Reaching Higher Ground: Avenues to Secure and Manage New Land for Communities Displaced by Climate Change, CPR Paper 1703, by CPR Member Scholars Maxine Burkett and Robert Verchick, and CPR Policy Analyst David Flores, May 2017.

September 5, 2018, New Report on Disasters and Climate Change Shows How Government Can Help Communities Move from Surviving to Thriving

In April 2019, each of the Chesapeake Bay states submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the public drafts of their Phase III Watershed Implementation Plans, encompassing their plans for meeting the 2025 pollution reduction targets. CPR's Evan Isaacson evaluates the plans put forward by the three states responsible for the bulk of the pollution in the Bay, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. A companion analysis by David Flores examines whether and how well the plans account for the impacts of climate change.

Dismissing the Green New Deal as 'Socialism' Ignores Reality of Climate Crisis, op-ed by Alice Kaswan

Carbon pricing continues to be a hot-button issue, a promising tool in the effort to stave off climate change, but one roundly opposed by industry. In her June 19 issue brief, CPR's Alice Kaswan argues that carbon pricing is necessary, but both practically and politically insufficient for achieving a clean energy transition. June 2019.

Conservatives Flip-Flopped on Cap and Trade, op-ed by Robert Glicksman

Climate bill good first step in long and arduous trip

Cap and trade is preferable to hodgepodge regulation, by Kirsten Engel and David Driesen

Proposition 23 and the damage it would do to California: Setting aside the state's climate change law would damage the state's green economy and imperil California's commitment to fighting greenhouse gas emissions

Six Myths About Climate Change and the Clean Air Act, CPR White Paper 1105

The Law's Great Strength, by Holly Doremus

Politics and progress: Will the White House stall its own climate change plans?, op-ed by Rob Verchick and Thomas McGarity

UN goals fall short of Francis' vision, op-ed by Carmen Gonzalez

Time for Communities to Face Climate Change, op-ed by Rob Verchick

As Court Weighs Clean Power Plan, Rule's Approach Could Reduce Carbon Emissions, Improve Public Health, op-ed by Alice Kaswan

Coalition letter to Bay Jurisdictions Principals Staff Committee re accounting for climate change in Chesapeake Bay cleanup planning, February 23, 2018

Another Trump rollback that will harm Texans, op-ed by Thomas McGarity

In an op-ed in the Orlando Sentinel, CPR's Joel Mintz writes that President Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accords will be seen by historians as a greater disgrace than his impeachment.

State courts are an emerging venue for victims of climate-change-induced harms to hold corporate polluters accountable. Read the news release over CPR's November 2019 Climate Justice report.

Given the scope of the damage from climate change, individuals, organizations, and specific jurisdictions have turned to litigation to hold industry accountable for past and continuing behavior. Such litigation is the only way those who have suffered climate-related damage can seek recourse for loss of homes, livelihoods, health, and the death and injury of loved ones. It could also have an important impact on climate change policy in the United States. Read CPR's November 2019 report on the trend toward state-based litigation.

Carbon pricing continues to be a hot-button issue, a promising tool in the effort to stave off climate change, but one roundly opposed by industry. In her June 19 issue brief, CPR's Alice Kaswan argues that carbon pricing is necessary, but both practically and politically insufficient for achieving a clean energy transition. June 2019.

Carbon pricing continues to be a hot-button issue, a promising tool in the effort to stave off climate change, but one roundly opposed by industry. In her June 19 issue brief, CPR's Alice Kaswan argues that carbon pricing is necessary, but both practically and politically insufficient for achieving a clean energy transition. June 2019.

Carbon pricing continues to be a hot-button issue, a promising tool in the effort to stave off climate change, but one roundly opposed by industry. In her June 19 issue brief, CPR's Alice Kaswan argues that carbon pricing is necessary, but both practically and politically insufficient for achieving a clean energy transition. June 2019.

Carbon pricing continues to be a hot-button issue, a promising tool in the effort to stave off climate change, but one roundly opposed by industry. In her June 19 issue brief, CPR's Alice Kaswan argues that carbon pricing is necessary, but both practically and politically insufficient for achieving a clean energy transition. June 2019.

Carbon pricing continues to be a hot-button issue, a promising tool in the effort to stave off climate change, but one roundly opposed by industry. In her June 19 issue brief, CPR's Alice Kaswan argues that carbon pricing is necessary, but both practically and politically insufficient for achieving a clean energy transition. June 2019.

A new report highlights the role climate change and the lack of adequate planning and preparation plays in increasing the threats of toxic floodwaters, with a focus on Virginia.

Dan Farber, writing in the Revelator takes a close look at how climate change will play out in the life of someone born in 2000.

A well-designed cap-and-trade program could increase incentives for alternative energy and for new emissions-reduction technology. Traditional regulations generally take a facility’s basic production technology as a given and then impose rate-based emission reduction requirements in light of that production technology.   In contrast, a cap-and-trade program would put a price on carbon and, if the price signal is successful, would create an ongoing incentive to reduce overall emissions. An effective trading program could give facilities incentives to use less carbon-intensive energy sources and production technologies, not simply reduce end-of-the-stack emissions to comply with a set standard.

CPR Perspective: International Environmental Justice and Climate Change. CPR's Perspectives Series is a set of monographs by CPR Member Scholars on timely and important health, safety, and environmental topics. Each Perspective provides a thumbnail sketch of the competing arguments concerning a substantive or procedural principle for developing appropriate health, safety and environmental policies, and closes with the Member Scholar-author's proposed approach to the issue.

"Presidential emergency powers could provide useful tools for addressing climate change, but taking this route sets an important precedent," Dan Farber writes for The Conversation. "If presidents increasingly make free use of emergency powers to achieve policy goals, this approach could become the new normal – with a serious potential for abuse of power and ill-considered decisions."

The impacts of climate change do not fall equally. As the waves rolled over New Jersey, New York, and much of the Atlantic seaboard during Hurricane Sandy last fall, climate scientists’ austere graphs predicting severe climate impacts suddenly popped to life. With that in mind, Alice Kaswan writes, policy-makers at all levels of government, whether considering the use of existing authorities or developing new ones, should attend to seven key principles and themes.

On CPR's April 29, 2020, webinar, participants will hear from leading experts on pandemics, public health, and climate change, as part of our series of Climate Justice webinars. Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana is an expert in epidemic and disaster management, with decades of experience advising federal, state, and local officials on health security. Dr. Aaron Bernstein brings experience as a pediatrician on the front lines and cutting-edge expertise on the intersection of public health and climate change. Finally, seasoned environmental lawyer and CPR Member Scholar Daniel Farber offers expertise in legal and policy tools, such as the Stafford Act, that may be used to help protect vulnerable communities from bearing the greatest burden of the pandemic.

In April 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruled in favor of Hawaiian environmentalists who had waged a 12-year battle to ensure that sewage discharged into the Pacific Ocean via groundwater was subject to a Clean Water Act permit. CPR’s Member Scholars played important roles in convincing the Justices that we need a more scientifically relevant conception of the Clean Water Act’s coverage, and they joined key participants in the litigation in a May 28, 2020, webinar on the topic.

Writing in MinnPost, Alexandra Klass applauds the effort to hold major corporate contributors to climate change accountable by means of a consumer protection lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute. The suit seeks restitution and penalties for the harm to Minnesotans from the industry's decades-long effort to mislead the public about climate change and its origins.

Writing for DrilledNews, Karen Sokol dissects the oil and gas industry's PR campaign of "aggressively marketing products to create a fossil-fuel dependent society, coupled with massive and systematic disinformation campaigns to counter and obfuscate the clear scientific evidence of the catastrophic dangers of using those products."

With the nation approaching a pivotal election, 19 CPR Member Scholars contributed to a series of white papers proposing policy solutions for a just transition from carbon-based energy to renewables, with a particular focus on the environmental justice implications.

Our current pollution prevention policies are static in a time of great and rapid disruption driven by the climate crisis. The growing risk of harm from climate-driven industrial pollution and chemical disasters demands a just, innovative policy response. In our November 18 toxic floodwaters webinar, participants learned about the legal and policy challenges to addressing these hazards, as well as litigation and regulatory solutions proposed by leading experts and practitioners.

In The Revelator, CPR Member Scholar Dan Farber explains that the incoming Biden administration can leverage energy industry and state policy trends to advance an ambitious climate agenda.

In an op-ed published in The Hill, CPR Member Scholars Shalanda Baker and Alice Kaswan offer recommendations for moving from rhetoric to reality when it comes to delivering climate and energy justice to America's communities.

It’s past time to address “double disasters” — hazardous chemical releases by industrial facilities that are worsened by inadequate action in the face of conditions of climate change and natural disasters. As the global climate crisis intensifies, coastal and inland communities are increasingly at risk of natural disasters. When industrial facilities in these communities fail to adequately prepare for extreme storms, wildfires, earthquakes, heat waves, floods, rising sea levels, and other natural disasters, hazardous chemicals stored onsite can ignite, explode, and there may be dangerous and even catastrophic releases that threaten the health and safety of workers and the public. This can lead to a cascading series of harms, including toxic chemical exposures, on top of the effects of the storm itself. This brief spotlights this urgent issue, proposes policy solutions, and calls on federal leaders to take bold and prompt action to solve this problem.

In a comment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), CPR Senior Policy Analyst James Goodwin urges the agency to use any eventual rulemaking within the Risk Management Program to rework how cost-benefit analysis is used to evaluate rules. Goodwin encourages EPA to work with the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to take otherwise unquantifiable benefits into account and maximize protections from chemical disasters.

Recent events have dramatized the urgent need for prompt and bold action to respond to climate change. Raging rivers in Germany and Belgium, unheard of "heat domes" over large sections of North America, and uncontrolled wildfires and flooding around the globe, have made it absolutely clear that humankind must quickly limit the emission of greenhouse gases and adapt to the increasingly calamitous consequences of climate disruption. In view of this situation, what is and ought to be the substance of environmental leadership?

On Aug. 9, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the first installment of its latest report assessing the state of scientific knowledge about the climate crisis. As United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres put it in a press release, the report is nothing less than “a code red for humanity.” The good news is that the science indicates that there is still time to respond by taking drastic and rapid action to shift from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy and to keep people safe in the face of the dangerous changes in the climate system that have already taken place. That will be expensive, and a group of senators led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) plan to introduce legislation based on the well-established legal and moral principle that those who cause damage should pay for it.

The Interdisciplinary Panel on Climate Change report released Aug. 9 declared that evidence is now unequivocal that human activity is driving global warming, and immediate steps must be taken to mitigate profound changes. Karen C. Sokol, professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and CPR Member Scholar, says two essential international policies must be taken — ending fossil fuel production and providing communities with the resources to adapt.

Scientific concerns about the impacts and risks of global climate change are scarcely new. In 1988, those concerns became sufficiently widespread in the scientific community that the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a committee that included hundreds of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, to study the emerging climate problem and its implications. Since its creation, this panel has issued five full extensive reports. These assessments were soundly criticized by some independent climate scientists as understating the significance and dangers of climate change. However, earlier this month, the IPCC seems to have rectified that purported problem. Given this, how should we proceed? By way of example and quiet diplomacy, the United States must use its influence to encourage other nations to meet their climate responsibilities.

Addresses by national leaders to the United Nations General Assembly are often broad expressions of lofty ideals, and President Joe Biden's speech Tuesday fell squarely into that category. It covered an extraordinary panoply of global challenges and policy concerns, including controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, rebuilding and strengthening global alliances and regional initiatives, curbing terrorism, protecting human rights (including the rights of women and workers) and lifting up democracy. Biden also committed the United States to advancing human dignity, combating corruption and seeking peace in areas of conflict around the world.

Carbon capture use and storage (“carbon capture”), heavily promoted by the coal, oil, and gas industries, is now at the center of the national climate policy debate. Today when industries burn fossil fuels, the resulting carbon dioxide and methane soars into the atmosphere, traps heat, and contributes to climate breakdown. Using carbon capture technology, industries claim they will recover post-combustion carbon dioxide from their flues and smokestacks and either “store” the gas permanently underground in sedimentary rock or “use” the gas to recover oil or make other products. Proponents claim it’s a win-win — benefiting both the planet and the fossil fuel industry. But, on closer inspection, the large-scale roll-out of such technologies is a false promise.

Center for Progressive Reform Executive Director praises U.S. House passage of the "Build Back Better" budget bill, notes its historic investments in climate action, and urges Congress and the White House to go even further to secure a just, inclusive transition to clean, renewable energy.

On Feb. 28, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the first of an expected wave of cases challenging governmental action to address the climate crisis. The court’s grant of four petitions seeking review in this case—two by coal companies and two by states—portends that the six conservative justices will erect significant barriers to meaningful climate policy and will continue to interfere with democratic governance in disregard of the rule of law.

The Center for Progressive Reform joined dozens of other public interest organizations in a public comment period extension request for the White House Council on Environmental Quality's Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Sequestration Guidance. The groups asked the agency to extend the comment period from 30 days to at least 60 days.

After the Supreme Court's decision last month rejecting the Biden vaccine mandate for large employers, it wasn't just the public health community that was asking "where do we go from here?" Environmental activists and attorneys immediately recognized that the Court's reasoning in the vaccine case, National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, will likely lead to a win for the fossil fuel industry in the biggest environmental case of this term, West Virginia v. EPA.

Last fall, on the same day that the parties to the Paris Agreement gathered in Glasgow for their first day of their annual international climate meeting, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would review an appellate court decision about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases from fossil fuel power plants under the Clean Air Act. Fast forward half a year: On February 28, the day that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change issued its sobering report on climate adaptation and harms to human and planetary well-being, the court heard oral arguments in the case—West Virginia v. EPA. Once again, it was a split-screen reality.

It is past time for federal regulatory agencies to better engage the public and incorporate their unique on-the-ground perspectives to inform their work and make better, fairer decisions. To its credit, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is taking steps to do so and has created a new leadership role focused on environmental justice and equity. A major structural change is also underway: after decades of delay, FERC is now creating a new Office of Public Participation (OPP) to empower the public through more inclusive and responsive policymaking processes. This report provides core constituencies — agency policymakers, advocates for energy justice, and members of the public who are concerned about our energy future — with the information they need to ensure the OPP achieves its goal of promoting greater energy democracy at FERC. It begins by describing FERC’s role in energy policy and how its actions impact Americans; it then reviews FERC’s progress thus far in constituting the OPP. Finally, it offers recommendations to ensure the OPP achieves its goals and lessons to enhance regulatory democracy and equity across all federal regulatory agencies.

Center for Progressive Reform Policy Analyst Catalina Gonzalez and Member Scholar Alice Kaswan submitted comments on California's 2022 Draft Scoping Plan Update on climate change and net-zero carbon emissions. These comments promote a vision and implementation strategies that embrace the urgent need for action and more explicitly foster improvements in well-being for the state’s frontline communities.

Once again turning its back on bedrock precedent and the will of the American people, the U.S. Supreme Court today sent a wrecking ball through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to protect us all from climate change. More than that, though, even the still-settling dust cannot conceal the extent of the damage this decision does to our system of regulatory safeguards, as it threatens our ability to take common-sense actions to protect public health, safety, financial security, and the environment.

In public comments submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Center for Progressive Reform commended the agency for proposing a rule that aims to strengthen toxic spill response measures under the Clean Water Act. However, the Center noted the rule could more rigorously respond to the worsening impacts of the climate crisis and provided evidence and policy suggestions to support that recommendation.