine, alléguant que le Gouvernement fédéral en fait trop pour lutter contre le changement climatique. Pendant les administrations républicaines (George W. Bush, Donald J. Trump), la plupart des poursuites sont intentées par des groupes environnementaux et des États démocrates, alléguant que le Gouvernement fédéral en fait …

Climate Change And Human Trafficking After The Paris Agreement, Michael Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

At least 21 million people globally are victims of human trafficking, typically involving either sexual exploitation or forced labor. This form of modern-day slavery tends to increase after natural disasters or conflicts where large numbers of people are displaced from their homes and become highly vulnerable. In the decades to come, climate change will very likely lead to a large increase in the number of people who are displaced and thus vulnerable to trafficking. The Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 established objectives to limit global temperature increases, but the voluntary pledges made by nearly every country fall far short of …

Safe Harbors: The Many Benefits Of Marine Monuments And Sanctuaries, John F. Bruno, Whitley Saumweber, Larry B. Crowder, Linwood Pendleton, Stephen E. Roady, Tracy Rouleau, Miyoko Sakashita

Faculty Scholarship

The United States has been at the forefront of marine resource stewardship since the 1970s when Federal officials began to implement a series of national policies aimed at the conservation and management of public trust resources in the ocean. Beginning with the establishment of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1970, soon followed by several pieces of landmark legislation, this era marked the start of a continuing effort to integrate ecosystem science with marine resource management. Among the most important bipartisan legacies of this effort has been the steady expansion of marine managed areas in U.S. coastal and ocean …