Environmental Justice and Domestic Climate Change Policy

May 2008
Citation:
38
ELR 10287
Issue
5
Author
Alice Kaswan

Editors' Summary: Legislators and regulators should incorporate environmental justice concerns and opportunities into climate change policies. In this Article, Prof. Alice Kaswan first addresses the environmental justice benefits and risks of cap-and-trade programs. The environmental benefits include enabling higher reduction goals, imposing absolute caps on emissions, and creating technology adoption and innovation incentives. Environmental concerns here center on the programs' morality, their real-world efficacy in reducing emissions and inspiring innovation, the distributional impacts resulting from greenhouse gas co-pollutants, and the lack of public participation. She then describes a number of mechanisms for incorporating environmental justice considerations into cap-and-trade programs in a manner that balances the sometimes conflicting goals of equity and efficiency. She goes on to identify a number of economic risks and opportunities created by climate change policies, including but not limited to cap-and-trade policies. Finally, she addresses the environmental justice risks presented by new technologies like ethanol.

Alice Kaswan is a professor at the University of San Francisco (USF) School of Law. She thanks Maxine Burkett, Kara Christenson, Richard Drury, James Fine, Sheila Foster, Michael Gerrard, Kristin Grenfell, Helen Kang, and Avi Kar for their insightful comments, and Megan Walsh, USF 2008, for invaluable research assistance.
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Environmental Justice and Domestic Climate Change Policy

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