Monthly Archives: October 2017

6 posts

Can Fossil Fuel Companies Be Held Liable for Climate Change?

by Justin Gundlach We know that burning fossil fuels is the main cause of anthropogenic climate change, and that climate change is the source of adverse impacts on communities and even regional and national economies. Those impacts—sometimes irksome, sometimes devastating—are increasingly obvious, and the causal mechanisms that connect them to […]

The ‘Grid Resiliency Pricing Rule’ distracts from the pressing need to make the electric grid resilient to hazards driven by climate change

by Justin Gundlach As a spate of disasters in the past few months has made painfully clear to people in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, and northern California, designing the electric grid to be reliable at all times requires anticipating and preparing for destructive hazards that can interrupt its operation. […]

Transforming Puerto Rico’s Electricity Grid: The Benefits of Shifting to a More Distributed Generating System

By Romany Webb Nearly three weeks after being hit by Hurricane Maria, 90 percent of Puerto Rico remains without electricity. While the island’s nine key generating facilities were not seriously damaged by Maria, they cannot be used, as the infrastructure required to transfer electricity to customers no longer exists. The […]

Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy Looks to the Courts, Businesses, and Citizens to Protect Our Climate

By Dena Adler Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy delivered the third David Sive Memorial Lecture on Environmental Law at Columbia Law School on Thursday, September 28. Sharing her thoughts on “The Present and Future of the EPA,” she sharply critiqued the actions of Scott Pruitt’s EPA as illegal and without scientific […]

October 2017 Updates to the Climate Case Charts

Each month, Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP (APKS) and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law collect and summarize developments in climate-related litigation, which we also add to our U.S. and non-U.S. climate litigation charts.  If you know of any cases we have missed, please email us at columbiaclimate at gmail dot com. […]