I can’t let this one pass unremarked. Seth Jaffe, writing in the Boston law firm Foley Hoag’s “Law and the Environment” blog, uses Portland Oregon’s recent release of an updated draft Climate Action Plan as an occasion to criticize not only Portland (one of the few cities I actually like) but the whole concept of local climate planning and regulation. Jaffe sees local climate action as “a heavy thumb on the side of the scale arguing for comprehensive federal legislation.” Despite conceding that some local climate measures “may be beneficial,” Jaffe argues that “many . . . will be inefficient, contradictory, or both.” He recognizes that the bills passed by the House and under consideration in the Senate would not preempt local action. It appears that he would prefer preemption, but at a minimum he wants quick federal action so that this silly idea of local climate planning will stop spreading.
Jaffe is flat wrong. Of course we need national climate legislation, but federal law should support and encourage local climate action, not try to squelch it.
Local communities took up the challenge of dealing with climate change long before the federal government did. Indeed, grassroots enthusiasm for climate action at the local level has been an important part of the political progress in the US toward federal legislation. Portland was reportedly the first U.S. city to act, adopting a CO2 reduction strategy in 1993, followed by a local climate action plan in 2001. In 2005, as the Kyoto Protocol took effect without U.S. participation, the US Conference of Mayors adopted a Climate Protection Agreement calling for federal and state action but also pledging local efforts to reduce emissions. Today, more than 1000 mayors representing nearly 87 million Americans have signed the agreement. The Conference of Mayors has created a Climate Protection Center to facilitate the exchange of information and highlight models of “best practices.”
Local governments are essential partners in emission reduction (and adaptation) efforts. The federal government is capable of regulating industrial emissions, although even there it has needed state partners to implement the national regulatory schemes of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. But controlling industrial emissions alone won’t solve the climate problem. Roughly a third of the nation’s carbon emissions are directly attributable to individual decisions about electricity use, personal transportation, and the like.
Those decisions are difficult to change by legislative fiat, in part because they respond to the infrastructure of local communities. Local governments are peculiarly well positioned to understand local variation in sources of GHG emissions and the susceptibility of those emissions to control measure. And given their traditional primacy in land use regulation, they are often the only entity capable of dealing with the emissions encouraged by sprawling development. Leaving them out of the equation would repeat the mistakes of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which have done a terrific job of controlling industrial pollution but left other important contributors like vehicle miles driven and diffuse run-off essentially untouched.
Cities are also major consumers of energy, operating fleets of vehicles, installing street lighting, and pumping drinking water and wastewater. They can use their market power to encourage the development and spread of energy-efficient technologies like LED traffic signals and high-efficiency cars.
Finally, local governments are politically responsive to their constituents. If the people of Portland don’t want their government to work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it won’t. But there is no reason for Portland residents to object. Quite the contrary. The measures Portland proposes are not intrusive or heavy-handed. They are common-sense measures designed to reduce the city’s direct carbon footprint and help concerned citizens reduce their individual footprints. Portland’s plan, and others like it across the country, will save the city and its residents money by reducing energy consumption while at the same time making the community more livable.
So let’s congratulate Portland for its work on climate planning, and let’s make sure that federal legislation includes measures to encourage and fund this sort of local initiative.
I’ve been catching up on some reading. Here are links to a few interesting recent journal articles.
Well, so much for that:
Faced with resistance from within and outside to his advocacy for a dramatic change of stand on climate change negotiations,environment minister Jairam Ramesh was in a damage control mode on Tuesday.
The minister retraced his steps against the backdrop of clear signs that the country’s climate negotiators, including Prime Minister’s special envoy Shyam Saran and C Dasgupta, were unhappy with his controversial proposition. Dasgupta, a veteran of many battles with the developed countries — the leading polluters — had considered quitting in protest against the attempt to shift gears. The senior negotiator was reassured only after the PMO clarified that Ramesh had, in his letter to the PM, merely reflected his personal views.
Some observers had leapt prematurely on the disclosure of a private note from Ramesh to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which had argued for reorienting India’s climate policy closer to the G-20 and away from the G-77 — in other words, attempting to reach a compromise with developed nations.
In his letter, Ramesh had suggested, rightfully in my view, that although India could not accept binding emissions caps, it could adopt a “schedules approach,” which would allow different countries to pledge a variety of actions for cutting emissions such as renewable electricity standards and provisions to avoid deforestation rather than relying on economy-wide caps on emissions as the indication of a country’s commitment. i believe that this is the best way to approach New Delhi on the issue, as I wrote earlier this year.
Ramesh is an intelligent and sophisticated advocate, but it seems to me that he was clearly suckered here: he may have intended to start a new conversation within Indian government circles, but a well-placed leak destroyed it. And really, he should have anticipated that. The fact of the matter is that in India, the Environment Ministry is very weak, and attempts to interfere in these negotiations represented a challenge to Singh’s climate advisor Shyam Saran and Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, a key member of the Prime Minister’s climate team.
But after Copenhagen, the United States and India are going to have to pick up the pieces, and the schedules approach is a promising way to start.
Ecology Law Quarterly has a new issue available online, featuring articles about global environmental law; standing; and NRDC v. Winter; as well as a review of Doremus and Tarlock on the Klamath Basin. Browse the ELQ website to see this issue, a preview of the next one, the latest from Ecology Law Currents, and more.
Or go directly to the articles in this issue using the links below:
According to the Post,
The climate-change bill that has been moving slowly through the Senate will face a stark political reality when it emerges for committee debate on Tuesday: With Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the legislation, there is almost no hope for passage.
Let’s hope that’s not true. But if it is, we at least have state regulation and EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act to keep things moving forward. Unfortunately, in modern America, Congress too often seems to be the last place to look for serious decisions about social policy.
UPDATE: By Monday morning, the headline on the story had been watered down to “Climate Bill Faces Hurdles in the Senate.” In rereading the article, I was also struck by the ending:
State lawmakers who came to advise the White House last week on climate saw a different picture. “We looked for any Republican, in any state legislature in the country, who supported a bill,” recalled Minnesota state Rep. Jeremy Kalin. “We found not a one.”
If that’s right, it’s a sad commentary on the state of Amerian politics.
Under the Bush administration, which was implacably hostile to state environmental regulations exceeding federal minimum requirements, the Department of Energy refused to consider California’s request for permission to issue state rules setting water efficiency standards for washing machines. The Ninth Circuit has now set aside that action as arbitrary and capricious, and ruled that DOE must reconsider California’s request. That likely means that California’s rules will eventually take effect, but several years later than they should have.
Does it matter whether California can regulate the water efficiency of washing machines? More than you might think. California’s 2002 statute directing the California Energy Commission to set water efficiency standards was supported by a finding that washing machines account for a whopping 22% of average household water use. (If that seems too high, consider that the joint DOE/EPA Energy Star program assumes an average of 392 loads per per household per year.)
According to the Ninth Circuit, California asserted that its washing machine standards, when fully implemented, would produce annual water savings sufficient to supply a city the size of San Diego. That’s critically important in California, where water is chronically short and the water use cycle (transporting, supplying, treating, and disposing of water) is responsible for nearly 20% of electricity use.
The federalism of appliance efficiency standards is complex. The federal Energy Policy and Conservation Actpreempts the adoption of state standards for energy or water use of any product covered by federal energy efficiency standards. There are federal standards for energy use by washing machines, but the federal standards don’t cover water use because DOE concluded (at the tail end of the Clinton administration), that it lacked authority to issue water use standards.
EPCA allows DOE to waive preemption if state regulations are “needed to meet unusual and compelling State or local energy or water interests.” 42 U.S.C. § 6297(d). The statute requires that the state show both that its interests “are substantially different in nature or magnitude than those prevailing in the United States generally,” and that the regulation it seeks to adopt is preferable to “alternative approaches to energy or water savings or production, including reliance on reasonably predictable market-induced improvements in efficiency.”
No waiver may be issued if opponents of the state regulation show that it “will significantly burden manufacturing, marketing, distribution, sale, or servicing of the covered product on a national basis,”or “is likely to result in the unavailability in the State of any covered product type (or class) of performance characteristics (including reliability), features, sizes, capacities, and volumes that are substantially the same as those generally available in the State at the time of the Secretary’s finding. State rules cannot go into effect sooner than 3 years after the waiver is formally approved.
California sought a waiver late in 2005, shortly after it completed its regulations. A year later, DOE denied the petition. California sought review of that decision in the Ninth Circuit. After first determining that California was not required to seek review in the District Court, the Ninth Circuit ruled that DOE had not adequately considered California’s request.
A quick scan of the opinion shows just how determined the Bush DOE was to prevent any state regulation. DOE justified denial of the waiver on three grounds: (1) California’s rules, the first phase of which were to be implemented at the beginning of 2007, did not provide the statutorily required three years lead time, as of DOE’s December 2006 ruling on the waiver request; (2) California didn’t show exactly where in the administrative record it had shown that its regulations were preferable to alternative approaches; and (3) that adoption of the proposed regulations would make top-loading washers unavailable in California.
The Ninth Circuit rejected each of these arguments in turn. It concluded that: (1) DOE could have delayed approval of the state regulations for three years, or allowed the second phase (scheduled to begin in 2010) to go into effect without the first phase; (2) California had provided enough information to enable DOE to evaluate the waiver request against the statutory standards, as demonstrated by DOE’s acceptance of California’s submission as complete in 2005; and (3) that DOE had not evaluated the competing evidence on top-loading washers, instead simply accepting opponents’ assertion that none would be available.
California asked the court to order DOE to grant its waiver request, but the court was not willing to go that far. Having found that DOE had, in effect, never fully evaluated the request, the court decided that the remedy was to remand to DOE for a fresh look. Under the Obama administration, of course, that look is far more likely to result in a determination that the state has regulatory authority. For all its rhetoric of state’s rights, the Bush administration never believed those should apply to state decisions to impose strong environmental regulations. As demonstrated by its grant of California’s request for authority to implement automobile greenhouse gas emission regulations, the Obama administration is much more sympathetic to state autonomy on the environmental regulation front.
Expect a positive ruling from DOE on this one, and expect California’s rules to drive general improvements in washing machine water use efficiency. Better late than never.
Hat tip: LA Times Greenspace blog.
Apparently, substantially safer designs for nuclear reactors are now available. But the safe storage and disposal of nuclear waste is a significant challenge and a yet unresolved problem. Presently, waste is stored at over a hundred facilities across the country, within seventy-five miles of the homes of 161 million people.
The major problem is the longevity of the waste – plutonium will be dangerous for 250,000 years. Although we may be able to model the geologic and physical processes at some geographic sites over such time periods, no one seems to have a clue about how to model possible changes in human behavior and society. Thus, by producing nuclear waste, we are leaving our descendants with a dangerous problem, while having no real idea how competent they will be to handle it. Assuming we care about their welfare, we seem to be taking a serious gamble at their expense.
In the short run, it is not feasible to eliminate existing nuclear facilities. The tougher problem is the basic question of whether to continue producing substantial quantities of waste in the medium to long-run.
In the medium run, we have to think seriously about the upside benefits of nuclear power and whether they are enough to the risk to later generaitons. Upside benefits seem likely mostly in terms of avoidance of carbon emissions, so as to limit what we have already seen to be the severe downside risks of climate change. Whether nuclear should be part of the medium-term strategy depends in part on how optimistic we are about alternate technologies.
In the long-run, however, it is hard to see how we could justify continued production of nuclear wastes, given the tremendous uncertainties about containment – at least if we care about the welfare of distant generations. There may be alternative ways of using nuclear reactions to produce power that do not result in the production of such long-lived, dangerous waste. But as other non-carbon energy sources such as solar become more widespread and cost-effective, the upside benefits from nuclear will fade, leaving us in a situation where the imposition on our descendants becomes increasingly hard to justify.
Photo: Obama in Copenhagen earlier this year
Oct 30 Should Obama Go To Copenhagen?
President Obama has, of course, already been to Copenhagen once this year – in his quest to bring the Olympics to Chicago - and brought… [read more]
Oct 29 101 (Or So) Useful Responses to Climate Skeptics
I know a lot of people who have occasion, for one reason or another, to deal with climate skeptics. Sometimes this happens at public events, sometimes… [read more]
Oct 29 Climate and Energy Research @ Berkeley
Berkeley, like UCLA, is on the forefront of research on climate change and energy policy. There’s a lot going on here — ranging from breakthroughs… [read more]
Oct 28 Common Sense is Bipartisan
“Eleven academies in industrialized countries say that climate change is real; humans have caused most of the recent warming,” admitted Sen… [read more]
Oct 28 Paying for Those Transmission Lines to Promote Renewable Energy
Even people who could not care less about renewable energy development have heard the plea: in order to deliver big bunches of power from central station… [read more]
Oct 28 Corporate Law and Climate Change
In a policy reversal long sought by shareholder advocates, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ruled yesterday that investors can directly call… [read more]
Oct 28 News on the Political Front
Both the NY Times and the Washington Post had lead stories on the politics of climate change legislation. The Post’s story centered on the increasing… [read more]
Oct 27 Odds Are that Energy Technology Will Advance Faster Than Expected
In a post yesterday, I discussed a point that Sam Savage makes about climate change in his book, The Flaw of Averages. He makes another point that I… [read more]
Oct 26 The Nuisance Suits Heat Up: Fifth Circuit Follows Connecticut v. AEP
The Fifth Circuit, in Comer v. Murphy Oil Co., has agreed to follow the Second Circuit by construing Massachusetts v. EPA’s standing holding very… [read more]
Oct 26 Why You Should Worry About Climate Change Even If You Don’t Think It Is Going To Happen
Even if you think that carbon emissions won’t cause uncertainty, you should think seriously about hedging that bet. [read more]
Oct 25 Meeting the Energy Needs of the Global Poor
A billion people rely on primitive smoky cookstoves that damage their health and cause significant global warming. Much more needs to be done to address… [read more]
Oct 25 Environmental “Poetry” (Yet Again)
… [read more]
Warning: this thing will have more sequels than Friday the 13th! In fact, it will still be playing in your neighborhood theater for decades to come.
President Obama has, of course, already been to Copenhagen once this year — in his quest to bring the Olympics to Chicago — and brought nothing home to show for it. The stakes for the December United Nations Climate Change Conference are obviously much higher: the negotiation of an international agreement to govern greenhouse gas emissions when the Kyoto Protocol expires. But the first Copenhagen trip makes the question of whether Obama should go back to attend the December conference that much trickier. For political and symbolic reasons, should Obama go? On the one hand, if he found time to fly to Cophenhagen to persuade the International Olympic Committee that Chicago should get the Olympics, surely he should return in an attempt to persuade the international community to tackle a far more serious issue. On the other hand, the stakes are much higher so that failure could have more far-reaching consequences: if Obama attends and the conference produces no agreement he may lose significant political face. The Obama Administration has at least so far signaled that Obama won’t go: Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has said that “the meeting that’s currently set [is] not necessarily a head of state meeting” and unnamed White House sources are saying that it’s “hard to see the benefit” of Obama going to Copenhagen.
A related question is whether a visit from Obama would make any actual difference in helping secure an international agreement. Obama is obviously hampered by the fact that the Senate has not and almost certainly will not have passed climate legislation when negotiators convene in Copenhagen. So Obama may have little to offer to bolster a weak U.S. position on the issue. On the other hand, things can change between now and then. David Victor, for example, predicts that the U.S. and China will have a deal on climate policy that will be announced when Obama visits China a month before the Copenhagen talks. If he’s right, Obama can point to the new agreement, together with the fact that for the first time ever the House of Representatives has actually passed a comprehensive climate bill; that the Administration has adopted national emissions standards for automobiles; that the Environmental Protection Agency has taken action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act; and that Congress allocated significant stimulus money for energy efficiency, renewable energy and transmission line improvement as evidence that the U.S. is now making significant progress on the issue. So if the U.S. delegation thinks it has enough to offer to provide leadership toward a new agreement, a visit from Obama could be just enough to push negotiators over the top. But if it appears that the weakness of the U.S. position, together with intransigence from China and India, make an agreement nearly impossible, Obama — perhaps obviously — will sit Copenhagen out.
In a post yesterday, I discussed a point that Sam Savage makes about climate change in his book, The Flaw of Averages. He makes another point that I think is very important:
. . . if we continue developing sources of renewable energy at our current average rate, we may indeed be doomed. But we won’t continue at this pace because there will be a distribution of success rates, with some technologies evolving faster than others. The technologies that do evolve faster will get more funding than the others, further accelerating the advances, while the below-average technologies will be abandoned. Therefore, the expected pace of progress today underestimates the true pace of progress in the future.
This suggests that most — maybe the large majority — of the renewable technologies that people are touting today in fact won’t turn out. But this may not matter, so long as some of them do and we can push them forward aggressively.
If you think about it, this is basically how drug companies make tons of money. They research large numbers of possible new drugs, which on average turn out to be disappointing, but they pour funding into developing the rare exceptions that turn into bonanzas. If it works for them with drugs, the same strategy can work for society as a whole with energy technology.
Well, I didn’t expect this one.
The Fifth Circuit, in Comer v. Murphy Oil Co., has agreed to follow the Second Circuit by construing Massachusetts v. EPA’s standing holding very broadly. It has allowed a class action by private plaintiffs on a common-law public nuisance claim, for damages occurring from greenhouse gas emissions, to move forward.
More to come on this one when I have a chance to finish the opinion. But a couple of points:
1) Comer represents a case of private plaintiffs suing private defendants; thus, it has a different procedural and remedial posture from either Massachusetts v. EPA or Connecticut v. AEP. But if anything, the test here should have been even harder, because the AEP plaintiffs are asking for an injunction, and so do not have to point to specific damages.
2) The Fifth Circuit might be the most conservative federal appellate court in the country: if it is going in this direction, then certiorari might soon follow.
"Plans based on average assumptions are wrong on average"
Sam Savage’s book, The Flaw of Averages, talks about the ways that we are misled by focusing on averages rather than considering the full range of possible outcomes. It’s a fun read that makes some very important points. One of his illustrations is climate change, which is the subject of chapter 37.
Savage asks the read to consider a hypothetical in which, on average, we expect no sea level rise — perhaps because our best estimate is that climate change won’t happen. However, assume further that we are not certain of this outcome, and the range of possible sea levels forms a bell curve. Savage then observes that: “If the sea level ends up below expectations, then damage will be a bit lower than expected, but if sea level is above expectations, damage will be much worse than expected.” “Hence,” he continues, “the damage associated with the average or expected sea level change may be tolerable, but averaged over all the things a scorned and furious Mother Nature might do to us, the damage could be disastrous.”
Savage analogizes to a drunk walking down the center of a highway – the drunk’s average position is on the centerline, so he is completely “safe on average” but in fact he’s going to be killed because of his wobbles into oncoming traffic.
He emphasizes that “for this analysis I assumed that the expected temperature would be the same. yet the uncertainty alone created great risk.” So even if you think that carbon emissions probably won’t cause climate change, you might still want to think very serious about hedging that bet.
I spent yesterday at an important University of Colorado conference organized by Lakshman Guruswamy on energy justice. The conference dealt with a frequently overlooked part of the energy problem. In our discussions of energy policy, we often focus on those who, like Americans, are already high consumers of energy, or the needs of those who, like the Chines, are rapidly increasingly their consumption compensation. But there is a third group — the billion or more people whose only energy source is burning firewood, animal dung, or other organic material in primitive indoor stoves.
Given poorly ventilated housing, the result is a major public health problem, especially for women and children. Women also generally bear the burden of collecting the material to burn, which can take hours of their time and expose them to the risk of attack as they walk miles to the nearest source. And the poor combustion produces lots of black carbon, with substantial greenhouse effects.
This is a huge problem, but it has not brought forth a commensurate level of effort. Nevertheless, valiant efforts are being made by NGOs, academic researchers (including significant work at ERG), and government agencies to promote safer, more efficient cookstoves. There is some hope that more funding may become available as offset systems expand and mature — the reduction in black carbon could result in valuable offsets that could bring a good price from companies in the developed world.
There once was a coal company,
Which fought cap-and-trade mightily.
“Costs too much,” they complained,
“Emissions can’t be contained,
Or our profits will face jeopardy.”
There once was a scientist (or two),
Whose work couldn’t pass peer review:
“It’s all cosmic rays,
Or perhaps high-level haze,
Or something else besides plain CO2.”
Climate Change & Africa's Natural Resources. Artist: Rose Fyson, Melbourne, Australia for Oxfam
Oct 23 More Environmental “Poetry”
There once was a climate denier
Who said, “Let the carbon go higher.
From the facts let us run,
‘Cause coal’s cheap by the ton,
And who cares if the planet’s on fire?”
… [read more]
Oct 22 Two Important New Papers About Climate Policy
The latest issue of Science has two key papers on climate policy. First, Tim Searchinger, Dan Kammen (a faculty member at ERG), and others argue that… [read more]
Oct 22 UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy launches new website, publishes climate policy issue
Forgive me for a little boasting about our great student-run environmental law journal, which has just launched a new website with downloadable content… [read more]
Oct 22 New GAO Report on Adaptation
The challenges faced by federal, state, and local officials in their efforts to adapt fell into three categories, based on GAO’s analysis of questionnaire… [read more]
Oct 21 Oil Shale, Greenhouse Gas, and Federal Lands
Back in 2005, a Rand report assessed the merits of pursuing oil shale (a rock formation particularly prevalent in the U.S.) as an option for extracting… [read more]
Oct 21 Saving the Polar Bear: The Saga Continues
The Obama administration today proposed protecting more than 200,000 square miles in Alaska as critical habitat for the polar bear — an area the… [read more]
Oct 20 The New Top 40: Facing Up to the Worst Coal-Fired Powerplants
People are talking about it in emails and all over the blogosphere – it turns out that coal-fired electric power is not as cheap as many people want… [read more]
Oct 19 The Kivalina Climate Change Lawsuit: Wrong Is Right
As Holly noted the other day, Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong of the Northern District of California has thrown out the Kivalina tribe’s climate change… [read more]
Oct 19 Some Environmental Haiku
Early October:
Copenhagen lies ahead.
Still Congress dithers.
… [read more]
Oct 18 Adapting to Climate Change? Should the States or the Feds Take the Lead?
A great deal of attention has been devoted to federalism issues relating to climate change mitigation. In contrast, the federalism dimension of adaptation… [read more]
Oct 17 EPA threatens a mountaintop removal veto
Early on in the Obama administration, EPA did some inconclusive dancing and shuffling about its role in overseeing the issuance of Clean Water Act section… [read more]
At least, optimism seems to be the White House message, according to a TPM report:
On Friday the president urged speed in the broader shift in U.S. energy priorities and said he believed lawmakers — many of whom are skeptical of the energy bill — are following.
“It is a transformation that will be made as swiftly and as carefully as possible, to ensure that we are doing what it takes to grow this economy in the short, medium, and long term,” Obama said.
“I do believe that a consensus is growing to achieve exactly that.”
Let’s hope he’s right.
In any event, isn’t it nice to have a president who thinks it’s worth going to places like MIT to talk with people?
A couple of ditties sent to us by some friends:
There once was a climate denier
Who said, “Let the carbon go higher.
From the facts let us run,
‘Cause coal’s cheap by the ton,
And who cares if the planet’s on fire?”
There once was a man named Inhofe,
Whose knowledge of science was soft.
He thought up was down,
And math made him frown.
The data he simply blew off.
The latest issue of Science has two key papers on climate policy. First, Tim Searchinger, Dan Kammen (a faculty member at ERG), and others argue that an accounting exemption for bioenergy that appears in the Kyoto Protocol, the European carbon trading scheme and draft legislation on Capitol Hill treats all biofuels as “carbon neutral” even if the process of making them results in large carbon emissions. The land use issues regarding biofuels are actually huge and poorly understand, which argues for caution in relying on them too heavily as a way to reduce carbon.
The second Science paper is by ERG graduate student Stacy Jackson. (ERG is the Berkeley Energy and Resource Group, an interdisciplinary teaching and research program that pioneered ideas such as renewable portfolio standards.) Stacy also has a Legal Planet connection — she contributed some postings to this blog about the climate science meeting in Copenhagen last spring. here, here and here
Stacy’s paper points out that quick, cheap reductions in emissions can be obtained from non-CO2 substances such as black carbon. This can buy time to implement CO2 reductions in a more cost-effective way.
Forgive me for a little boasting about our great student-run environmental law journal, which has just launched a new website with downloadable content and published a terrific, policy-oriented issue (together with the Emmett Center) with lessons from state leaders across the country on tackling climate change.
The issue focuses on how states are addressing the climate crisis in light of federalism constraints and opportunities, and what their future role will be or should be in the context of a national climate policy. Congressman Henry Waxman wrote the Foreword, introducing pieces by Governor Jim Doyle of Wisconsin, Mary Nichols and guest blogger Ken Alex of California, and other officials from Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York.
The issue also includes a constitutional analysis of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative by Professor William Funk, as well as student comments on California’s SB 375 and on cap-and-trade carbon credits.
Details and links to the pieces below. Enjoy!
Foreword, Rep. Henry A. Waxman
California’s Climate Change Program: Lessons for the Nation, Mary D. Nichols
Challenges and Opportunities for Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions at the State, Regional and Local Level, The Honorable Jim Doyle
The Changing Climate of Cooperative Federalism: The Dynamic Role of the States in a National Strategy to Combat Climate Change, Jared Snyder and Jonathan Binder
The Role of Illinois and the Midwest in Responding to the Challenges of Climate Change, Douglas Scott
A Colorado Perspective: The New Energy Economy, Jim Martin and Ginny Brannon
Climate Change Action in Connecticut: Linking Energy, the Environment and the Economy, Paul E. Farrell
Massachusetts Takes On Climate Change, Ken Kimmell and Laurie Burt
Climate Change Action in Arizona, Steve Owens
The Essential Role of State Enforcement in the Brave New World of Greenhouse Gas Emission Limits, Matt Bogoshian and Ken Alex
SB 375: Promise, Compromise and the New Urban Landscape, John Darakjian
Not All Carbon Credits Are Created Equal: The Constitution and the Cost of Regional Cap-and-Trade Market Linkage, Juliet Howland
