Vibrant Environment
Climate Change And Sustainability
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The Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA’s) increase of the 45Q tax credit has created a bonanza around carbon removal.
When a colleague asked me what exactly I meant by political ecology during a recent meeting, I was genuinely surprised.
A longstanding problem for solar farms has a surprisingly cute solution. “Sheep are the solar industry’s lawn mowers of choice,” writes Amrith Ramkumar in the Wall Street Journal. Farmers maintaining thousands of acres of panels need to contend with tall grasses, which, unabated, can obstruct sunlight. Enter the star of nursery rhymes and an unexpected hero of renewables. Hard-working flocks are now generating millions of dollars in annual revenue by helping to chomp on pesky weeds.
When I last sat down to write this column, the Supreme Court had just issued its 6-3 decision in West Virginia v. EPA. As I said at the time, it was disheartening, and many in the environmental law field were assessing how to bounce back from its potential effects limiting agency action. Fast-forward two months, and while the concerns raised by that case aren’t gone, we’ve spun in the other direction.
Clean energy technologies require a variety of minerals of varying degrees of scarcity. As a result, decarbonizing the economy will entail expansion of mineral production—not only through imaginative reuse and recycling, but also through new mines and the permits required to build those mines. Some have called for a loosening of environmental standards to address this growing need.
Managed retreat is deemed by most as a viable adaptation option to climate-related extreme weather events. Yet, the practice is controversial due to the negative impacts it can have on marginalized communities.
Passed on August 16, 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act commits nearly $370 billion in direct investment to address climate change and energy production.
Developments this past summer—including the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA and the historic passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—have dramatically reshaped the future of U.S. climate law.
Twenty-five years before Silent Spring, Rachel Carson published her first essay in The Atlantic on the wonders of ocean life. Titled “Undersea,” the piece showcased Carson’s “commitment to making the reader feel something,” reports Anelise Chen in the same magazine 85 years later.
When the pandemic started, it seemed you couldn’t turn a page or open an email without seeing “unprecedented” used in one context or another. And it was true—we were in uncharted territory, and among everything else, it was hard not to keep returning to that locution. I clearly remember sending a mass email using the word, thinking I was the first person to stumble upon this apt descriptor; little did I know how ubiquitous it would become.