Donald Trump was hostile towards environmental regulation from his first day in office. From rolling back regulations, to appointing industry insiders and anti-environmentalists to important positions within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Justice (DOJ), and other agencies tasked with the enforcement of environmental laws, Trump intended to weaken environmental protections, noting he would only leave the EPA “little tidbits” when he slashed their budget. It is undeniable that the Trump Administration went to great lengths to damage the federal environmental enforcement apparatus. Some early research even shows that criminal prosecution may have been significantly reduced. Yet we still know very little about whether the Trump Administration was able to substantially reduce the ability of federal agencies to investigate and prosecute serious environmental crimes and how this may have varied from the Obama Administration. Answering this question is crucial, as we need to assess the impact of the Administration on criminal enforcement. More broadly, we must evaluate how environmental law enforcement agencies persist or desist in their efforts under hostile versus supportive presidential regimes. To understand these issues, we gathered data on EPA criminal investigation that led to a prosecution during the Trump Administration. We explored the frequency of such prosecutions and trends in charging patterns, whether environmental law enforcement agencies were able to prosecute serious violations of law, and if they were able to obtain significant penalties during this time. We then gathered extensive prosecution data during the Obama Administration to compare prosecution outcomes. This approach gave us over 1,200 cases to explore in our analysis.
This Article seeks to answer the following questions: What does the academic literature say about POC access to and use of blue space? What role, if any, does systemic racism and inequality play in creating barriers to access? Most historical accounts of any water-race nexus focused on the Black experience, and there is little academic research studying the connection to water, or lack thereof, among other POC. Thus, this Article focuses on the Black experience of and connection to water, which includes the lack of access to blue spaces. Additionally, this Article demonstrates the need for more studies to evaluate the experience of other non-Black POC regarding access to blue spaces.
As this Article argues, then, we cannot achieve our climate goals without tackling fossil fuel financing, and that requires leadership by the Federal Reserve (the Fed)—the U.S. governmental institution that has been given primary responsibility for regulating our financial system. Part I of the Article grapples with the normative questions that surround the proper role of the Fed in our larger system of government, responding to the arguments that are frequently deployed against Fed action on climate and making a legal, comparative, and constitutional case for the Fed to pursue as robust a climate agenda as it possibly can. Part II describes various regulatory and monetary-policy tools that the Fed could conceivably utilize under its current statutory authority to achieve critical climate goals. And Part III analyzes the vulnerability of these different strategies to judicial review, resulting in the somewhat paradoxical observation that the Fed’s use of its more sweeping monetary powers may in fact be more strategically viable than the deployment of its arguably less controversial regulatory tools.
The Article identifies state innovations in four categories that go beyond widely adopted “baseline” policies. They include policies that: establish affordability and access policy goals, provide express legal authority, and require data collection; reduce electricity demand through efficiency and renewable programs targeted to the most vulnerable; make electricity affordable, for example, through rates or credits guaranteeing affordability for particular income levels; and reduce disconnections, especially by providing help with arrears. The Article also identifies and compares the different ways states pay for these policies where necessary—through utility rates, universal service charges, climate program revenues, taxes, or one-time windfalls. The Article concludes by identifying important policy considerations related to this emerging model.