CleanLaw

EELP Senior Staff Attorney Hannah Perls talks with Susan Crawford, the John A. Riley clinical professor at Harvard Law School, and Michelle Mapp, an Equal Justice Works law fellow at the ACLU of South Carolina and former CEO of the South Carolina Community Loan Fund, about Susan's most recent book, Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm. Read the transcript: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CleanLaw-87.pdf Quotes: “Charleston is everything about America sort of distilled: enormous growth, enormous focus on profit, a deep rootedness in our history of racism and now facing a lot of pressures from both the water and from development.” —Susan Crawford (9:31) “... [W]e have just refused to even begin to have these conversations as a community, as a state, or as a country. But they're conversations that we must have because whether we choose to put our head in the sand or not, the water is coming, the hurricanes are coming, these weather events are coming as we are already seeing in our country.” —Michelle Mapp (36:20) “We have to elect people who are capable of looking beyond their short-term plans and their short-term success in office to think about the long-term survival of this country.” —Susan Crawford (41:09)

Harvard Law School Professor and EELP's Founding Director Jody Freeman, who is also an independent director of ConocoPhillips, speaks with Harvard Law School Professor Richard Lazarus and University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Law Steph Tai about the US Supreme Court’s recent decision in Sackett v. EPA. They discuss how the Court’s reliance on a dictionary definition of waters will drastically limit Clean Water Act protections: severely shrinking what qualifies as covered wetlands and streams, and as a result, enfeebling the federal government’s ability to protect the larger water bodies the act still clearly covers. With a deep dive into the history of the Clean Water Act, the Supreme Court’s prior decisions, and the science of watersheds, they put into context how the Sackett decision flies in the face of what Congress intended when it passed this landmark legislation. Transcript: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CleanLaw-86-final.pdf Quotes: “[I]f the Court uses a continuous surface water connection test, which is what they're moving towards, to traditional navigable waters required for wetlands, more than 50% of wetlands in some watersheds would no longer be protected by the Clean Water Act. With respect to streams: Ephemeral and intermittent streams would not be jurisdictional waters and thus more than 90% of stream length, in some watersheds, would no longer be protected by the Clean Water Act.” —Steph Tai [6:50] “… [W]e don't have to guess what the purpose of the Clean Water Act is, it's the very first section of the act, section 101, it says its purpose is to preserve the biological, physical, and chemical integrity of the nation's waters. That is the purpose of the statute. And unfortunately, what the court is done here, it's made it impossible to do that both to those waters that are now no longer covered themselves, which are important, and because their connection to the waters the court says are covered. So all sets of those waters will no longer be effectively protected by the statute. And when Congress did this in 1972, they did it deliberately. They deliberately decided we needed a national law, a comprehensive law. They deliberately defined the term navigable waters to mean waters of the United States as a broad term, and the accompanying legislative history said, we're doing that deliberately. We want to tap into the full scope of Congress's power under the Commerce Clause. So, they were intentionally not making this depend on traditional notions of navigability. And that's been the sort of the settled law. And now the court has turned back the clock.” —Richard Lazarus [13:45] “I felt a sense of disappointment there wasn't a dissent that really took the majority to task and chimed in about the danger of the Thomas-Gorsuch approach and view of the Commerce Clause... [L]urking here in the Thomas-Gorsuch concurrence is a very radical view of the Commerce Clause and what Congress can do and what it means for environmental law more generally.”  —Jody Freeman [42:50] “There is a real tone and tenor and attitude of real disdain for the enterprise of the agencies in these cases. For the job the government has been given by Congress in these statutes, a sense of the government is the enemy. The government imposes and impinges on liberty. There's a line in the Alito opinion, Richard, that says the Clean Water Act is a ‘potent weapon’ and it has ‘crushing’ consequences. Not, ‘there's a mission.’ Congress gave the agency a mission to protect the waters of the United States.” —Jody Freeman [55:08]

EELP Senior Staff Attorney Hanna Perls, Executive Director Carrie Jenks, and Electricity Law Initiative Director Ari Peskoe break down recent changes to federal permitting passed as part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, aka the debt ceiling bill, which President Biden signed on June 3rd. Transcript: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CleanLaw-85.pdf Mentioned link: https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2023/5/federal-actions-to-improve-project-reviews-for-a-cleaner-and-stronger-economy

Executive Director Carrie Jenks and EELP’s Electricity Law Initiative Director Ari Peskoe discuss the Supreme Court’s recent National Pork Producers Council v. Ross decision. Ari explains how this case about a California law regulating sales of pork products will help insulate state clean energy laws from certain types of legal challenges. Transcript: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CleanLaw-84.pdf Mentioned link: https://statepowerproject.org/

EELP’s Founding Director Jody Freeman, who is also an independent director of ConocoPhillips, and EELP's executive director, Carrie Jenks speak again with Jay Duffy, litigation director at Clean Air Task Force, and Kevin Poloncarz, a partner at the law firm Covington and Burling. Jody, Jay, and Kevin recently joined CleanLaw to discuss the Supreme Court’s decision about the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan, and now, with Carrie, talk about EPA's recently proposed greenhouse gas regulation for the power sector and their views on how EPA's approaches were shaped by both the Supreme Court’s decision, West Virginia v. EPA, and Congress’s enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act. Transcript available here https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Transcript-83-Power-Sector-Rule-Jody-Jay-Kevin-Carrie-J.pdf

EELP senior staff attorney Hannah Perls speaks with Dr. Carolyn Kousky, associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, and Sean Hecht, who is the managing attorney of Earth Justice's California Regional Office. They discuss the past, present, and future of disaster insurance, including the role that governments can play in helping design insurance markets that not only redistribute climate related risk, but can help mitigate that risk in an effective and equitable way. Carolyn and Sean are just speaking for themselves and not on behalf of their current or former organizations. Transcript available here: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Transcript-82-Disaster-Insurance-Past-Present-and-Future-with-Hannah-Perls-Carolyn-Kousky-Sean-Hecht.pdf Mentioned links: Carolyn Kousky, Understanding Disaster Insurance: New Tools for a More Resilient Future (2022): https://islandpress.org/books/understanding-disaster-insurance Sean Hecht, Climate Change and the Transformation of Risk: Insurance Matters, 55 UCLA L. Rev. 1559 (2008): https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/55-6-3.pdf Carolyn’s testimony before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs: https://www.banking.senate.gov/hearings/reauthorization-of-the-national-flood-insurance-program-improving-community-resilience The California Insurance Commission’s Sustainable Insurance Roadmap: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/180-climate-change/The-Sustainable-Insurance-Roadmap.cfm

Harvard Law Professor and EELP's Founding Director Jody Freeman, who is also an independent director of ConocoPhillips, speaks with Chet France, a former senior executive at EPA who oversaw the first national greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks in US history. Jody and Chet analyze EPA's most recent proposal to update greenhouse gas emission standards for light-duty and medium-duty vehicles and discuss how the implementation of those standards might be impacted by subsidies and incentives in the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act and future litigation. Transcript: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CleanLaw-81-Journey-to-the-electrification-of-the-transportation-sector.pdf Mentioned links: Episode 65, Clean Car Rules with Jody Freeman and Chet France https://soundcloud.com/user-995691545/65clean-car-rules-with-jody-freeman-and-chet-france?si=db9f227fa1424e34a1a30e322212c7e1&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing EDF Joins Dozens of Other Leaders to Defend EPA’s Clean Car Standards in Court: https://www.edf.org/media/edf-joins-dozens-other-leaders-defend-epas-clean-car-standards-court Transcript: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CleanLaw-81-Journey-to-the-electrification-of-the-transportation-sector.pdf

Executive Director Carrie Jenks speaks with Harvard Law School Professor Richard Lazarus about his recently released book, The Making of Environmental Law, Second Edition. In this long-awaited update, Professor Lazarus describes how environmental law has developed over the last two decades and explores new challenges for the field, including the shifting role of the judiciary, long overdue efforts to achieve environmental justice, and addressing climate change. Read the transcript: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CleanLaw-80-The-Making-of-Environmental-Law-April-2023.pdf

Carrie Jenks and Hannah Oakes Dobie talk about EPA’s latest regulation to address interstate ozone pollution, the “Good Neighbor Plan.” They discuss how the rule’s new design features will refine EPA’s longstanding air transport program to require power plants to reduce smog-forming pollutants. You can read more about the 2023 “good neighbor plan” in the link below. This podcast was recorded on April 3, 2023. On April 5, EPA issued its pre-publication version of the proposed Mercury Air Toxics Standards that Carrie mentions in her discussion about upcoming power sector rules that might impact the timing for installation of emissions control technologies. Read the transcript: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Transcript-7-the-Good-Neighbor-Plan-for-Interestate-Ozone-Pollution.pdf Acronyms in this episode: CAIR (Clean Air Interstate Rule), CSAPR (Cross-State Air Pollution Rule), FIP (Federal Implementation Plan), NAAQS (National Ambient Air Quality Standards), SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction controls), SNCR (Selective Non-Catalytic Reduction controls), SIP (State Implementation Plan)

Senior Staff Attorney Sara Dewey speaks with Hannah Perls talk about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. They discuss the regulatory and legal implications of the derailment, including who is in charge of the response and the different roles that federal agencies play. They also discuss the cleanup order issued by EPA and possible federal reforms to railroad safety regulations. You can find a transcript of this episode here https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Transcript-78-East-Palestine-Sara-and-Hannah.pdf