Today's climate impacts and those on the horizon increasingly infuse mitigation and adaptation efforts with urgency, causing policymakers to contemplate or issue formal declarations of a climate emergency and to streamline review processes to aid rapid development of mitigation and adaptation infrastructure and technology. Yet, this urgency and need have the potential to create injustice and sideline or overwhelm efforts to reduce existing injustice.
Many environmental law paradigms focus on fixed points. Sometimes, the fixed points are in the past, and environmental laws call upon us to look at a baseline or previous state of nature and compare our actions against it. Other approaches call for us to consider an ideal state and develop strategies regarding how to reach it. In a 4° Celsius world, both strategies fail. Adhering to baselines is meaningless and striving for goals that are unachievable may lead to paralysis.
Last September, the Biden Administration announced the American Climate Corps, a workforce training and service initiative with the goal of giving young people skills-based training for careers in the clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience sectors. The initiative will offer 20,000 Americans paid training in a variety of environmental fields, specifically prioritize equity and environmental justice, and collaborate with federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, and tribal, state, and local governments.
EPA announced the availability of and seeks comment on the draft document titled "Technical Documentation for the Framework for Evaluating Damages and Impacts (FrEDI)," which provides technical documentation of a framework used to analyze future climate change-related impacts to the United States, projected to occur across multiple impact sector categories, geographic regions, and populations, under any custom temperature scenario.
EPA announced the availability of and seeks comment on the Draft Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2022.
The United States has historically valued free access to most public lands. But federal land management agencies also rely on users’ fee dollars to support critical operations. This tension between “free access” and “user pays” has been an important feature of public land law since the late 1800s. The primary statute at issue is the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act (FLREA), which authorizes fees at some sites while mandating free access at others.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs proclaimed approximately 1,483.03 acres as an addition to the reservation of Pascua Yaqui Tribe.
Green startups play a crucial role in the transition to a sustainable economy, yet there is a gap in the literature about the legal and policy challenges these startups face. This Article seeks to fill that gap through interviews, surveys, and focus groups with senior law firm partners experienced in advising green startups, senior pro bono counsel and staff, chief executive officers of early-stage green startups, and senior staff at nonprofit legal aid groups.
The Federal Highway Administration amended its regulations governing national performance management measures to require state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations to establish declining carbon dioxide targets for the greenhouse gas emissions associated with transportation and report on progress toward the achievement of those targets.
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) Climate Disclosure Rule has provoked heated controversy on many fronts. Several commenters have argued that the First Amendment precludes the SEC from demanding climate-related disclosures. This Article grapples with the unsettled state of “compelled commercial speech” doctrine, arguing that the rule’s constitutionality should be scrutinized using the prevailing rational basis test, and that even under the intermediate scrutiny test, the rule should be upheld.