Law and environmental-technological change

Construction crane at Norris Dam (TVA) (Currents of Change)
Yesterday's New York Times had a piece by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway on the need for government help in making the technological transformations necessary to avert disastrous climate change - in particular, phasing out fossil fuels by the year 2050. They write:
None of the major technological transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries were the product of the private sector acting alone and responding only to the market. Railroads, radio, telegraph, telephone, electricity and the internet were all the result of public-private partnerships. None was delivered by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace. All involved significant interventions by the visible hand of government.
What does this mean for us? Right now, government is widely seen as inefficient and ineffective, and our needs are thought to be best addressed by the private sector, through entrepreneurship, venture capital and Silicon Valley-style “disruption.” But unless we acknowledge the need for a substantial government role, we are going to be stuck, because change driven solely by the marketplace is unlikely to suffice.
Some might object that our current challenge is vastly different from those met by past technological changes, because we’re not just talking about a thing, like a radio or cellphone, but about changing our entire energy system. But these earlier transformations involved systems, too. Just as energy technology isn’t one thing, neither were the railroads, radio, electricity or the internet. Those systems all involved many parts, including federal, state and local policies to support them (the land grants that made the railroads possible, for instance, or role of the Federal Trade Commission in licensing radio and television stations). 
Read more »

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lessons from tobacco for the future of climate change liability

Image
The law surrounding the health effects of tobacco are an important precedent for many environmental law issues (see here and here ). Now Martin Olszynski, Sharon Mascher, and Meinhard Doelle recently posted "From Smokes to Smokestacks: Lessons from Tobacco for the Future of Climate Change Liability" . The abstract: In this article, we imagine a future Canada (circa 2030) wherein the world has managed to avoid the worst climate change but nevertheless has begun to experience considerable warming. Governments of all levels, but especially provincial ones, are incurring unprecedented costs to mitigate the effects of climate change and to adapt to new and uncertain climatic regimes. We then consider how legislatures might respond to these challenges. In our view, the answer may lie in the unprecedented story of tobacco liability, and especially the promulgation in the late 1990s of provincial legislation specifically designed to enable provinces to recover the public healthcare c...
Read more

American regulation of water pollution

Image
Water filtration plant at Lake Montebello, Maryland, 1915 This Day in Water History recently posted a Municipal Journal and Engineer  article from 1909 , "Stream Pollution in America", which surveys some of the state-level regulation of water pollution going on at the time. The blogger notes that "we know from other sources that these laws were seldom enforced or had penalties that were too lenient, so they were ignored", but I'm not sure the situation today is so different . Some excerpts from the 1909 article: At a Conference of State and Provincial Boards of Health of North America, held in Washington last June, the Committee on the Pollution of Streams appointed last year presented a report in which it gave some data concerning the extent to which the pollution of streams was being regulated by the various States. Ohio, New Jersey and Kansas have, according to this report, passed laws during the last few years which ”are especially worthy of note as indicati...
Read more

Colonial aspects of international environmental law

Image
Signing the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, 1946 Douglas de Castro recently posted "The Colonial Aspects of the International Environmental Law – Treaties as Promoters of Continuous Structural Violence" . This is a topic that has come up before in work by Yoriko Otomo and others . De Castro's abstract: The formation of international institutions in the twentieth century occurs under a scenario marked by the rule of colonialism and imperialism. Thus, instead of reducing inequalities in the world system, international institutions reproduce a prevalent logic of material and subjective discrimination based on a colonialist ideology marked by violence, which is communicated in a certain way so that it can justify its importance and legitimacy. The colonial violence is perpetuated under the form of symbolic violence manifested in the language that imposes a universal meaning and systemic violence that manifests itself in the "perfect" function...
Read more