Climate Change Law: An Introduction offers a wide-ranging survey of the present status of international and domestic climate agreements, laws, policies, and realities. The authors, who are all currently or formerly affiliated with Pace University's Elizabeth Haub School of Law, take a pragmatic approach as they enumerate and examine the multifaceted aspects of legal responses to climate change mitigation and adaptation obligations and needs.
The book departs from the notion of top-down national climate change strategies as singular pathways to realizing meaningful carbon emissions reductions and adaptation measures. Although the authors acknowledge that this sort of paradigm would be ideal, they explicitly recognize that many nations, including major carbon emitters, simply lack the ability or political will to implement such a comprehensive approach. They instead demonstrate, using concrete examples, that even in such a country, legal actions and policies at the state or provincial, local, or even individual levels can and do have positive effects.
The opening chapter examines the international treaty regime, mostly focusing on the Paris Agreement of 2015. Readers are introduced to its mechanisms, CO2 reduction targets, and some of the questions of justice and fairness that multilateral climate negotiations encounter, such as how to apportion mitigation and adaptation responsibilities among countries whose greenhouse gas contributions and climate vulnerabilities are usually inversely proportional (i.e., the largest emitters are often the least vulnerable, and vice versa).
The authors then turn to country-level mitigation measures and energy laws, generally confining the book's scope to a single jurisdiction, the United States. National and subnational regulations, programs, and incentives are covered, with the occasional mention of developments elsewhere. (Most of these non-U.S. examples are from the global North and/or West.) Chapters that explore legislative and administrative approaches largely center on statutes and regulations, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and rules from federal agencies. The chapter on enforcement litigation reviews the body of as-yet unfruitful lawsuits in the United States, but also includes exemplar cases from other nations that illustrate different arguments that have met with some, albeit limited, success (depending on the ability of the venue's judiciary to avoid treading on its legislature's sphere of competence). Another chapter examines the emerging overlap of the fields of climate change law and human rights, and convincingly enumerates both the synergies and the stumbling blocks that may be encountered when attempting to advance the notion of environmental protection and climate change adaptation as cognizable guarantees. Final chapters look at the available means for influencing private actors’ behaviors and at the ethics and philosophical principles related to greenhouse gas emissions and mitigation obligations.
With its significant focus on U.S. domestic law, this book will most benefit readers who are generally familiar with that jurisdiction's laws and legal system, especially concerning procedural and constitutional concepts (such as federal pre-emption of state actions and standing to sue) that play important roles in the domestic adoption and enforcement of climate change laws. Readers who may be less conversant with the U.S. legal system, however, will still benefit from discussions of taxation mechanisms, cap-and-trade incentives, and other economic measures, along with the broader international and ethics topics. Those who are looking for a comprehensive introduction to the variety of ways in which climate change law and policy is developed and enacted within a jurisdiction will also find no dearth of valuable information in the book.
The authors keep the book's introductory nature in mind throughout, and suggest further, more in-depth resources for the reader at several points. That being said, each chapter hits the right balance of explaining the concepts and discussing the pros and cons of each statutory approach, regulatory scheme, or program without drowning the reader in excessive detail. The book is well-footnoted—some chapters exceed 150 such references—and is exceptionally current; at least one cited source was issued fewer than four months prior to the book's publication.
In their introduction, the authors state that “[h]elping individuals […] to develop climate change law literacy is the raison d’être of this book,” a goal they accomplish admirably. This relatively slim reader opens doors to deeper discovery and inquiry by providing a solid foundation and understanding of the extremely complex sets of legal, political, and economic dynamics involved in any effort to address the transnational and existential problems associated with an anthropogenically warming planet. Climate Change Law: An Introduction would make a great choice for a textbook for a climate change or environmental law seminar, and would also serve as a compact but highly informative resource for practitioners, policymakers, students, and others who wish to obtain a thorough grounding in the current state of climate change laws and policies.
