Image by Maxim Tolchinskiy (Unsplash) In November of 2022, when the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) proposed new rules  to control venting, flaring, and leaks from oil and gas leases on federal land (the “Fossil Fuel Waste Rule”), they noted that these leasing rules would have an enormous ancillary climate benefit. While the proposed rule had been designed to protect taxpayer royalties from public lands mineral leases, BLM expected that, in complying with the rule, oil and gas companies would eliminate $427 million per year of climate-related harms. However ..read more

A new report published today by the Sabin Center examines the laws governing international transport of carbon dioxide for sequestration. We focus, specifically, on the shipping of carbon dioxide that was captured in Europe to the United States for sequestration there. Much of the report would also be relevant to the shipping of carbon dioxide between other regions, though domestic laws at either end of the trip may also be relevant. The issue of cross-border shipping of carbon dioxide for sequestration is of academic and practical interest. As previously reported on this blog, there were impo ..read more

Vincent Nolette joins our team at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law as the Equitable Cities Climate Law Fellow. His work will support the Center’s Cities Climate Law Initiative and include research on city-level law and policy at the intersection of climate and racial wealth equity. Before joining the Sabin Center, Vincent served as an Excelsior Legal Fellow at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and was also a litigation associate at Carter Ledyard & Milburn LLP.  Before law school, he worked on the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) in Wellingt ..read more

Today, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law published a new report titled Advisory Opinion On Climate Change: Summary of Written Observations Submitted to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Part 1). Faced with an escalating climate emergency, the global community is increasingly turning to international courts and tribunals for guidance on addressing the multifaceted challenges posed by climate change. Against this backdrop, in January 2023, the Foreign Ministers of Chile and Colombia catalyzed a pivotal moment in the quest for climate justice by requesting an advisor ..read more

Incorporating International Climate Change Law to Maintain the ECHR’s Relevance Amid the Climate Crisis “Everything could be different – and yet there is almost nothing I can change.” This is, as Niklas Luhmann observed, the paradoxical blend that modern democracies impose on citizens, inviting either utopianism or fatalism. Disillusionment with the transformative potential of democracy is indeed widespread in the face of the “rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all” on the one hand (see also paras. 118 & 542), and the often  ..read more

The climate rulings of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) are landmark decisions. However, it is not obvious what they mean precisely for the State parties of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Have we witnessed, in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, a landslide victory for the activists that will revolutionize domestic climate law? Or do the two other decisions in which the Grand Chamber dismissed the applications preponderate? Milanović has rightly pointed out that the judgment in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz is “very sophisticated.” All three ruli ..read more

Solar PV Project in Cuba (Photo credit: IRENA) Today, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) jointly published a new report titled Building a Cleaner, More Resilient Energy System in Cuba: Opportunities and Challenges. The report provides detailed information on the current state of Cuba’s electricity sector and recommends reforms to advance the transition to a lower emission, reliable, and more climate resilient system. The recommendations include possible changes to Cuban domestic policies to, among other things, encourage greater public and private inve ..read more

On April 9, 2024, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued its first-ever findings concerning climate change. This post, part of a series on the ECtHR decisions, discusses Duarte Agostinho and Others v. 32 Member States. The case was brought by six youth applicants from Portugal, who alleged breaches of Articles 2, 3, 8 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) based on the present and future impacts of climate change, including heatwaves and wildfires, caused by the respondent States’ greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Like the landmark decision in the KlimaSeniorinnen c ..read more

Photo by Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images   Last week was big for green bank champions. On Thursday April 4th, the Environmental Protection Agency announced $20 billion of awards from the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) created under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Three applicants were selected under the $14 billion National Clean Investment Fund, and five were selected under the $6 billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. The remaining $7 billion is set aside for the fund’s Solar for All program, which will launch later this year. It’s the end of a decade-lon ..read more

States’ extraterritorial jurisdiction was one of the hot topics decided by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Duarte Agostinho. Strictly speaking, the “lack of it” led the ECtHR to declare the complaint inadmissible with respect to all defendant States except Portugal. This finding is in line with previous ECtHR case law but highlights a gap in human rights protection and creates a mismatch between the ECtHR’s case law and that of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). As part of the symposium on the climate ruling ..read more