By Malcolm Dowden, Solicitor and Environmental Law Consultant The UK Environment Agency’s CRC Project Executive Andrew Hitchings has confirmed the British Standards Institute’s ‘Kitemark’ scheme for Energy Reduction Verification (ERV) as an approved ‘Early Action Metric’...

By Meredith Irvin and Erin Book, Managing Directors, SNR Denton In a week-long blog series, Meredith Irvin and Erin Book will summarize the main climate and/or energy proposals that are currently being discussed as we head into the final working days of the 111th Congress. Since the June...

By Meredith Irvin and Erin Book, Managing Directors, SNR Denton In a week-long blog series, Meredith Irvin and Erin Book will summarize the main climate and/or energy proposals that are currently being discussed as we head into the final working days of the 111th Congress. Today’s blog...

By Russell Prugh, Associate, Marten Law PLLC “The effects of coming greenhouse gas (GHG) regulation will be felt across a broad spectrum of the oil and gas industry. Exploration, development, production, refining, and transportation face restrictions on their direct GHG emissions. And unlike...

By Gregory E. Wannier, Deputy Director of the Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Law School CCCL recently released a report detailing options for implementing potential cap and trade regimes through federal-state partnerships under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act (§111) . This report...

California voters rejected an oil industry-backed effort to squash the state's law mandating a large reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Now, a lawsuit from a handful of environmental justice groups may accomplish what Big Oil could not. Last November, California voters soundly rejected an...

By Marc Karell, Founder and Principal, Climate Change & Environmental Services Earlier this year the World Resources Institute and other organizations issued a report providing ways for the federal government to implement a cap and trade program to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions independent...

Calibrating measurements from study teams on the ground with the results of a readouts from "light detection and ranging" instrumentation (LIDAR), Arbonaut, a Finnish natural resources management firm, has created the technology to product 3-dimensional images of the trees in a forest, which...

By Shelley Welton, Deputy Director & Fellow, Center for Climate Change, Columbia Law School On Tuesday, October 11, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) held one of a series of stakeholder learning sessions devoted to possible program reforms. Tuesday's session focused on electricity...

Former Orrick Environmental Partner to Anchor Firm's Expansion to California Robert Lawrence , former chair of Orrick's environmental transactions group, will anchor Marten Law's new San Francisco office - making it one of the largest environmental and energy law firms on the West...

By Robert F. Lawrence, Partner, and Dustin Till, Associate, Marten Law Cap and trade is a market-based framework under which aggregate emissions are capped and regulated businesses must obtain (through government allocations, auctions, or secondary trades) an allowance for each ton of greenhouse...

By Robert F. Lawrence, Dustin Till and Svend Brandt-Erichsen, Matren Law PLLC Excerpt: California's greenhouse gas (GHG) cap-and-trade program is due to be finalized within a few weeks, over widespread opposition and concern about its effects on California's economy. Looking forward, California...

By Julia Dobtsis, JD Candidate, 2012, Cornell Law School On October 20, 2011, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) announced the adoption its long awaited Air Resources Board Emissions Trading Program. The state-administered program is the first of its kind in the nation. It is considered...

By Steven M. Siros, Partner, Jenner & Block On December 14, 2011, a group of investors that purchased trading privileges on the Chicago Climate Exchange ("CCX") sued the CCX and its founders, alleging fraud and violations of Illinois' Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices...

ENERGY: The OHIO House and Senate approve SB 315, which requires greater disclosure of chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process to extract natural gas from underground shale deposits. The measure also requires water sampling within 1,500 feet of proposed water wells, mandates...

By Mark Beaufoy and Laura Schuijers July 1 marked the first day of the first compliance year under Australia's carbon pricing mechanism (CPM). Entities liable under the CPM will need to record and report their covered greenhouse gas emissions. The threshold emissions level for an entity to be...

By Shelley Welton, Deputy Director & Fellow, Center for Climate Change, Columbia Law School On Wednesday, January 10, 2013, Governor Cuomo gave his state-of-the-state message . Much of the message was devoted to examining how the state can recover and learn from Superstorm Sandy. Encouragingly...

If you saw the SOTU address earlier this month, you heard President Obama renew his plea for a 'market based' solution to our climate change crisis. That comment triggered a heated policy discussion among my environmentalist friends. What does a tax guy say when folks ask about the cap-and-trade...

HERBERT NAMES 'ACTION TEAM' TO FIGHT DIRTY AIR: Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) announced the creation last week of a new working group tasked with devising solutions to the Beehive State's persistent air pollution problems. The 38-member panel, dubbed the Clean Air Action Team, will have until...

Teresa Parejo, Associate Professor of Law (Carlos III University), Visiting Scholar at the Center for Climate Change Law The EU ETS (European Union Emissions Trading System), the most important EU tool to fight against climate change, is now facing two challenges of great significance: 1. In...

By most measures, California's nascent cap-and-trade program had a solid first year of operation, producing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for state coffers and, perhaps more important, not dragging the state's still-recovering economy back into the abyss it had been wallowing in...

On April 29, 2014, Washington State Governor Jay Inslee signed an executive order outlining a series of “next steps” to reduce carbon pollution within the state, including the creation of a market based carbon pollution cap program and to work towards eventually eliminating the use of electricity...

By John McAleese . With the release of EPA’s proposed regulation of CO2 from existing sources on June 2, there has been a lot of speculation that states will look to cap-and-trade schemes as a means of complying with EPA’s mandate that the states reduce CO2 emissions by 30% of 2005 levels...

By Steven M. Siros While it is unlikely that the 113th Congress will take any action on climate change (especially not in advance of the November 2014 elections), many major public companies aren't waiting for Congressional action and are instead proactively beginning to factor internal carbon...

Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’, On Care for Our Common Home includes a section about the economics of carbon mitigation. Although a small part of the encyclical—one paragraph out of 246—the pope’s economic prescription received extensive coverage from top newspapers...