Last week marked an important shift in executive policy on fossil fuel leasing: the Interior Department announced a moratorium on new leases for coal mined from federal lands, pending a comprehensive reexamination of the decades-old coal leasing program. Interior will prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) to examine how […]
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By Edward McTiernan and Michael B. Gerrard On December 4, 2015, President Obama signed the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (“FAST”) act into law. This law primarily provides up to $305 billion in transportation spending through 2020, but it also enacts important revisions to the way that major infrastructure projects are […]
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 […]
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 […]
On November 19, the Washington State Superior Court issued a decision in which it affirmed that climate change affects public trust resources in the state, but ultimately held that the state was fulfilling its public trust obligations by engaging in rulemaking to establish more comprehensive greenhouse gas (GHG) standards. The […]
The Sabin Center is now accepting applications for internships for summer 2016. Please feel free to circulate the following information to anyone who might be interested in these positions: Undergraduate and Master’s Students The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School is currently seeking a few exceptional undergraduate and/or master’s […]
“When you are a Special Rapporteur and no one is angry at you, you’re not doing your job right,” said Hilal Elver, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, during an Oct. 21 address to students and faculty at Columbia Law School. Elver spoke about her work as […]
Justin Gundlach Climate Law Fellow On October 9, 2015, the High Court of Ireland issued a decision—discussed below the jump—very much in line with decisions recently issued by U.S. federal district courts about how feedstocks and power plants relate for the purpose of environmental review. In the U.S., the feedstock […]