In the spring of 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must promulgate automobile tailpipe greenhouse gas emission standards under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act (CAA). American environmentalists hailed the Supreme...

The polluter pays principle (PPP) is often thought of as an aspirational or guiding principle rather than one that is justiciable by courts. While the principle features in many international conventions in varying formulations, it has not been recognized as a principle of customary...

Given the high levels of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and the likelihood of growing emissions in the future, even aggressive limits on greenhouse gas emissions might ultimately fail to prevent dangerous climate disruptions. To prepare for this risk, some scientists have started to...

This article explains the basic elements of climate change law, with a particular focus on those issues that promise to be important for a considerable time as well as the major factors that are driving the development of this law. The emerging law of climate change is being constructed at the...

This chapter reviews the current status of and prospects for efforts to include emissions from deforestation (and international forest carbon activities in general) in emerging greenhouse gas compliance regimes at the international level; future iterations of the European Union Emissions Trading...

This chapter in an upcoming book on Climate Justice initially discusses the status of American and Canadian indigenous communities and focuses on specific tribes in North America. Following a brief introduction of Canadian and American indigenous peoples, this chapter addresses the threats faced...

Although a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol has not materialised yet, the 2009 Copenhagen meeting underlined the importance of China in international debates on climate and energy. This is not only based on China’s current climate emissions, but also on its expected energy use and economic...