By Michael Burger On Monday, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear oral arguments in Juliana v. United States. The argument will be live streamed here, at 1 pm EST/10 am PST. Below, I flag four key issues that may figure (more […]
Cross-cutting Issues
384 posts
By Dr. Will Frank [1] Editor’s note: Lluiya v. RWE, now pending in the courts of Germany, is a noteworthy litigation concerning the potential liability of greenhouse gas emitters for the damages caused by climate change. The blog below presents an analysis of the case from the point of view of a […]
By Michael Burger Earlier this week EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a directive that prohibits scientists from serving on the EPA’s independent scientific advisory committees if they are currently a principal investigator or co-investigator on a research project that receives grant funding from the agency, or “if they are otherwise […]
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 […]
On September 14, the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division II, ruled that a trial court decision to release climate scientists’ emails had improperly ignored an Arizona statutory protection for university records. In this case, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (“E&E Legal”) has been attempting to use open records laws […]
By Dena Adler It has been widely reported that Hurricanes Harvey and Irma inundated industrial plants, wastewater treatment plants, and Superfund sites, causing a stew of toxic chemicals and sewage to leak into floodwaters and releasing almost 1 million pounds of seven deadly pollutants into the air. The Union of […]
By Michael Burger This past July, three local governments in California filed three different lawsuits in California state courts, claiming that the extraction, promotion, and sale of fossil fuels by a group of oil, gas, and coal companies constituted torts under a number of different state common law theories. (I […]
On August 21, the federal District Court for the District of Columbia upheld the decision by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to withhold NOAA climate scientists’ research documents from release to the conservative group Judicial Watch. Judicial Watch sought to use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) – […]