Climate Crisis: Assessing Disruptive Change and Radical Law and Policy Response

This seminar will examine the emerging literature on potential severe and rapid climate changes that may present disruptive near-term challenges to legal and governing arrangements, and potential legal and policy responses. Topics will be organized by the major categories of climate response – emissions cuts, adapting to realized and anticipated impacts, atmospheric removal of old emissions, and active interventions to reduce near-term risks – but will generally examine more environmentally ambitious and more radical responses than those that currently dominate national and international legal and policy agendas. Specific topics covered will include doctrinal areas being disrupted by realized climate impacts (e.g., inverse condemnation in property law, zoning and permitting, emergency authorities, insurance regulation); available instruments and authorities to achieve rapid emissions reductions; implications of proposed rapid expansions of atmospheric removal and stable storage of previous emissions; and legal and regulatory structures to address proposed earth system interventions (aka geoengineering), aiming to simultaneously promote their exploration and development and assess and control their environmental and socio-political side effects. Constitutional issues raised by these responses will be considered, primarily in US jurisdictional context but with some comparative considerations.