With the Inflation Reduction Act, the Clean Energy Revolution Will be Subsidized
This is the first in a two-part series on the implications of the historic climate and health spending package, which President Biden signed into law earlier this week. Read the second post here.
With the signature of President Joe Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) now marks the most significant climate policy action the United States has ever taken. The defining feature of this law is that it seeks to wring carbon dioxide emissions out of the U.S. economy by relying heavily on policy "carrots," like subsidies, instead of policy "sticks," such as regulating the fossil fuel industry or attempting to capture the external costs of greenhouse gas emissions through carbon pricing.
In this regard, the new law represents a significant departure from past unsuccessful legislative efforts to tackle the climate crisis and, as we argue in Part I of this series, is a groundbreaking and respectable effort to decarbonize. However, as we argue in Part II, its provisions could potentially place an unacceptably heavy burden on marginalized communities and thus may fall short of fulfilling the administration's commitment to climate justice.
Setting the Path to a Clean Energy Future
The IRA directs $369 billion toward a …
This is the second in a two-part series on the implications of the historic climate and health spending package, which President Biden signed into law earlier this week. Read the first post here.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will subsidize our nation's clean energy revolution and have a positive impact on climate-driven economics, as noted in Part I of this series. That said, the IRA isn't flawless. Notably, it includes several subsidies for fossil fuels, which will be counterproductive as our nation works toward its climate goals.
Worse still, not all "carrots" for clean energy technologies are good, and the IRA includes a potentially bad one. Specifically, the IRA risks subsidizing the clean energy transition through perpetuating environmental injustice in how we obtain and use energy to fuel our economy.
It is well known that the fossil fuel industry was built in part by concentrating the costs …
Last week, the Center for Progressive Reform joined 90 organizations in expressing strong support for the Environmental Justice for All Act (EJ for All Act) in a letter as the bill went before the House Committee on Natural Resources for markup.
The coalition, led by Coming Clean, a collaborative of environmental health and environmental justice experts, and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance (EJHA) for Chemical Policy Reform, urged committee members to advance this important legislation to the House floor. The bill, introduced by Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona and Donald McEachin of Virginia, is the most significant effort by the federal government to address generations of environmental racism.
Although the bill passed in committee last Tuesday by a 26 to 21 vote, its future is unclear. Before the bill is sent to the House floor, it must overcome concerns that it has jurisdictional overlap with the …
This post was originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission.
Soon after Trump took office, Republicans used the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn sixteen Obama-era regulations. If they win control of the government in 2024, they'll undoubtedly do the same thing to Biden regulations. It behooves us, then, to understand the effect of these legislative interventions. A Ninth Circuit ruling last week in a case involving bear baiting, Safari Club v. Haaland sheds new light on this murky subject.
The CRA provides a fast-track process for Congress to repeal administrative regulations. Such a repeal also impacts the agency's power to issue new regulations. In the absence of further legislation, an agency may not reissue the rule in "substantially the same form" or issue a "new rule that is substantially the same" as the overturned rule. As a thorough report by the Congressional Research Service explains …
During a historic hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform on October 28, the executives of ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute (API), refused to admit to their decades-long climate disinformation campaign that is now well-documented in publicly available documents uncovered by journalists and researchers.
If that weren’t enough, the executives continued to deny climate science under oath, albeit with a slight twist from their previous disinformation campaign. Instead of denying the science establishing that fossil fuels are driving the climate crisis, they’re now denying the science establishing the urgent need for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.
In other words, they’re still lying — a strategy that was on full display in this blockbuster hearing.
The ultimate questions at hand were whether the chiefs of the oil and gas industry would:
- Admit to their companies’ decades-long …
In February, Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson, chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, reintroduced the FAIR Act. The legislation would protect workers and consumers by eliminating restrictive "forced arbitration" clauses in employment and consumer contracts. The bill would also allow consumers and workers to agree to arbitration after a dispute occurs if doing so is in their best interests. A companion measure has been introduced in the Senate.
Arbitration — a process where third parties resolve legal disputes out of court — is a standard precondition to most, if not all, nonunion employment and consumer contracts. It's considered "forced" because few consumers and workers are aware that they are agreeing to mandatory arbitration when they sign contracts. In most contracts, arbitration is imposed on a take-it-or-leave-it basis before any dispute even occurs; refusing to sign is rarely a realistic option because other sellers …
This op-ed was originally published in The Hill.
Making Congress functional again is having a moment. The debates over ending the filibuster and legislation to prevent hyper-partisan congressional districts have received the most attention in this space so far. But lawmakers did quietly take an important step forward on mending congressional dysfunction when they reinstated the practice of earmarking the federal budget, reversing a decade-old ban.
Lawmakers should build on this fix to the budget process by cracking down on “poison pill” appropriations riders, a gimmick that proliferated in the vacuum left by the earmark ban.
These riders are the inverse of earmarks, which direct federal agencies to spend a certain portion of funds on a specific activity (like building a bridge or community center, for example). Poison pill riders, on the other hand, bar agencies from using funds for certain activities. They don’t repeal agencies …
Today, a group of 136 law professors from across the United States, including 31 Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) Member Scholars, will send a letter to congressional leaders urging them to “ensure that our courthouse doors remain open to all Americans for injuries they suffer from negligence during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The letter, spearheaded by CPR Member Scholars Dan Farber and Michael Duff, comes in response to a push by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporate special interests to include a “federal liability shield” in the next COVID relief bill, which is now being negotiated in Congress. This shield would prevent ordinary Americans from holding corporations accountable in the civil courts when their unreasonably dangerous actions cause people to become sick with the virus.
As the letter explains, the federal liability shield would violate clear principles of federalism by intruding upon the traditional rights …
Originally published on Workers' Compensation Law Prof Blog. Reprinted with permission.
Listening in on Tuesday's Senate Hearing on Corporate Liability During the Coronavirus Pandemic – you can find the video here and do a text search for "workers' compensation" – I was especially pleased to hear workers' compensation immunity discussed at 1:14:20 to about 1:14:50. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island specifically asked whether blanket corporate immunity would constitute subsidization of workers' compensation insurers. Witness Professor David Vladeck of Georgetown University Law Center responded that it very well could if workers' compensation were not carved out of the bill. I did not hear anyone contend during the hearing that workers' compensation could not be part of an immunity blanket, which is food for thought.
Coincidentally, I had been reading in The Atlantic as the Senate hearing was commencing an exceptionally good and sobering account of …
Originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission.
Sen. Mitch McConnell is demanding that any future coronavirus relief law provide a litigation shield for businesses, and other conservative and business interests have made similar proposals. So far, the supporters of these proposals have engaged in some dramatic handwaving but haven't begun to make a reasoned argument in support of a litigation shield.
In this post, I'm going to limit myself to negligence suits against businesses. Basically, these lawsuits claim the plaintiff got the virus due to the failure of a business to take reasonable safety precautions.
Even without a business shield, these are not going to be easy cases to win. Plaintiffs will have to show that they were exposed to the virus due to the defendant's business operation, that better precautions would have prevented the exposure, and that they weren't exposed elsewhere.
Tort lawyers may be …
