Advanced Environmental Law
ADVANCED ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
August 25, 2005
Paper will be due the last day of the examination period. Extensions are allowed, but they are discouraged.
20 – 30 pages…depending on 2 – 3 credits.
Pick topic; outline; several drafts
Sunday Times (NY)…be sure to read each week.
125 years to use up the first 50% of the world’s supply of oil. It will only take a few years to burn through the remaining (last) 50%. India and China are growing the fastest. They represent 1.2 billion and 1 billion, respectively. Over 40% of the world population. How much oil does the U.S. use? 300 million…% is about 5% (6 billion total). We use about 25% of the world’s oil supply. China and India are starting to also be gluttons. 84 billion barrels a day are used here. Why else will it be faster on the way down? Oil extraction gets less efficient when it is no longer pressurized. Remaining oil is in harder places to drill…hostile environments. Also, the people are hostile as well. “The Long Emergency”—the end of oil. Prediction that the world is not ready for the transition to the post-oil era. This could end up being quite dramatic.
Price of oil today is 64 dollars per barrel. Could go up to 80 in the spring…100 soon thereafter. If you are a seller, what do you do when it gets this high? You go to find more reserves…you start drilling in other areas or trying out the old fields to see if any remains.
What else happens when it gets this high and you are an energy company also? Let’s say you are a company that makes solar or wind power? Your business goes up. Substitutes get really attractive…now solar is much more competitive. BP owns the largest solar production company in the country.
North-South Politics
OECD started as the marshall plan…European countries…U.S….Japan…Canada…Mexico…South Korea…about 30 countries that are pretty far along on development…overlapping this is the European Community…about 10 now (Turkey is a big question) Accession countries have to go through a very elaborate preparatory process…Environmental Akey…new countries have to have approximately the same laws, plus an implementation, ability to make the law work….EC provides cohesion funds to allow new countries to fit in
Countries that are not as strong…Chile…
Weak states…those that may move up or fall back down…Argentina, Kenya,
Failed states…those incapable of governing themselves. Ahganistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somolia, Liberia, Congo
You have these 200 countries from the good to the failed….self governing…mid range…weak…and the failed…the good are a small number (perhaps less than 50)…midrange (about 50)…etc.
Transparency International…check out corruption in countries…
COOPERATION V. SOVEREIGNTY
Countries use sovereignty as a means of arguing with its neighbors. Brazil, for example, tries to control the Amazon. What is the value of sovereignty if your environment is destroyed? Nothing. It is a legal construct but a dangerous one when people misunderstand.
NON-STATE ACTORS and NON-TRADITIONAL POLICY-MAKING
Monopoly of states has been the historical approach to international law. Now, NGOs have carved out some space, but they are able to participate more and to be heard, not to be followed.
STATUS QUO v. NEED FOR REFORM AND SEARCH FOR SOLUTION
A great challenge is to find solutions…easy to be a pessimist here. As a species, we have the genius to correct the problem…question of finding it and activating soon enough.
SCIENCE v. DIPLOMACY
Much of the international environmental law is science-driven. Science does not always win…we have to negotiate and use diplomacy (trading)
We need to consider ways to shape behavior. By doing this we can avoid some of the laws that are needed in todays society…social norms help to guide us…can we be resocialized?
Law discovers social norms “Order without Law”…about how a community organizes itself without using formal law. We need to get people socialized for sustainable development.
Consider smoking and drunk driving. The use of seatbelts is another example.
September 8, 2005
Emissions trading…in the U.S., we have NOx, SOx, and mercury trading rights…market helps to evaluate who can do it at the lowest cost. If the price is high enough, it will be advantageous to develop technologies to reduce emissions.
There is still a standard. It is not a voluntary standard by the company…they have to do it. Our current program, estimates that it would cost incredible amounts of money, but what happened was the firms found a way to do it low cost, 25% companies complied, and they made money doing this.
Michael Porter…Porter Hypothesis…how firms and regulations interact…if you have stricter environmental regulations and give them the flexibility to meet the standard, then firms will have the lowest costs and sometimes make moneyàinnovation offsets…they figure this out because they were forced to reexamine their production process…pollution is waste.
If our automobiles burned everything, there would be nothing coming out of the power plants…however, not all of it burns, so we have pollution.
The world now recognizes that this is a very efficient way to address pollution…if you have a system for emissions trading, you must have strict compliance…there is 24 hour monitoring by telemetry…they can send by radiofrequency to EPA computers and they get the levels and can tell whether these firms are releasing what they say they are releasing…because they have 24 hour monitoring at EPA, they have 100% compliance. Basically, there are only a small number of power plants that all of the pollution is coming out of…not too many to watch…with climate change, we have many more sources, so it is much harder. The conference on November 17th and 18th is about compliance. If you don’t buy credits, you are violating the law. You have to be confident that I will deliver the credits…this is a legal promise…I will deliver to you so many tons of SO2 that I didn’t emit. You have to have a mechanism that this is complied with.
Europeans have started this system to meet their obligations under the Kyoto Protocol…they have issued allocations to the firms…cost of Carbon is about 26 Euros per ton. Just a few months ago, it was 19; it started at about 8.5 Euros.
British Barrister James Cameron…co-founder of CIEL…started in London and Washington…James is very clever...he started a merchant bank; he has raised 130 Million as an investment fund to 1) give advice to companies to meet requirements for climate change, 2) buying carbon credits and reselling, and 3) invest in new technologies that are good for climate…wind power and solar power.
Hurricane Katrina
Professor Zaelke left when it was hitting New Orleans. European press has been very vigilant about covering this story…very critical stories…CNN and BBC showing the images that are just astounding.
Water pollutionàPb and coliform and chemical companies…these companies will use oil as a feed stock…also a lot of the others, such as benzene and nitrobenzene, etc.
Other environmental issues related to the story of Katrina, include: why the hurricane did so much damage? When you have a big river like the Mississippi, you have sediment that washes into the river, and settles out in the Mississippi Delta, this is a very fertile area…nutrients build up, so the land goes up. You can build barrier islands. These become barriers that hit the barrier island because they keep the waves out. When the hurricane hits land, it loses energy. It slows the ocean surge and the hurricane. The Mississippi has a wild history itself. There were earlier floods on the Mississippi. Herbert Hoover was in charge and became famous for this. Lets go back another step. You have a fertile delta, so people want to farm it. It is very attractive land. People are attracted by this. The way to prevent the flooding is to control the environment…we are going to control the Mississippi. We build the levees and dykes the dams. Then more people come and the settlement gets bigger. New Orleans is then about 20 feet below the sea level. When you channel the sediment, it goes straight out. Without the settlement being replaced, the land sinks. We lose the natural barriers that are there to prevent the destruction of the land. The more you protect yourself, the more you lose of the natural protective barriers.
The Netherlands also has a large amount of the country below sea level. The UK had a devastating flood in the 1950s. When they don’t have the storm, they let the barriers down…this was to blood the title surge by the Tames. The Netherlands had a huge storm and flood in the 1950s, but the fast thinking captain of a ship, plugged the breach in the dike with his ship.
The biggest environmental connection that is in the press is climate change. Hurricanes are becoming more devastating because of climate change…they gain their strength from the heat of the ocean from where they start…the water needs to be at least 20 degrees C, this summer it was almost 30 degrees C. Heat is energy. You pass over this hot water and suck up the hot water and cause a more intense storm (severe weather events). Scientists believe that climate change is already causing a sufficiently warmer world to cause more severe weather events. How can you prove that this is caused by climate change? You can drill on one of the poles and get a core of ice that goes back 400,000 years…then they analyze the chemical composition of the ice and tell you what the temperature was. This becomes the “band” where you can say this is how much the weather varies over thousands of years, now we see it is getting hotter than it used to be.
(what is a framework convention? Here is what we know, lets get together and study it more. It doesn’t solve the problem. This way we all know what the rules are…we share the information. Protocol is a subsequent treaty that fits within the framework that has some teeth. Kyoto Protocol.) If you are negotiators and you are working on the Kyoto successor (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), now we are negotiating post-Kyoto emissions. The negotiations are performed by all the representatives of all the parties (Conference of the Parties [COP]), this coming December it will be COP 11 to strengthen climate regulations.)
You are going to Montreal, and you are all representatives of New Orleans. The Nation-State sends representatives. Why shouldn’t New Orleans be there? Do they have the same view of climate change as George Bush? Most people there will say it is a problem. They can go to Washington and knock on the door and ask that they tell the state dept to represent New Orlean’s position.
Let’s say that New Orleans gets invited. Today, we are forgetting the rules of international law, we are going to allow the representatives of New Orleans to come. The estimates now are 100-200 billion dollars to rebuild. What would you want from an international treaty? Here are some ways to think about it? You have science…you have the intergovernmental panel on climate change…IPCC…this group studies climate, they report every few years about the state of climate. Not everyone believes that the IPCC is right. However, there is a strong consensus that it is occurring.
Daniel Kenneman won his nobel prize on behavioral economics. Our theory of economics is that humans are perfectly rational in their thinking and that we compute risk benefit analysis.
George Bush has a brilliant consultant that helps him (Carl Rove) frame his political arguments…he uses language in a way that controls discussions about the issue. If you want to be Makeavellian Law…let’s cut all the dead trees so there is nothing to burn. So if there is a fire out there, we keep the forest healthy. This is a Bush argument. Another example, the Clear Skies initiative. This is an idea about framing a debate. “Moral Politics”—good book…also “Don’t Think About the Elephant”
Huristics are short cuts.
Bias—nearsightedness…myopic…we think about the present, not the future. Then the other one is the optimism bias…we suffer or we are blessed by this. If you ask people how many of you are in the top 1% of the economy, 19% percent think they are. The only people that have a real impression of themselves are the chronically depressed.
Are the environmental NGOs part of the chronically depressed? If most people have the optimism bias, then selling disaster is not the way to get through to them.
Sanctions are required…normal motive for obedience.
Porter Hypothesis—if you design law properly, you can actually help firms make money. Promotes maximum innovation…if you have strict standards that give firms that flexibility to meet those standards, they will capture innovative technologies to make money. Consider the SO2 example.
September 15, 2005
Broader framework for environmental problems: IPAT formula…I=environmental impact; P=population; C (A or affluence)=consumption; T=technology
I = P * C * T
There is some correlation with the number of people and the consumption and technology. The relationship is proportional. Consumption means using resources…somewhat of a measure of quality of life. Proportional relationship between consumption and impact. Technology…how would a technology reduce the impact? Increased efficiency; cleaner burning of fuel by engines; however, some types of technology may increase the impact…for example, ocean fishing we can wipe out a species. In this latter respect, technology can be a negative.
Ekins says we spend an extremely large amount of time shopping. He then says that this is associated with another of our activities watching TV…it is supported by advertisements. Statistics here about TV watching…about 22 hours a week watching TV…what percentage of a person’s leisure time does this represent? 45% of leisure time spent on TV…6 hours a week spent shopping. A hundred years ago we were not driven by consumerism. We are creating/socializing people to be consumers.