Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Journal of Energy, Climate, and the Environment
Publication Date
Spring 2010
ISSN
ISSN: 2160-4517
Page Number
64
Keywords
mitigation litigation, greenhouse gas emissions, climate change
Disciplines
Environmental Law | Law
Abstract
This Article focuses on a different but related fundamental policy design question: How should federal agencies implement existing statutory authorities to contribute to a coherent national climate change policy? One might ask why we should be concerned with how existing laws can be employed given reasonable expectations that the Obama Administration and Congress are poised to make gains on new federal initiatives. For several reasons, however, it is unlikely that even bold new federal legislation-a comprehensive carbon tax on all fossil fuel consumption or a cap-and-trade program broadly encompassing major emission sources-will obviate the need to solve the puzzle of how to integrate existing laws into the picture. First, it is unlikely that new federal legislation aimed at reducing national greenhouse gas emissions will alone allow us to meet our nation's appropriate share (whatever that is) of global reductions necessary to wrestle climate change under control (whatever that level is). Second, regardless of how aggressively the federal government regulates greenhouse gas emissions through some new legislative program, the global climate system will face a period of "committed warming" resulting from the buildup of past emissions in the troposphere.5 In short, something more than new federal emission reduction programs will be needed to reduce emissions (known as mitigation), and something entirely different from emission reduction programs will be needed to respond to the climate change we inevitably will experience regardless of mitigation success (known as adaptation).
Recommended Citation
J.B. Ruhl,
Climbing Mount Mitigation: A Proposal for Legislative Suspension of Climate Change "Mitigation Litigation", 1 Journal of Energy, Climate, and the Environment. 64
(2010)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/460