Study demonstrates courts' critical, underappreciated role in climate policy

"The courts are a central, yet underappreciated avenue

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for the development of climate-related policy in the United States," says lead author Sabrina McCormick, PhD, an Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at GW's Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH). "In this regard, our country is responding to climate change similarly to how we dealt with tobacco and chemical exposures. In the coming months and years, judicial decisions that both support government action on climate change and serve to halt or slow such action will have a significant impact on our nation's greenhouse gas emissions, energy development, and biodiversity. These decisions will also play a key role in determining how our cities and society are able to adapt to climate change."

McCormick and her colleagues in the Milken Institute School of Public Health's Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, the George Washington University Law School, and the university's Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration looked at 873 judicial decisions between 1990 and 2016. They found that the number of decisions mentioning climate science has been increasing, especially since 2006. One of the best-known cases is Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to cite climate science in 2007 when it enabled the agency to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant. But it is only one of hundreds of legal cases that address activities responsible for greenhouse gas emissions that have affected governmental decision-making, the authors say.

The GW team's analysis revealed that science was raised more frequently in cases arguing for regulation than in cases advocating against regulation. The analysis also shows that the role of climate science in the legal decisions has grown in recent years. A notable example of a case where climate science played a pivotal role is the 2009 decision by a U.S. District Court judge to overturn the U.S. Department of the Interior's 2007 removal of the grizzly bear from the Endangered Species List. The 2009 decision was influenced by studies showing that climate change threatened the bears' food sources.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-courts-critical-underappreciated-role-climate.html#jCp