Environmental Enforcement in the Age of Trump
Many thought that the BP Oil Spill would lead to new environmental legislation, as happened after past environmental disasters. That didn’t happen. But something else did happen: BP paid $24 billion in civil and criminal penalties. In an era where any effort at government regulation is immediately denounced as a dire threat to liberty, there was nary a peep out of Republican politicians about these massive penalties. Nor do I hear Trump, Cruz, or Rubio defending Volkswagen from penalties. The moral is that the public is much more united behind punishment for corporate wrongdoers than it is about new regulation.
This makes sense if you think about the arguments that are made against regulation. Opponents of regulation have successfully spun their position as protecting consumers from higher prices and workers from lost jobs. Corporate shareholders, and corporations as entities, don’t get such a respectful hearing. Indeed, “corporate welfarism” is reviled by the Tea Party, and big business remains low in public esteem. Punishing corporate wrongdoers also fits well with the populist anger at both ends of the political spectrum — it’s something Trump supporters and Sanders supporters can both support. Indeed, on both the Right and Left, few …
Chief Justice Roberts turned down a request this morning to stay EPA’s mercury rule. Until the past month, this would have been completely un-noteworthy, because such a stay would have been unprecedented. But the Court’s startling recent stay of the EPA Clean Power Plan suggested that the door might have been wide open. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be true.
In some ways, a stay in this case would be even more shocking than the earlier one. Only the states, not industry, were seeking the stay. Some industry members even argued that a stay would just disrupt their planning. Moreover, as the government pointed out, the states were seeking review of a very narrow issue: whether the D.C. Circuit should have vacated the rule pending a remand to the agency. Since the agency plans to act within the next six weeks, this issue …
There’s already been a lot written about how Justice Scalia’s untimely death will affect pending cases, not to mention speculation about the possible nominees to replace him. Less attention has been given to the effect on the lower courts. Yet Justice Scalia’s departure gives liberal judges in lower courts more freedom than they’ve had in the past. Here, I’m specifically thinking of the D.C. Circuit and the Ninth Circuit, which between them are the most important forums for environmental litigation. It now looks like it could be at least a year until a successor is named. The 4-4 split gives lower courts more scope to take the initiative.
The main reason is that it is now much less likely that the Supreme Court will review liberal lower court decisions. In the past, the Chief Justice and Justices Thomas and Alito could …
Scalia's decisions were almost unremittingly anti-environmental.
Over the past three decades, Justice Scalia did much to shape environmental law, nearly always in a conservative direction. Because of the importance of his rulings, environmental lawyers and scholars are all familiar with his work. But for the benefit of others, I thought it might be helpful to summarize his major environmental decisions. The upshot was to restrict EPA’s authority to interpret environmental statutes, make property rights a stronger bulwark against environmental protection, restrict the ability of environmental groups to go to court, and limit federal authority over rivers and wetlands.
Administrative law. The Chevron test says that an agency’s interpretation of a statute is entitled to deference. It can be set aside only if it is contrary to an unambiguous statute or if it is an unreasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. There are only three …
The value of some goods like wilderness today depends on their futures.
Normally, economists imagine, equal experiences become less valuable as they recede further into the future. But some types of goods don’t have that kind of relationship with future experiences. They can become more valuable as they extend farther into to the future.
Take this blog post, for example. I’m really happy that you’re reading it today. But it will be even cooler if someone reads it ten years from now. And it would be super cool if someone would read it a century from now. It’s also true that some people are more valuable because of their past histories – something owned by your grandparents might mean more to you than an otherwise identical object without that history. Or both could be true — an heirloom might mean more because it belonged to …
Here are seven of the most important developments affecting the environment.
2015 was a big year for agency regulations and international negotiations. In 2016, the main focal points will be the political process and the courts. Here are seven major things to watch for.
The Presidential Election. The election will have huge consequences for the environment. A Republican President is almost sure to try to roll back most of the environmental initiatives of the Obama Administration, undoing all the progress that has been made on climate change and other issues – and we might also see efforts to undo earlier environmental legislation.
The Senate. No one seems to think that control of the House of Representatives is at issue in this year’s election, but control of the Senate is potentially in play. If Republicans win the Presidency and keep both houses of Congress, we’re likely to …
If we're serious about keeping warming "well below" 2 degrees C, geoengineering may be necessary.
The Paris agreement establishes an aspirational goal of holding climate change to 1.5 degrees C, with a firmer goal of holding the global temperature decrease “well below” 2 degrees C. As a practical matter, the 1.5 degrees C goal almost certainly would require geoengineering, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere or solar mirrors. Even getting well below 2 degrees C is likely to require steps of that kind or a technological breakthrough for another kind of geoengineering, removing CO2 from the atmosphere. None of this has to happen soon, but sometime between now and the end of the century, something along these lines would probably be required.
It's always good to begin with the actual text of the agreement. Here’s the language of the agreement …
How Law Schools Serve the Public
Most people probably think of law schools, when they think of them at all, as places that train future lawyers. That’s true, and it’s important, but law schools do a lot more. Faculty scholarship makes a difference — law review articles laid the foundation for many of the ideas now guiding judges (both on the Right and the Left). But I’d like to focus here on another, more recent activity by law schools — the environmental law clinics and research centers that have sprung up in recent years. There are too many of these across the country to describe here. Instead, I’ll stick to the University of California law schools. Even so, space allows a discussion of only a fraction of their activities.
One key activity is a joint project of Berkeley and UCLA, although it’s housed here …
How to make health and safety a personal priority for industry officials.
According to economists, firms have little reason to take into account the cost of externalities — that is to say, the harms their activities may impose on others. The traditional solutions are damage remedies or taxes to transfer the financial cost to the industry, or regulation to force industries to limit their harmful activities. Why not try a more direct solution? Why not require owners and managers to expose themselves to the same risks?
For instance, we could require managers of nuclear plants, utility officials, and officials of reactor manufacturers to live within a mile of the plant, along with their families. That would enhance the incentive to think of safety. Similarly, we might require oil company executives and their families to live within a mile of a refinery, so they would experience the same risks …
The answer will surprise you.
What parts of the country benefit most from the series of new EPA rules addressing pollution from coal-fired power plants? The answer is not what you think.
EPA does a thorough cost-benefit analysis of its regulations but the costs and benefits are aggregated at the national level. In a new paper, David Spence and David Adelman from the University of Texas break down these figures on a regional basis. What they found may surprise you. In fact, the areas benefitting the most are the very ones that rely most on coal. The reason is simple. Much of the benefit from reducing the use of coal comes in the form of health improvements — fewer heart attacks and deaths from respiratory disease, fewer asthma attacks. These health improvements are mostly in the vicinity of the power plants. So the same places that will have …
