On Friday, Texas lead a group of states in asking the Supreme Court to hear (and overrule) the DC Circuit case of last year upholding EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases from stationary sources. A group of industry representatives have joined in asking for Supreme Court review. Given the DC case and Texas’s petition for certiorari, [...]  More »

The EU Parliament unexpectedly shot down a proposal to reduce the supply of greenhosue gas credits entering the EU market, going against the recommendation of the Environment Committee, the EU Climate Action Commissioner, and the European Commission itself. While some of the negative votes were expected (Poland has fought vociferously against any action that would [...]  More »

It has been a while since my last blog post. In the climate change legal world, most of what has happened in the past few months has been of the utilitarian, and not the showy variety. California continues to implement its Global Warming Solutions Act (A.B. 32) and has already held two auctions of the [...]  More »

On Tuesday, a panel of the DC Circuit released its long awaited opinion in EME Homer City Generation v. EPA. This case was brought about on consolidated challenges to the EPA’s attempt to implement the Cross State Air Pollution Rule, a follow up to the CAIR (Clean Air Interstate Rule) that the DC Circuit found [...]  More »

Yesterday the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issues a stinging rebuke to state and industry challengers’ petition to prohibit the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and extending that regulation to prevention of significant detioration for major stationary sources. The unanimous decision stated that the EPA’s endangerment [...]  More »

The adopted “Rio+20″ agreement, adopted by numerous countries on June 22 has been panned mercilessly by many environmental and human rights groups as doing too little too late. They have substituted their own nickname for the document: “The Future We Don’t Want.” (proposals for the document had been entitled: “The Future We Want.”) What is [...]  More »

Just in time for the beginning of the official Rio activities, comes Professor John C. Dernbach’s book “Acting as if Tomorrow Matters: Accelerating the Transition to Sustainability.” This book notes that we already know what needs to be done to move towards a sustainable system, the trick is to actually do it. Professor Dernbach and [...]  More »

(with assistance from Amanda Byrum, UNC JD 2013) Each country represented at Rio+20 was asked to create and submit a document outlining its priorities for the conference. In addition, non-governmental organizations and other stakeholders have submitted suggestions for the event’s final agenda to be adopted by participating countries as the conclusion of the conference. As [...]  More »

There has been a great deal of controversy for months about what UN negotiators would put forward for possible treaty adoption by countries at the end of Rio+20. What was supposed to be a simple document became complex and demonstrated many divisions between countries. When the negotiating team couldn’t reach agreement this created an opportunity [...]  More »

As the first wave of visitors, delegates and speakers arrive in Rio for the Rio +20 sustainability summit, the overall picture is still unsettled. The persons charged with drafting a possible International Agreement to come out of the conference have still not settled on a straightforward document. Disagreements remain over how to measure national progress [...]  More »

Many of you may have seen the recent publicity for the upcoming United Nations summit commonly known as Rio +20. The title refers to the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit, which occurred in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. That meeting produced both the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as a [...]  More »

As the OTC gets underway to record numbers here in Houston, one oft repeated phrase from industry and government is that safety should come first. James Watson, head of BSEE, also announced that the government plans to speed up its rulemaking on safety requirements by skipping the “notice of proposed rulemaking” stage and going straight [...]  More »