This blog summarizes a report finding that proactive climate resilience planning by electric utilities is required under public utility law and tort law.
Michael Panfil, Sarah Ladin and Romany WebbDecember 3, 2020
The number of plaintiffs taking energy firms to court for ignoring climate-related risks is growing. By revealing how the sector is not prepared—and not preparing—for what is coming, their cases are pressing the energy sector to treat those risks as a cost of doing business.
Justin GundlachFebruary 17, 2020
This article assesses how the Green New Deal, and particularly renewable energy, will fare under current siting and environmental protection statutory regimes and concludes that for the Green New Deal to success in its renewable energy and infrastructure goals, these regulatory regimes will need to tolerate more streamlined, top-down, preemptive…
J.B. Ruhl and James SalzmanFebruary 4, 2020
This article discusses the integration of an ecosystem services framework into land use and environmental governance and outlines general principles and guidelines for local policy.
J.B. RuhlJanuary 1, 2020
This book chapter synthesizes the body of work using complexity science—the study of complex adaptive systems—to explore the theoretical and empirical bases for thinking of legal systems as complex adaptive systems.
J.B. Ruhl and Daniel KatzDecember 2, 2019
This article discusses the problem of cascade failures and how to control them, and the particular governance challenges for strategies to control such failures in the context of large scale social-ecological-technological systems.
J.B. RuhlOctober 18, 2019
This article traces the policy evolution that embedded consideration of ecosystem services in lands management, assesses why and how that happened and what it means for the future of lands management, and argues that land management agencies' emphasis on the flow of ecosystem services from public lands to off-site human…
J.B. Ruhl and James SalzmanOctober 17, 2019
This article discusses U.S. and EU examples of untapped capacity in existing laws for fostering resilience in social-ecological systems.
J.B. Ruhl and OthersOctober 1, 2019
These comments to the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and Public Utilities Regulatory Authority discuss their proposed distributed energy resource value categories, encouraging the agencies to include electricity system resilience and community resilience in their list of value categories.
Justin GundlachAugust 21, 2019
This essay explains the Supreme Court decision requiring agency to determine if an area is a species' "habitat" before it can be designated as critical habitat under the ESA and provides suggestions for how to define habitat, which is not done by statute or regulation.
J.B. RuhlAugust 17, 2019