Climate Law Blog

By the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law has been selected as the winner of the International Association for Impact Assessment’s (IAIA) 2018 Institutional Award for its outstanding efforts in climate change and the law governing environmental impact assessment (EIA). “In the face of growing climate […]

By Jose Felix Pinto-Bazurco* Since its founding in 1979, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (the Court) has issued 24 advisory opinions. Although it has previously recognized the existence of a relationship between environmental protection and the enjoyment of other human rights, it has done so only in relation to the territorial rights of indigenous […]

By David Spence* Visionaries imagine better futures. Skeptics worry about proof of concept — whether the technically-possible is in fact possible.  Regulators who oversee transitions to new and better futures ought to do so slowly and carefully — not only because the devil is in the details, but because some utopian visions can become dystopian […]

by Justin Gundlach and Romany Webb Resilience—the capacity to withstand, absorb, recover from, and better adapt to disruption—is currently a popular topic of discussion and debate. Several factors, including a string of disasters and unrelated but coincident regulatory processes, have made resilience a key objective for a wide array of policy makers. They include the […]

By Romany Webb and Justin Gundlach On February 15, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) announced that it would convene a technical conference to explore issues relating to the wholesale market participation of distributed energy resources (DERs). These resources, which consist of solar panels and other small-scale energy systems installed on or near customers’ premises, […]

By Dena Adler Donald Trump claims to have delivered on deregulation in his first year as President. While independent reporting questions the veracity of his assertions, climate change is one arena where the Trump Administration’s regulatory rollbacks have been both visible and real. The Administration has delayed and initiated the reversal of rules that reduce […]

By Richmund Sta. Lucia Extreme weather patterns can be easily seen in floods. Severe storms, especially during the rainy season, cause record rainfall to inundate both cities and countryside alike. Storm surges, another weather abnormality, create havoc in coastline areas by pushing meters-high water from the seas towards land. Indeed, the problem of flooding is […]

Each month, Arnold & Porter 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. HERE ARE THE ADDITIONS TO THE CLIMATE CASE CHART […]

By Justin Gundlach and Romany Webb The speedy and opaque process that ended in December 2017 with passage of the Federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has meant that different sectors and companies are just now figuring out what its provisions mean for them. For regulated utilities, which collect money from ratepayers in anticipation of […]