Region: International

Negative Greenhouse Gas Emissions, the National Academies, and the Law

Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda

What does the scaling-up of negative emissions technologies for environmental law?

In my previous posts , I described how most emissions scenarios that are expected to keep warming within 2 or 1.5°C rely on negative emissions technologies (NETs) at large scales and how the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change addresses NETs (as well as how solar geoengineering could offer an additional means to …

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Você Fala Português?

Brazil’s New Environmental Crisis Raises Crucial Constitutional and Advocacy Issues

  As Dan noted last week, and as E & E News reports today, Brazil’s President-Elect, Jair Bolsonaro, is not only an authoritarian quasi-fascist (no exaggeration in those terms), but is also horrific for the environment. And that, in turn, is not simply bad for Brazil and South America, but for everyone on the planet. In …

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A Global Standard for a Global Problem

Emmett Institute Submits Comment in Support of CARB’s Proposed Tropical Forest Standard

The Emmett Institute submitted a comment to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) yesterday in support of its proposed Tropical Forest Standard (“Standard”).  If approved, this Standard would provide CARB a set of criteria to follow when determining whether to trade tropical forest offsets between California’s Cap and Trade Program and a foreign emissions trading …

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On the future of climate policy

A response to William Nordhaus’s comments about how essential carbon taxes are to addressing climate change

William Nordhaus recently (and deservedly) won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on the economic implications of climate change and policies to respond to climate change. In the press coverage after the award, some comments were attributed to Nordhaus that I think are important to consider in more depth – in part because …

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What to Make of Chief Justice Roberts’ Stay of the Juliana Case

It’s only temporary but stay tuned

Last Friday, as Rick Frank previously blogged, Chief Justice Roberts put a temporary halt to the Juliana v. United States trial –the Juliana  case was brought by a group of children alleging that the United States has violated the public trust doctrine and various provisions of the US. Constitution in failing to protect them from the ravages …

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American Journal of International Law Publishes Symposium on Climate Change Localism

California rancher Ned Wood unlocks the controls for the photovoltaic solar cells and well pump on Friday, Jul. 24, 2015 in Contra Costa County, CA.

The online alter ego of the American Journal of International Law, AJIL Unbound, has just published its symposium on Climate Change Localism. The symposium explores the implications of subnational actors’ efforts to address climate change. The explosion of initiatives and declarations in recent years outside the federal government, ranging from state and local governments to …

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Another Scary Election (But Not Here)

An election next Sunday has implications for the entire planet.

I hate to give you something else to freak out about in our current Age of Anxiety, but there’s a very worrisome presidential election next Sunday. No, I haven’t completely lost it – the presidential race isn’t here, it’s in Brazil.  The election pits a dangerous populist against a highly competent but colorless Establishment candidate. …

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A Potentially Important Climate Change Court Ruling in the Netherlands

Urgenda logo

A Dutch environmental organization surprisingly won its novel climate change lawsuit when the government appealed.

Although I am in the midst of a series of blog posts (1, 2, 3) regarding novel technologies in the recent special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I take a brief detour to report on a court ruling in the Netherlands regarding climate change. Although I am skeptical of its impact …

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Another Possible Means To Keep Global Warming Within 1.5 Degrees Celsius

Did the IPCC bury the lede regarding solar geoengineering?

In my previous posts on the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I described how models assume the use of uncertain negative emissions technologies at very large — if not impossible — scales in order to keep global warming within 1.5 or two degrees Celsius (1, 2; see also my colleague Julia …

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More great environmental and energy law scholarship

Some of the best articles in the field from 2016-17

Some of our readers may be interested in what is happening in environmental and energy legal scholarship.  So I thought I’d post again (I also did this in 2016) about the Land Use & Environment Law Review, which is Thomson Reuters/West Publishing’s peer-selected annual compendium of significant legal scholarship in land use and environmental law.  …

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