Law Columbia

MARCH 18, 2025

Achieving global climate goals will require rapid and dramatic greenhouse gas emissions reductions, along with the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. At a high level, liability rules hold actors responsible when they breach a law or legal duty in a way that harms other people or the public at large.

Carbon Dioxide

Law Columbia

AUGUST 4, 2025

Greenhouse gas (GHG) footprinting has been the industry’s main yardstick to date. Stepping out of the footprint The appeal of footprinting is clear: our collective climate fate depends on how much GHG emissions make their way into the atmosphere, and every ton matters.

Fossil Fuels

Law Columbia

JULY 15, 2025

Mitigation targets are to be as ambitious as possible, informed by a nation’s current and cumulative historical greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, its capacity to contribute to mitigation measures, and other national circumstances (e.g. Actions that jeopardize the future of life on Earth should be prohibited by law.

Climate Change

PA Environment Daily

AUGUST 6, 2025

There were frequent failures and malfunctioning of equipment that led to large amounts of hazardous emission releases that have violated state law. million pounds of air pollutants as a result of malfunctions, largely composed of greenhouse gas emissions (CO2e, approximately 383.3 Read more here. million pounds).

Air Pollution

Legal Planet

DECEMBER 2, 2024

But it has passed laws regulating two powerful greenhouse gases, and some other climate laws stretching back over the past five decades. I’ll discuss these laws in chronological order. Only laws that specifically cover climate or greenhouse gases are included. Reagan’s then-Vice President, George H.W.

Law

Vermont Law

OCTOBER 31, 2024

law applies. The largest and most important agency is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). However, the expansion of offshore wind is but one part of the Biden Administration’s strategy which includes the protection of 30% of all marine areas by 2030 and the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions from shipping.

Ocean

Legal Planet

NOVEMBER 27, 2024

On the one hand, global greenhouse gas emissions have reached an all-time high, and the temperature for 2023 is the highest ever recorded. Photo: Cara Horowitz Some have described the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku as “challenging,” “ineffective,” and “disappointing.” from the Paris Agreement again.

Paris Agreement

Union of Concerned Scientists

JANUARY 14, 2025

As NASA explains , over most of the last 800,000 years, until humans started burning fossil fuels, atmospheric CO 2 concentrations basically never went below 180ppm and never went above 280ppm. In the last sixty years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has grown 100 times faster than it did at the close of the last ice age.

Fossil Fuels

Law Columbia

NOVEMBER 6, 2024

This blog post was authored by 2024 Sabin Center Summer Intern, Arpana Giritharan, with input and supervision from Johanna Lovecchio, Director of Program Design for Climate Action and Adjunct Professor at Columbia Climate School, and Romany Webb, Deputy Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

Carbon Dioxide

Circle of Blue

JULY 9, 2025

These trends converged in Paris in 2015 when 195 countries signed a legally binding international treaty on climate change to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and attempt to keep global temperatures from rising to more dangerous levels. In the United States, coal production actually did peak in 2008 at 1.2

Clean Energy

Vermont Law

DECEMBER 24, 2024

However, environmentalists often criticize EQIP for awarding funding to practices that do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, sequester carbon, or build climate resilience. Agriculture and The Inflation Reduction Act In 2022, President Biden signed the IRA into law after it passed through Congress, mainly along party lines.

Conservation

Legal Planet

JANUARY 16, 2025

The second law, the CHIPS Act was focused on the semiconductor and computing sectors, but it also had extensive provisions relating to energy and climate. Both laws had bipartisan support. But these laws were eclipsed by the climate provisions of the third law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed on a party line vote.

Carbon Dioxide

Union of Concerned Scientists

FEBRUARY 18, 2025

establishing that heat-trapping emissions (or greenhouse gas emissions) are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. The 2007 case was brought by petitioners (which included several state attorney generals and NGOs, including the Union of Concerned Scientists) in the context of greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles.

Fossil Fuels

Legal Planet

APRIL 15, 2025

The news that started leaking last Friday is that the Trump administration wants to break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and essentially end NOAAs climate work by abolishing its primary research office and forcing the agency to instead help boost U.S. Trump wants to Make Weather a Mystery Again.

Law

Legal Planet

APRIL 30, 2025

Trump signed fewer laws in his first 100 days than any modern predecessor, the LA Times notes , while setting a record for issuing executive orders. Columbia Law’s Climate Backtracker has them in a handy spreadsheet. Bush tells Newsweek. China is going bigger and bigger while the US goes much much smaller.

Fossil Fuels

Union of Concerned Scientists

MAY 14, 2025

Not only has Zeldin gone after the $3 billion IRA Climate and Environmental Justice grants, he has targeted $20 million of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The work of the OAR is being threatened through a drastic reorganization plan, which seeks to eliminate its Atmospheric Protection Program and disrupt other parts.

Clean Air Act

Legal Planet

JUNE 17, 2025

Here in Los Angeles, recent demonstrations against ICE have been largely peaceful and nothing like past face-offs with law enforcement, though you wouldn’t know it from the burning Waymos that some national media are playing on a loop. It’s the topic of Season 12 of the Drilled Podcast by Alleen Brown.

Clean Air Act

Legal Planet

AUGUST 5, 2025

What you saw in Brazil is the leading edge of a strategy that started years ago,” my UCLA Law colleague Alex L. If the plans are carried out, one of the missions would be permanently terminated, because the satellite would burn up in the atmosphere.” Wang, who studies Chinese environmental governance, told me in an interview. “It’s

Fossil Fuels

Union of Concerned Scientists

JULY 24, 2025

A government website housed on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) website–climate.gov–had “a rich trove of climate data and information,” as my colleague Marc Alessi said. We were braced for this website to shut down, because the Trump administration has laid off many of the federal workers who maintained it.

Politics

Scientific American

JULY 4, 2025

The difference exists because greenhouse gases in the air essentially trap heat from the sun, warming Earth above the calculated temperature. As the sun grows brighter, it will first raise Earth’s temperature so much that we will lose all the water vapor in our atmosphere and then, eventually , all the surface water on the planet.

Carbon Dioxide

Legal Planet

JANUARY 2, 2023

The “for one year” part is crucial: stratospheric aerosols stay in the atmosphere roughly a year, so one gram offsets the heating effect of one ton only for the first year after the ton is emitted. And in all likelihood, they are not breaking any current law or regulation. Could this activity change the climate?

Cooling

Real Climate

NOVEMBER 11, 2023

A friend asked me if a discussion paper published on Statistics Norway’s website, ‘ To what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions? ’, was purposely timed for the next climate summit ( COP28 ). I don’t know the answer to his question. But this discussion paper is problematic for sure.

Sea Level

Real Climate

APRIL 6, 2023

Nevertheless, the summary for policymakers states the need for “rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade” if we want global warming to keep below 1.5°C 3, which is from small samples of global climate models (sample size of 5-15) prone to “the law of small samples”.

Climate Change

Legal Planet

SEPTEMBER 30, 2021

Today, climate change is the central, though by no means the only, concern in environmental law. Westlaw searches for “global warming” and “greenhouse effect” pick up only a handful of citations before 1985. The most notable was by an administrative law professor at Harvard, one Stephen Breyer.

Carbon Dioxide

Law and Environment

AUGUST 9, 2021

Here are a number of the lowlights: It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. Global warming of 1.5°C

Climate Change

Law Columbia

JULY 2, 2024

A highly potent greenhouse gas, methane makes a significant contribution to climate change, but has historically received relatively little attention in climate mitigation discussions. Those issues are explored in a new report by researchers at the Sabin Center, Removing Methane via Atmospheric Oxidation Enhancement: The Legal Landscape.

Atmosphere

Legal Planet

SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

22 degrees by 2050 because of both the reduced emissions and the dissipation of methane in the atmosphere, potentially allowing the world a bit more time to reduce and sequester other greenhouse gases. A worldwide methane emission reduction of 30 percent by 2030 could reduce global warming by.22

2030

Legal Planet

JUNE 4, 2021

its district, appellate , and supreme courts decided in favor of Urgenda, an upstart environmental organization, ordering the government to more aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental Protection Agency (2007) forced the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Everyone produces greenhouse gases.

Carbon Dioxide

Legal Planet

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023

As a young person and a UCLA Law student, the importance of the Held trial is not lost on me. This summer was the hottest on record and the season was rife with dire signs that the atmosphere’s dangerous levels of carbon dioxide are wreaking havoc on the environment and communities. In a changed climate, life cannot proceed as usual.

Climate Change

Union of Concerned Scientists

AUGUST 21, 2024

Most prominently, because the approach is changing from rewarding specific technologies to rewarding anything that meets the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions threshold of “clean”—hence the “tech-neutral” label—exactly how the government goes about determining whether or not something is actually eligible will be enormously important.

Electricity

Legal Planet

SEPTEMBER 18, 2023

Two former Emmett Institute law fellows served on the Secretariat. UCLA law students provided research and analytic support to the Secretariat in the International Climate Law and Policy Clinic. The UCLA Emmett Institute contributed to the establishment and work of the Commission in several ways.

Atmosphere

Legal Planet

DECEMBER 3, 2021

So for my last Climate Law and Policy class at UCLA Law this semester, I once again asked my students to tell me what they are thinking about the future of climate policy in light of today’s global circumstances, keeping in mind lessons we’ve learned through the semester. –Jay Parepally, JD 2023. –Sarah Repko, JD 2023.

Climate Change

Union of Concerned Scientists

JULY 9, 2024

Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) were developed to replace a type of chemical that impacted the ozone layer in our upper atmosphere, but these replacements are potent greenhouse gases. This is a major federal law that governs if a chemical will be regulated, limited, or even banned.

Toxic Substances Control Act

Legal Planet

JULY 12, 2023

As I outlined here , Montana state law prohibits the consideration of greenhouse gas emissions or climate impacts–– inside and outside the state’s borders––when reviewing projects and approving permits. This now-infamous climate prohibition has been called a “limitation” on the Montana Environmental Policy Act, or MEPA.

Fossil Fuels

Union of Concerned Scientists

SEPTEMBER 25, 2023

It acknowledges that “the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries” and outlines the objective of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that prevents dangerous interference with the climate system.

Climate Change

Law Columbia

JUNE 6, 2024

The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) issued an advisory opinion on April 21, 2024 in response to a request submitted by the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law (COSIS). 157 as used in para. 52, 54, 60 and 68).

Law

Law and Environment

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023

On September 21, 2023, the Biden administration outlined plans to expand federal agencies’ consideration of the social cost of carbon—a metric for the economic cost of each additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere. Postal Service has assessed climate benefits in selecting its next generation delivery vehicles.

Carbon Dioxide