Amy Turner

27 posts
Amy Turner is the Director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.

Emerging Local Legal Pathways for Building Electrification: Air Pollution and Land Use Regulation in New York City & Brookline, Massachusetts

By Amy Turner   This week marked significant growth for the building electrification movement, as the legal pathways in use by local governments to catalyze electrification doubled in number. Previously, local governments had pursued building electrification through building code provisions requiring or incentivizing electrification expressly, or through affirmative “bans” on […]

When State Preemption of Local Climate Laws Undermines Equity

By Amy Turner Recent efforts by states to preempt local greenhouse gas or energy requirements have not only stymied climate action, they have also been wielded in an undemocratic way that undermines equity in climate policymaking. State preemption of local law is nothing new, but its impact on procedural equity […]

Net-Zero Stretch Code: A New Model for Municipal Building Decarbonization in Massachusetts

By Amy Turner This week, the Massachusetts State Legislature passed S.2995, An Act Creating a Next-Generation Roadmap for Massachusetts Climate Policy (the “Act”), which sets sweeping climate policy for the state, including greenhouse gas reduction targets of 50 percent by 2030, 75 percent by 2040 (both relative to 1990 levels), […]