By Michael B. Gerrard, Director The Paris Agreement on climate change reached on December 12, 2015 has a heavily negotiated sentence that, when closely read, seems to call for the virtual end of fossil fuel use in this century unless there are major advances in carbon sequestration or air capture […]
Clean Energy
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 […]
Jessica Wentz Associate Director and Fellow Earlier this month, I visited Savannah, Georgia to talk with concerned citizens about the environmental review process for oil and gas infrastructure in their state. My presentation focused on how the public can use the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to ensure that agencies […]
By Nikita Perumal and Jessica Wentz A foundational component of sustainable development is the principle of inter-generational equity: that we should meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. On August 12, a group of twenty-one youths invoked this principle […]
Grant Glovin, Sabin Center Summer Intern Hillary Clinton’s climate change plan, released last week, centers on two goals: installing 500 million solar panels by 2021, and, relatedly, adding enough electric generation capacity from renewable sources to supply all residential electricity needs. The plan appears ambitious: the solar power expansion alone […]
By Michael Greenberg, Sabin Center Summer Intern Pope Francis’ June 18 encyclical Laudato Si’, On Care for Our Common Home includes a section about the economics of carbon mitigation. Although a small part of the encyclical—one paragraph out of 246—the pope’s economic prescription received extensive coverage from top newspapers such […]
Jessica Wentz Associate Director and Postdoctoral Fellow Yesterday, President Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled the final version of the Clean Power Plan—the nation’s first ever federal regulatory standards to address carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from existing power plants. As noted by the President in a press conference […]
Arijit Sen, Sabin Center Summer Intern On June 30, 2015, Maine became the third jurisdiction in the United States to approve Value-of-Solar (VOS) pricing for distributed solar generation.[1] Governor Paul LePage had vetoed the legislation[2] on June 26, 2015, citing concerns that the legislature had passed the bill “hastily,” leaving […]