Environmental Policy & Law

While burning fossil fuels produces benefits, such as powering the electric grid and fueling cars, it also generates widespread costs to society – including damages from climate change that affect people around the world now and in the future. Public policies that reduce carbon pollution deliver benefits by avoiding these damages. Fellow Joe Aldy argues that President Trump's executive order to reverse Obama-era rules to cut carbon pollution is missing a key element of the equation.

The new Interior Secretary likes regulation, sort of, and energy production a lot. He sounds ready to break through regulatory and policy gridlock in many rural communities. The question remains, though, whether his publicized love of the outdoors and hunting makes him a fighter for the environment, writes Fellow Jessica Hall.

How did 24 diverse countries, including Russia, China, and the United States, come to agree to protect 1.55 million km2 of the Southern Ocean, more than 70% of which will be closed to commercial fishing? How did the US and Russia find common ground in the Southern Ocean, when it has been so difficult in other diplomatic arenas? Fellow Cassandra Brooks has an interesting answer.

Environmental regulations save our country money, provide jobs, and ensure the health of all animals, plants and the humans who see clean air, water and soil as an American right. The EPA needs a leader who will defend that right, write Dianne Kopec and Fellow Aram Calhoun.

The US helped forge the Paris agreement for international reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Now the election of Donald Trump is resetting the climate-diplomacy landscape, and casting a Green Climate Fund for developing nations into doubt. ... “I have nothing positive to say about the financing. Developing countries are right to worry,” said Kelly Sims Gallagher, a former Obama official who helped negotiate a 2014 bilateral emissions reduction pact between the US and China.

Many environmentalists have expressed concern about the incoming Trump Administration, since several of the President-elect’s picks for cabinet appointments are people who question the human impact on climate. Many fear a government pullback from efforts to combat climate change. The Department of Defense, however, is continuing work to adapt its bases to deal with possible threats associated with a warmer planet.

So now what? That’s the question those of us who care about the planet, its people — and, you know, basic human decency — have been asking since Election Day. Donald Trump, a climate denier who has promised to gut the Paris accord, scrap the Clean Power Plan, bring back coal, and roll back pollution restrictions is our next president, and the civil and human rights of so many in this country are threatened.

At the end of October, a room full of politicians, biologists, and conservationists in Australia erupted in applause. After five years of negotiations, 24 countries and the European Union unanimously agreed to create a marine protected area (MPA) in Antarctica’s Ross Sea, which is considered the most pristine marine ecosystem in the world. Fellow Cassandra Brooks has worked in the region on this project for years, but says the agreement comes with some important caveats.

From the Energy section: