By Benjamin Harris* This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment. The Clean Power Plan (“CPP”), announced and promulgated in late 2015 by the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and backed by President Barack Obama, seeks to develop a comprehensive regulatory scheme over the nation’s power plants in an effort to promote cleaner energy development and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On February 10, 2016, the Supreme Court granted a petition to stay the Clean Power Plan until a legal challenge against it can proceed on the merits. This post 1)…

This week’s post, Clean Power Planning: Unlike with Obamacare, States are Preparing for Clean Power Plan Compliance Even as they Fight it in the Courts, was written by Georgetown Environmental Law Review staff member Jennifer Golinsky. Read it here!

By Jennifer Golinsky, Staff Contributor, Georgetown Environmental Law Review.  This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment.   When the EPA released its draft of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) in June 2014,[1] commentators were quick to draw comparisons[2] to Obamacare (i.e., the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, hereinafter the ACA).[3] One journalist even dubbed the CPP “Obamacare for the Air” because the Clean Power Plan and the healthcare reform law are both “intensely polarizing” and “numbingly complex in an effort to ensure flexibility and fairness,…

By Shea Diaz, Georgetown Environmental Law Review This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment. In the United States, poor people and people of color experience higher cancer rates,[1] asthma rates,[2] mortality rates,[3] and overall poorer health than their affluent and white counterparts.[4] The Environmental Justice Movement (EJM) links these health disparities to higher concentrations of environmental pollution sources in these communities.[5] This disproportionate exposure to environmental harms in low-income, minority communities is known as “environmental injustice.”[6] Since the EJM’s inception in the 1960s, empirical evidence of…

David Williams* This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment. In the wake of Massachusetts v. EPA,[1] the EPA fashioned new regulations to cover greenhouse gasses. As part of the new suite of regulations, the agency promulgated a “Tailoring Rule”[2] that departed from the plain text of the Clean Air Act (“CAA”).[3] The EPA justified this rule with reference to two canons of interpretation: absurd results[4] and administrative necessity.[5] The EPA describes the canon of administrative necessity as a three part test: When an agency has identified…

By Daniel Carpenter-Gold, Managing Editor, Harvard Environmental Law Review. This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment. It’s done. Like a reluctant Odysseus, we have fastened ourselves to the mast of emissions reductions with Bungee cords (not too tight, now!) and stuffed one ear full of wax—just in case those cheap, dirty fossil-fuel Sirens have something interesting to say. But what is this “Paris Agreement”? What did we promise? After some initial optimism, debate over the outcome document has been mostly about precisely what flavor of evil the…