At this point in time, climate change pervades every aspect of contemporary life. It is a persistent current through our lives and, increasingly, throughout the law. One would be hard-pressed to find any area of law that has not or will not soon be touched by climate change. The onset of climate change has prompted decades worth of deep and wide efforts to reshape law and policy. Yet, alongside this development, there is also erosion. This Comment takes up these two competing trends: the steady development of climate-related legal and political measures versus countermoves designed to undercut the emerging rule of law around climate change. It suggests that, despite the lack of climate-specific legislation, there is a growing body of law that advances efforts to limit climate change, and limits the ability of political actors (including the U.S. Supreme Court) to undercut legal progress.

The European Union, China, California, and a number of U.S. states in the Northeast are currently using emissions trading as part of their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, the popularity of emissions trading as a policy tool co-exists with a well-established, and increasingly politically powerful, set of critiques of it in the United States. These critiques come from environmental justice advocates as well as some academics and other observers. This Comment ventures to propose an innovative application for trading—the development of a municipal trading program to help reduce GHG emissions from buildings, which account for the lion’s share of many cities’ GHG emissions—and lays out two forms of the proposed policy mechanism that cities could implement.

Efforts to hold major greenhouse gas emitters accountable for the harms caused by global climate change have been consistently frustrated at the procedural stages of litigation in U.S. federal courts. This Article explores using a combination of class action mechanisms to engage with these threshold barriers and hold carbon-major corporations responsible for climate impacts. Specifically, it proposes using issue certification under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(c)(4) against a defendant class of carbon-major polluters to overcome the causation question that has obstructed federal courts’ engagement with the merits of climate change litigation.