An essential part of the decarbonization challenge is proposing, analyzing, and comparing various legal pathways to that result in each individual country. Those legal pathways should be capable of reducing greenhouse gas emissions at a speed and scale needed to give the world its best chance of keeping the global average temperature increase below 2°C while also producing as many economic, social, environmental, and security benefits as possible.
EPA and the Corps’ promulgation of a new definition of “waters of the United States” under the CWA has prompted a fierce rhetorical and legal debate. EPA maintains that the agencies’ jurisdiction may actually be limited by the new definition, while agricultural organizations maintain that jurisdiction is increased in violation of the agencies’ statutory authority. While heavily engaged in public dialogue, neither side has attempted to offer a systematic legal analysis comparing the scope of jurisdiction under the preexisting rule to its scope under the final rule.
Scientific uncertainty is a component of many environmental and public health issues, such as climate change or the use of biotechnology. While some uncertainty is inevitable, the ways in which various professions communicate uncertainty also shape those debates, from the interpretation of scientific data to its dissemination for a mass audience to its use in advocacy and policymaking. Scientists, lawyers, and journalists all play different roles in addressing scientific uncertainty, in part due to differing professional norms and ethical standards.
Cost-benefit analysis purports to calibrate regulation. But the way administrative agencies practice cost-benefit analysis can, at best, calibrate a rule at the moment of its promulgation. As scientific knowledge of regulated health, safety, and environmental risks accumulates—and as technology becomes more affordable—the assumptions underlying a rule’s cost-benefit analysis can rapidly obsolesce. Because of the structural incentives towards agency inaction, pressure from regulated firms, or attention to other priorities, outdated rules persist.
De-extinction, an emerging suite of selective breeding or biotechnological processes for reviving and releasing into the environment members or facsimiles of an extinct species, has been the subject of a recent surge of analysis in popular, scientific, and legal literature. Unfortunately, conservation laws likely to govern the revival and introduction of de-extinct species like the Dodo largely remain premised on outdated assumptions of nature as static and firmly divisible from human activity.
As Welton’s article illuminates, the electric sector is not as organized as it appears. Welton references the recent Supreme Court decision, FERC v. Elec. Power Supply Ass’n, and suggests that the case may provide FERC with not only the authority, “but ‘indeed, the duty’” to ensure just and reasonable rates through non-traditional means, such as true parity in treatment of non-transmission alternatives. Welton’s analysis is accurate, however both FERC v. Elec.
Shelley Welton’s Non-Transmission Alternatives is a timely examination of an important issue in energy and environmental policy: What regulatory and business structures would best enable the Nation to plan, build, and pay for the right mix of electric transmission and alternative facilities? The Article explores reasons why the regional transmission planning process required by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order No. 10002 is not up to that task. This Comment notes ways FERC could clarify key terms used in Order No.
Current transmission planning processes are unlikely to result in selection and implementation of non-transmission solutions, even where they are demonstrably superior. This shortcoming is obviously bad for proponents of distributed energy. It is also bad for those who hope to implement significant but thoughtful grid expansion in the coming decades. More transmission is critically needed to update infrastructure and to keep pace with renewable resource development, but each transmission line is also a fractious, expensive, and environmentally damaging endeavor.
This extraordinarily well-written, well-researched article by Michael Livermore and Ricky Revesz makes a significant contribution to the literature and public policy debates by challenging conventional wisdom—namely, that health-based NAAQS are more stringent (and hence more protective) than those that would be set were we to consider the costs of achieving those standards.
Professors Livermore and Revesz present a seemingly well-documented call for moving beyond health-based environmental standards to optimize public health and environmental protections in their provocative article.