Blog

In Part 1, I provided an overview and some of my topline reactions to Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez’s excellent new book, Teaching Environmental Law in Context. In this part, I explore some specific environmental laws that Rebecca and Carmen include in their text and their creative approaches to teaching them.

Teaching environmental law has always been hard. The problem is, it’s about things our students care about. It’s about what Exxon knew, and the BP oil spill, and birds soaked with oil, and little kids with asthma or lead poisoning or cancer because wealthy people in corporate boardrooms were indifferent to the suffering of Black and Brown communities. It’s about Native Americans marching in protest to protect sacred lands their ancestors have stewarded and protected for millennia. I suppose this varies by region, but here in north Philadelphia, students come into class energized, outraged, and ready to defend the powerless and speak truth to power.

My book with fellow Member Scholar Rebecca Bratspies was inspired by an article written by former UN Special Rapporteur (and Member Scholar) John Knox (and co-author Nicole Tronolone) evaluating U.S. environmental law through the framework of international human rights law. With several noteworthy exceptions (such as climate change), Knox and Tronolone concluded that the U.S. (at the end of the Biden administration) generally complied with the substantive and procedural requirements of the right to a healthy environment. However, they described the government’s failure to address environmental injustice as nothing short of “catastrophic.” Far from remedying these shortcomings, the current administration is reinforcing them, as regulatory rollbacks proliferate, equity-based initiatives are dismantled, and coordinated political campaigns seek to ban the teaching of "divisive concepts" such as climate change and racial justice.

Last year, Governor Josh Stein created the North Carolina Artificial Intelligence (AI) Leadership Council to chart a roadmap on AI leadership and policy in the state. The roadmap report published by the council leaves many important areas unaddressed and falls significantly short on others, including harms like high bills, lost jobs, pollution, drought, mass surveillance, and more.

Teaching right now is no joke! This is especially true of teaching environmental law. Most of us teaching in this area have dedicated our professional lives to protecting the environment — the air, the water, the land, and of course the people who breathe that air, drink that water, and live on that land. Each day is more painful than the last as our work is dismantled in front of our eyes. Institutions that seemed solid bulwarks against tyranny are crumbling into dust. In this moment of crisis, fellow Member Scholar Carmen Gonzalez and I set out to write a book for our fellow professors struggling to find their feet — consider Teaching Environmental Law in Context a kind of love letter to the better world we are convinced we can build together with our students.

On August 5, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided Committee for a Better Arvin v. EPA, which is both a significant air pollution case and an interesting case study in how the U.S. Supreme Court has changed judicial review of agency actions. The case was brought by a group in Arvin, California, a small city near Bakersfield.

It’s August here in western Washington State, which means two things: (1) I’ll soon be packing up for my return to New Orleans (class starts soon), and (2) the smoke blowing in from regional wildfires is making my nose burn. Appropriately, the news here is full of stories about personal loss, evacuation routes, fire-suppression strategies, and the brave firefighters who put their lives on the line to keep us safe. But there’s a deeper story: Our broad approach to handling wildfire in the United States was designed for a climate that no longer exists. We must do better.

PJM, the regional transmission organization (RTO) responsible for grid operations in all or part of 13 Eastern U.S. states and Washington, DC, just asked the federal Department of Energy (DOE) to issue an emergency order under the Federal Power Act. In its request, PJM asked to allow for “large loads” (functionally, although not limited to, data centers located in the PJM footprint) to run emergency backup power generation between July 1 and July 2. This is in preparation for the extreme multi-day heatwave that is forecast for the eastern part of the country through the July 4 holiday weekend.

Across the country, legislators are figuring out how to regulate the worst harms from data centers. In North Carolina, the latest bill to do so is Senate Bill 730. Unfortunately, SB 730 is not a step forward in protecting North Carolinians from the harms of data centers. Rather, it is a step sideways, evading needed regulations.