Global Climate Change And U S Law

This comprehensive, current examination of U.S. law as it relates to global climate change begins with a summary of the factual and scientific background of climate change based on governmental statistics and other official sources. Subsequent chapters address the international and national frameworks of climate change law, including the Kyoto Protocol, state programs affected in the absence of a mandatory federal program, issues of disclosure and corporate governance, and the insurance industry. Also covered are the legal aspects of other efforts, including voluntary programs, emissions trading programs, and carbon sequestration.

The legal landscape around climate change is complex, unstable, and expanding. Scientists continue to publish new findings, policy makers regularly adopt new regulations, and petitioners file new litigation, nationwide and around the world. Hence the need for this third edition. Most of it is completely new, and the few chapters carried over from the second edition have been thoroughly updated.

"This book is an update to Climate Change Laws in the U.S. The legal landscape is complex, unstable, and expanding. Scientists continue to publish new findings, policy makers regularly adopt new regulations, and petitioners file new litigation, nationwide and around the world. Most of it is completely new, and the few chapters carried over from the second edition have been thoroughly updated"--

"This book is an update to Climate Change Laws in the U.S. The legal landscape is complex, unstable, and expanding. Scientists continue to publish new findings, policy makers regularly adopt new regulations, and petitioners file new litigation, nationwide and around the world. Most of it is completely new, and the few chapters carried over from the second edition have been thoroughly updated"--

A vast body of U.S. law relevant to climate change has developed since publication of the first edition of Global Climate Change and U.S. Law in 2007, even while Congress has failed to pass a new comprehensive statute to address the climate challenge. This domestic legal regime, covered comprehensively in this updated volume, consists of federal greenhouse gas regulations issued under the Clean Air Act and federal energy efficiency statutes, new disclosure requirements imposed under the securities laws, as well as a variety of state and local initiatives and common law decisions by the courts.Recognizing that climate change is largely an energy problem, this edition adds a completely new section on energy regulation. Additional chapters now cover cap-and-trade regimes, climate-related water issues, agriculture and forestry, and the use of non-climate international agreements to reduce emissions and address climate impacts. The final new section focuses on issues previously seen as marginal but now of growing importance: climate adaptation, carbon capture and sequestration and geoengineering. Chapters are organized in five parts:Part I: Overview and ContextPart II U.S. Federal Regulation and LitigationPart III: Regional, State, and Local ActionsPart IV: Energy RegulationPart V: The Next Legal Frontiers

Climate Change and the Law is the first scholarly effort to systematically address doctrinal issues related to climate law as an emergent legal discipline. It assembles some of the most recognized experts in the field to identify relevant trends and common themes from a variety of geographic and professional perspectives. In a remarkably short time span, climate change has become deeply embedded in important areas of the law. As a global challenge calling for collective action, climate change has elicited substantial rulemaking at the international plane, percolating through the broader legal system to the regional, national and local levels. More than other areas of law, the normative and practical framework dedicated to climate change has embraced new instruments and softened traditional boundaries between formal and informal, public and private, substantive and procedural; so ubiquitous is the reach of relevant rules nowadays that scholars routinely devote attention to the intersection of climate change and more established fields of legal study, such as international trade law. Climate Change and the Law explores the rich diversity of international, regional, national, sub-national and transnational legal responses to climate change. Is climate law emerging as a new legal discipline? If so, what shared objectives and concepts define it? How does climate law relate to other areas of law? Such questions lie at the heart of this new book, whose thirty chapters cover doctrinal questions as well as a range of thematic and regional case studies. As Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), states in her preface, these chapters collectively provide a “review of the emergence of a new discipline, its core principles and legal techniques, and its relationship and potential interaction with other disciplines.”

Taking a sweeping look at the current and proposed legal aspects of coping with climate change, this is a comprehensive resource of laws aimed at increasing resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change. Written by authorities from private practice, government, and academia, this compendium examines the legal aspects of coping with climate change, both in the United States and around the world. Topics include water, energy, building and infrastructure, public lands, coastal issues, species and ecosystem impacts, disaster preparedness, and critical international issues.

'UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called Climate Change "the defining issue of our era". It presents international law and lawyers with a wide range of novel issues, practical as well as conceptual. These challenges are addressed in this volume with great authority by many of the leading international law scholars of our generation. It is an important and distinctive contribution to the burgeoning literature on an issue critical for the future of our planet.' – David Freestone, George Washington University, US Climate change will fundamentally affect every area of human endeavour, including the development of international law. This book maps the current and potential impacts of climate change on the norms, principles, rules and processes of international law. This timely study brings together a group of leading scholars in their respective fields of international law to examine the impacts of climate change, and our responses to it, on the whole spectrum of international legal regimes, including those dealing with everything from climate displacement, human rights, and international trade and investment, to the oceans, the environment, armed conflicts and the use of force, and outer-space. the volume also examines the impacts of climate change on the underlying principles and processes of international law including those relating to the making and enforcement of international law and to third party dispute resolution. the book shows that there is much more to dealing with climate change than negotiating one global climate change-specific regime. Other areas of international law can, and must, be included in the solution. In this way international law can maximise its coherence and its efficacy. This well-documented study will appeal to international lawyers, academics, policy makers, government employees, negotiators, practitioners, international legal theorists and anyone interested in climate change and how to maximise our international legal and policy responses to it.