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Avoiding Performative Climate Justice

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.

The Tyranny of Baselines

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.

Climate Corps: Skills-Based Training to Combat the Climate Crisis

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.

Green Money for Western Waters: New Environmental Grants and Federal Water Pollution

Congress in the 2020s has authorized three new environmentally focused grant programs relating to western waters and appropriated $450 million in multi-year funding. The Bureau of Reclamation is responsible for creating and implementing these programs, giving it a new tool and resources for addressing stubborn environmental problems—some caused by the Bureau’s many dams.

Dismantling Roadblocks to a Sustainable Transition

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.

Annual Supreme Court Review and Preview

The U.S. Supreme Court's October Term 2022 had major implications for environmental law, including its most significant Clean Water Act decision ever. Upcoming cases in October Term 2023 have the potential to be just as impactful. On September 25, 2023, the Environmental Law Institute hosted a panel of experts who provided an overview of key rulings and major take-aways from the Court’s prior term, and discussed cases that have been granted review or are likely to be considered by the justices in the upcoming term.

Can We Talk Climate? The SEC Disclosure Rule and Compelled Commercial Speech

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.

Climate Change Disinformation Liability Under the Federal Trade Commission Act

Oil companies and their agents have been actively involved in creating and propagating climate change disinformation for the past half-century. In response to this deception, more than two dozen American states and cities have sued these companies under traditional tort-based causes of action like public nuisance, fraud, negligence, and failure to warn, alleging that the companies fueled uncertainty about climate science and undercut public support for necessary climate action.

Fighting Methane Emissions With the False Claims Act

This Comment argues that the False Claims Act (FCA) can now be used to enforce the Inflation Reduction Act's waste emissions charge and its royalties on vented and flared gas. It first explains why, unlike with other environmental violations, dodging either of these fees can trigger FCA liability. It then examines how two possible groups of plaintiffs—industry employees and outside observers—might discover unreported methane emissions and use the FCA against companies that dodge each of the IRA’s methane fees.