How Can Legal and Regulatory Enforcement Help Communities at Risk from the Climate Crisis?
From the farm fields of California to the low-lying neighborhoods along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, structural racism and legally sanctioned inequities are combining with the effects of the climate crisis to put people in danger. The danger is manifest in heat stroke suffered by migrant farmworkers and failing sewer systems that back up into homes in formerly redlined neighborhoods. Fortunately, public interest attorneys across the country are attuned to these problems and are finding ways to use the law to force employers and polluters to adapt to the realities of the climate crisis.
The second installment in CPR's climate justice webinar series showcased some of the important work these public interest advocates are doing and explored how their efforts are affected by enforcement policy and resource changes at regulatory agencies, from the federal level on down. Scroll down to watch a recording of the hour-long discussion featuring Cynthia Rice of California Rural Legal Assistance, Jon Mueller of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and Joel Mintz, CPR Board member and professor at Nova Southeastern Shepard Broad College of Law.
Here are some points of discussion you won't want to miss:
- Cynthia Rice shared examples of how California agriculture producers are …
On March 3, the Supreme Court will hear a plea to invent a new rule of constitutional law with the potential to put an end to the republic the Constitution established, if not under President Trump, then under some despotic successor. This rule would end statutory protections for independent government officials resisting a president’s efforts to use his power to demolish political opposition and protect his party’s supporters. Elected strongmen around the world have put rules in place allowing them to fire government officials for political reasons and used them to destroy constitutional democracy and substitute authoritarianism. But these authoritarians never had the audacity to ask unelected judges to write such rules, securing their enactment instead through parliamentary acts or a referendum.
The blessings of liberty in this country and other functioning democracies depend in important ways on something that legal scholars call the “internal …
On Thursday, the House Oversight and Reform Committee's Environment Subcommittee will hold a hearing to examine the harm to children posed by the Trump administration's attack on one of the most wildly successful clean air protections in American history: the Obama-era Mercury and Air Toxic Standards (MATS). The rule, adopted in 2012 after literally decades in the making, has reduced coal-fired power plant emissions of brain-damaging mercury by more than 81 percent, acid gases by more than 88 percent, and sulfur dioxide by more than 44 percent. Altogether, its pollution reductions have saved thousands of lives.
The February 6 hearing is part of a series that will highlight the despicably cruel impacts the Trump administration's assault on our safeguards is having on the nation's children. The other hearings will look at the administration's actions on the poverty line calculation, fair housing accountability, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance …
When the Trump administration released its recent proposal to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), it trumpeted the action as a long-overdue step to "modernize" the law's implementation by "simplifying" and "clarifying" its procedural and analytical requirements for federal agencies. If these words sound familiar, that's because they're the disingenuous claptrap that opponents of regulatory safeguards repeatedly trot out to camouflage their efforts to rig legislative and rulemaking processes in favor of corporate polluters. Put differently, those terms might as well be conservatives' code words to describe something that will cause more trips to the emergency room for urban children who suffer from asthma, more toxic contaminants in our drinking water, more irreversible degradation of fragile wetlands, and more runaway climate change.
To wit, it was not so not long ago when opponents of regulatory safeguards used these exact words – modernize, simplify, and clarify – …
This op-ed was originally published in The Hill.
The Trump administration has fired the latest salvo in its never-ending assault on environmental safeguards: a proposal from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to overhaul its regulations governing federal agency compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
The proposal would narrow the scope of NEPA’s protections, weaken federal agency duties when the law applies, and attempt to shield violations of NEPA from judicial oversight. More significantly, the proposal is wildly inconsistent with NEPA’s most fundamental goal: fostering deliberation and democratic participation to improve the government’s capacity to promote social welfare.
NEPA relies on four key mechanisms.
First, it directs all federal agencies to accompany proposals for “major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment” with a detailed environmental impact statement (EIS) comparing the environmental impacts of the proposed action …
Originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission.
Last week's NEPA proposal bars agencies from considering many of the harms their actions will produce, such as climate change. These restrictions profoundly misunderstand the nature of environmental problems and are based on the flimsiest of legal foundations.
Specifically, the proposal tells agencies they do not need to consider environmental "effects if they are remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain." The proposal also excludes "cumulative effects." [85 FR 1708] Not coincidentally, all of these restrictions target climate change, which involves very long-term, global, complex, and cumulative effects.
These restrictions fly in the face of everything we know about harm to the environment. We know that harm is often long-term rather than immediately obvious – think of chemicals that cause cancer decades after exposure. We also know that environmental effects aren't limited …
As I noted in my last post, 2019 brought a number of worrisome developments in regulatory policy. There were a few bright spots – most notably the positive attention public servants received for holding the Trump administration accountable. But, by and large, the most significant regulatory policy stories reflected the conservative movement’s successes in weakening the regulatory system. As a result, the threat to the future vitality of our system of safeguards – which we depend upon for our health and safety, the vitality of our economy, and the future of our planet – has never been greater. Here, in no particular order, are ten stories I will be following over the next year that could determine whether we will still have a regulatory system that is strong enough to promote fairness and accountability by preventing corporations from shifting the harmful effects of their activities onto innocent …
For many of us, the best way to characterize the past year in three words would be “too much news.” That sentiment certainly applies to the wonky backwater of the regulatory policy world. Today, that world looks much different than it did even just a year ago, and with still more rapid changes afoot, the cloud of uncertainty that now looms ominously over it doesn’t appear to be dissipating anytime soon. None of this is good for the health of our people, our democracy or our economy, and it’s certainly not good for the millions of working families struggling to keep their heads above water between paychecks.
Here, in no particular order, are 10 of the biggest developments from the past year that have contributed to this disquieting state of affairs.
- Nondelegation bullet dodged – for now. The case, Gundy v. United States, presented as clear …
Last week, my CPR colleagues and I were honored to be joined by dozens of fellow advocates and member of the press for a webinar that explored the recent CPR report, Regulation as Social Justice: A Crowdsourced Blueprint for Building a Progressive Regulatory System. Drawing on the ideas of more than 60 progressive advocates, this report provides a comprehensive, action-oriented agenda for building a progressive regulatory system. The webinar provided us with an opportunity to continue exploring these ideas, including the unique potential of the regulatory system as an institutional means for promoting a more just and equitable society.
Few organizations better illustrate this potential better than the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, so we were delighted to be joined at the top of the webinar by the organization's Founding Director, Anne Rolfes. Anne vividly described the work that the Louisiana Bucket Brigade is doing, empowering members of the …
Originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission.
The idea of low-hanging fruit is ubiquitous in environmental policy – sometimes in the form of a simple metaphor, other times expressed in more sophisticated terms as an assumption of rising marginal costs of pollution reduction. It's an arresting metaphor, and one that can often be illuminating. But like many powerful metaphors, it can also mislead us badly.
The idea behind the metaphor can be expressed in various ways, which can be equally arresting for those attuned to them. The same idea can be incorporated into graphs showing the cost of additional pollution reductions rapidly rising as the level of removal increases. If you google something like "marginal costs pollution reduction," graphs like that will pop up immediately along with verbal statements of the same concept. Combined with the assumption that the harm done by a unit of pollution …
