Cass Sunstein, the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Office of Management and Budget and one of the most prolific and frequently cited legal academics, detailed some of the positive results of using cost-benefit analysis in overseeing the Obama administration’s regulatory agenda when he spoke at NYU Law on April 30.
Cass Sunstein, Administrator of OIRA
The NYU Environmental Law Journal, NYU Environmental Law Society, and the Furman Center for Real Estate and Public Policy cosponsored a symposium on “Localities in the Lead: The Path of Environmental Progress through New York City.” Introducing the event, Professor Katrina Wyman discussed what she described as a relatively new era of focusing on environmental policy at the municipal level. “Municipalities aren’t just taking an interest in traditionally local issues, like land use or brown field,” she said, “but also taking an interest in the preeminent global environmental issue of our time: climate change.”
New York City in particular has been extremely active in recent years in environmental policy, Wyman said, pointing to the PlaNYC initiative. Because of this, she said, the city serves as a good case study for thinking through the challenges involved in working through environmental policy at a municipal level.
On February 2, Johnson Toribiong, president of Palau and Tillman Thomas, prime minister of Grenada hosted a diplomatic reception at the law school to build support for a UN General Assembly resolution reqesting International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the legal responsibility of countries for climate change under international law. An ICJ advisory opinion may be requested by a simple majority of UN members. This effort by Palau and Grenada is in conjunction with a number of other small island countries, who are concerned about the impact of rising sea levels that are resulting from climate change.
President of Palau Johnson Toribiong
“The truth is that nothing we or other Pacific countries do will stem the rising tides or the flood of global emissions. We need everyone to buy in or it won’t work. An ICJ advisory opinion would give us the guidance we need on what all States must do,“ said President Toribiong. “I am pleased that deliberations on a possible resolution have begun here in New York. But there is a long way to go.”
The UN General Assembly resolution is expected to be introduced in the autumn. Attending the reception along with the President and Prime Minister were their Ambassadors to the UN, Stuart Beck (of Palau) and Dessima Williams (of Grenada). They were joined by nearly 100 other UN Ambassadors, Deputy Permanent Representatives and legal advisors.
NYU law students Julian Arato and Ben Heath with Palauan Ambassador to the UN, Stuart Beck and President Toribiong
Two NYU law students and IILJ scholars, Julian Arato (’11, LL.M.’12) and Ben Heath (’11, LL.M.’12) have been assisting the Mission of Palau by providing legal advice on the issue. Since the Mission of Palau was opened in 2004, NYU law students have provided legal assistance on a number of issues, including international environmental law and law of the sea.
Institutions for climate finance and the new Green Climate Fund were the two main topics of discussion at the workshop on Climate Finance held in Abu Dhabi last week, hosted at the NYU Abu Dhabi campus by the Global Climate Finance Project, together with the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This was the Project’s third workshop in the UAE.
The workshop started on Monday, January 9th, bringing local UAE government officials together with an impressive group of experts drawing from academia, the World Bank, various NGOs and the private sector. The workshop heard from three panels discussing the global architecture; the new Green Climate Fund; and tracking climate finance flows. Discussion was so lively that the second day began with a panel originally intended to be on the first day: making transformative investments in climate technologies. The rest of the day was devoted to discussing a paper that will form the opening chapters of a new book on institutions for climate finance that the workshop participants will contribute to. Over the two days, participants engaged in a comprehensive discussion, identifying a number of pressing issues for resolution, areas in which further research is required, and various opportunities for both the UAE and the global community more broadly, to build an effective regime for climate finance.
After the first day of the workshop, Professor Richard Stewart, Professor Daniel Bodansky of Arizona State University and Smita Nakhooda of the Overseas Development Institute held a public discussion on “The Future of International Climate Action,” as a part of the public lectures hosted by NYU Abu Dhabi. The lecture was well attended and was followed by a spirited question and answer session and reception.
A December conference on the use of cost-benefit analysis to set domestic environmental policy in developing and emerging economies served a dual purpose as an occasion to seal an agreement between NYU School of Law and the University of Chile School of Law for a scholarly partnership.
Hosted by the University of Chile School of Law and its Center on Regulation and Competition and organized by Professor Gonzalo Moyano (LL.M. ’09), “How to Improve Regulation: Regulatory reform and economic activity” focused on how countries with limited resources can maximize the benefits of environmental protection while reducing the economic costs. Dean Richard Revesz and Michael Livermore ’06, executive director of the NYU Law Institute for Policy Integrity, attended with Meera de Mel ’05, assistant dean for global programs at NYU Law.
This conference is part of a multi-year effort led by Revesz and Livermore to examine how cost-benefit analysis is used in the global context. In October of 2010, the two convened a workshop at the NYU-Abu Dhabi Institute on the topic of “global cost-benefit analysis,” gathering top experts from the world of academia, government, and civil society to discuss the theoretical and practical issues that have arisen as the use of cost-benefit analysis has spread around the world. That two day conference produced a set of case studies from a number of global contexts—from dam building in Panama to air pollution in Singapore—that will serve as the foundation for a book edited by them to be published by Oxford University Press in the fall of 2012.
The first NYU-Chile collaboration will be around the issue of climate finance, with the aim of using Santiago as a hub to develop a regional network of thinkers on this issue. The NYU Global Climate Finance Project, led by Benedict Kingsbury, Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law, and University Professor Richard Stewart, John Edward Sexton Professor of Law, as well as project director Bryce Rudyk, has charted this new field, bringing together domestic and international policymakers, leaders from the business community, and academic institutions in a collaborative dialogue around the legal dimensions of the emerging global climate finance regime, issues which have largely prevented progress since the Copenhagen Accord that was drafted at the 2009 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The partnership with the University of Chile is a win-win for both institutions, said U.S. Ambassador to Chile Alejandro Wolff. Home to one of Latin America’s most prestigious law faculties, the University is aggressively expanding its international outreach, an effort led by its international relations director, Rodrigo Polanco (LL.M.’04). At the same time, Santiago is quickly becoming one of the developing world’s most entrepreneurial capitals, benefiting enormously from Chile’s steady economic growth, which was acknowledged by its 2010 membership to the OECD.
Richard Stewart, University Professor and John Edward Sexton Professor of Law, moderated the November 30 Milbank Tweed Forum. Titled “Global Warming or Nuclear Meltdown? The Future of Nuclear Power After Fukushima,” the discussion took on issues ranging from fears of nuclear proliferation to the recent crisis at the Fukushima plant in Japan, and, on the plus side, whether nuclear power can provide stable, secure, low-carbon electricity and curb climate change. Panelists included Michael Levi, a senior fellow and director of the program on energy security and climate change at the Council of Foreign Relations; William McCollum, chief operating officer of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates three nuclear and 11 coal-fired plants; and Christopher Paine, nuclear program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In his introduction to the discussion, Stewart, who is also the director of the Frank J. Guarini Center on Environmental and Land Use Law, noted that nearly all of the nuclear plants in the U.S. started construction before 1975 and that “ten years ago one would have said that the nuclear industry is moribund, there are not going to be any more new plants in the United States.” Then, he noted, “there was a change in direction and attitude” due to growth in energy demand, rising energy prices, concerns about energy security, and global warming. “There was talk in the 2005 era of a U.S. nuclear renaissance,” Stewart said. But, he added, “at this point the bloom is somewhat off the renaissance,” because of a drop in electric demand caused by the recession and safety concerns raised by the Fukushima incident. Additionally, Stewart noted, the U.S. has not figured out how it will dispose of its nuclear waste — the subject of his most recent book. “There’s a complex web of economic and environmental and security, as well as political and legal issues here,” he said.
Watch the full video of the event (1 h 13 min):
The following account was written by Elizabeth Hallinan ’13, who was one of the organizers of the program, and then moderated the discussion.
On Tuesday, October 25th, NYU Law’s Student Animal Legal Defense Fund and the Environmental Law Society hosted a panel to discuss another crisis in the American food culture – the prevalence of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), colloquially known as factory farms.
As explained by Nebraska farmer Kevin Fulton of the sustainable Fulton Farms, CAFOs are not the mom-n-pop family farm pictured on your milk carton. CAFOs, as explained by the EPA, are “agricultural operations where animals are kept and raised in confined situations…which congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area.”
Panelist Mark Bittman, a columnist and long-time food writer for the New York Times, is worried about the environmental damage these operations can do. CAFOs are major polluters of both local toxins (for example when manure lagoons overflow into local waterways) as well as greenhouse gases from both the facilities and the animals themselves. Bittman has written extensively about the problems stemming from the over-consumption of meat in the U.S. On the panel, he claimed that meat is not as cheap as it seems to be. He pointed out that if we included the extensive environmental and health costs to society – what economists call “externalities” of the system – the price of a steak dinner is actually very expensive. According to Fulton, Americans used to spend far more money on food than on health insurance. Now that ratio is reversed.
As we have moved from family farms to factory farms, other unintended consequences have arisen. Jen Sorenson, a litigator with the Natural Resources Defense Council explained that 80% of all antibiotics in the US are fed to CAFO animals. These antibiotics are given subtherapeutically, meaning they are used not to improve animal health, but to enhance growth rate and improve feed efficiency. Unfortunately, as Bittman pointed out, this extraordinary overuse of antibiotics contributes to the growing prevalence of “superbugs” that are resistant to therapeutic use of these antibiotics when animals, and humans, need treatment.
As one audience member commented after the panel, the problem with discussing factory farming is that you pull the thread of one problem, and the entire system starts to unravel. Animal welfare, worker safety, labor rights, and many other issues are implicated in the mess of the CAFO system.
So what can we do? Bittman wishes we would cook more at home and rely less on the food industry to tell us what we should eat. Sorenson suggested that focusing on the human health concerns is the best tactic in litigation aimed at curbing CAFOs. Jon Lovvorn, an attorney at the Humane Society of the United States, has found nuisance law to be a fruitful litigation approach. And Fulton invited the entire audience to see a sustainable farm at work in Nebraska. Judging by the warm reception given to him, and all our speakers, by the audience that night, I might not be the only one to take him up on his offer.
Over the last year, Connie Hedegaard (EU Commissioner for Climate Action), Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet (French Minister for Ecology) and Serge Lepeltier (French Ambassador for Climate Negotiations) each held workshops on current climate policy at NYU, continuing the Global Climate Finance Project’s series of meetings between leading international policy-makers and NYU faculty and students.
Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action participating in a roundtable discussion.
Commissioner Hedegaard, who was chair of the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009, came to campus in September 2010 after asking the Global Climate Finance Project to gather a group of experts to discuss issues relating to climate finance. In addition to Hedegaard and the European Commission’s Director of Climate Strategy and International Negotiations Artur Runge-Metzger, NYU professors and fellows participated along with colleagues from Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Environmental Defense Fund, Peterson Institute for International Economics, World Resources Institute, and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative
The workshop engaged in lively debate on a number of contentious issues, including the institutions and MRV structures for climate finance, the use of border carbon adjustments, the U.S. domestic political obstacles to implementing proposed international levies (for example, on bunker fuels), and the role of corporations in the current climate change negotiations and in any future climate finance regime.
Professor Richard Stewart, French Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet and Robert Orr, Assistant UN Secretary General discuss the future of climate finance
In March 2011, French Minister for Ecology, Sustainable Development, Transport, and Housing Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet was the lead speaker at “From Fast-Start to Long-Term Finance for Climate Protection: The Need for New Funding Sources,” a panel discussion involving the Assistant UN Secretary General Robert Orr, Professor Richard Stewart and others.
Following the public panel, a small private workshop was held on climate finance issues and opportunities in the upcoming international meetings and U.S. climate regulation. Participants included the panelists, the French ambassador to the United States, the French ambassador for climate change negotiations, the deputy governor of the Banque de France, and additional experts.
Serge Lepeltier (third from right) and NYU professors and fellows
In September 2011, Serge Lepeltier, the French Ambassador for Climate Negotiations returned with his climate advisors from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss climate finance in the lead up to the Durban climate conference. Participating were professors and fellows from NYU and its research partners, World Resources Institute and Environmental Defense Fund.
In Cambodia’s Cardamom forest, the 73 families of the Chumnoab community were practicing slash-and-burn agriculture and engaging in illegal wildlife trading because they lacked economic alternatives. The situation is an example of how, in certain sensitive ecological areas, the practices of local communities can be detrimental.
On April 25, the Institute for Policy Integrity and Conservation International hosted an event focused on the use of conservation agreements and cost-benefit analysis in conservation projects around the world.
The talk, “Giving to Get: Economic Incentives and Conservation,” was the third session of the joint discussion series Conversations with Eco-Innovators. It featured Conservation International’s Eduard Niesten, who presented his work in the central Cardamom forest as a case study on the use of conservation agreements in protecting natural resources.
Getting a local community to embrace conservation often requires extending benefits that exceed the costs of engaging in preservation. So CI examined the needs of the community and devised an agreement that offered salaries for two teachers, plowing technology, and training and equipment for patrolling the area in exchange for commitments such as limiting shifting (otherwise known as slash-and-burn) cultivation, halting illegal hunting and logging, and setting up forest patrols.
The result: a win-win situation in which 20,000 hectares of forest lands are now protected, patrolled, and zoned. Endangered species have returned to the area; rice production has increased, as have available agricultural tools for the community; and two year-round teacher positions have been created.
CI estimates that $30,000 can protect these 20,000 hectares for a year, and a $2 million trust fund could protect the area indefinitely.
Just as cost-benefit analysis was utilized by CI to form a conservation agreement in Cambodia, a similar calculus can also be a powerful tool in conservation efforts worldwide, according to Policy Integrity’s Michael Livermore ’06. Taking from his experiences in co-writing Retaking Rationality with Dean Richard Revesz, Livermore spoke about the ways in which cost-benefit analysis can be used to better understand and address environmental problems in developing and developed nations.
Livermore pointed to the example of Liberia’s forests, the subject of a chapter in a forthcoming book he is editing with Revesz tentatively called Global Cost-Benefit Analysis. The natural resources of the area offer enormous benefits to the global community, he said, including carbon sequestration and ecological diversity. These benefits, though complex and difficult to value, easily outweigh the funds Liberia can make from logging and other deforestation activities.
Watch a video of the conference (1h 1m):
On October 22, NYU School of Law hosted the Sixteenth Annual Herbert Rubin and Justice Rose Luttan Rubin International Law Symposium, titled “On Thin Ice: International Law and Environmental Protection In a Melting Arctic.”
After introductory remarks by Herbert Rubin ’42, founder of Herzfeld & Rubin, and José Alvarez, who is Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law, the keynote lecture was delivered by Peter Taksøe-Jensen, the Danish ambassador to the United States and former United Nations assistant secretary general for legal affairs. Taksøe-Jensen described the current state of the Artic Ocean, and the potential for changes in access to the region. During summer months, Taksøe-Jensen said, more and more ice is melting each year. This is creating uncharted waters in the arctic region, allowing for potential new trade routes, tourism, and migration of marine life. One of the consequences is a new tension between the countries that border the Arctic as they plan for regulating this new area.
The first panel delved further into Taksøe-Jensen’s introduction, setting its sights on recent changes in the Arctic region and the responses of various nations to those changes. Moderator Peter Miljanich ’11, editor-in-chief of the Environmental Law Journal, paced the discussion, which featured: Betsy Baker, an assistant professor at Vermont Law School; Lisa Speer, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s International Oceans Program; and Ross Virginia, Myers Family Professor of Environmental Science at Dartmouth College. Panel two, moderated by NYU Journal of International Law and Politics Symposium Editor Margaret Graham ’11, discussed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Professor Katrina Wyman moderated the third and final panel, which explored the domestic and international approaches to conserving the diverse and vulnerable marine ecosystems in the Arctic region from the increasing threats of overfishing, ship strikes, and pollution from new commercial activities.
Watch the opening keynote:
Watch the first panel:
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