It's all about climate change, stupid! Exploring the relationship between environmental law and climate law

This comment analyses the relationship between climate law and environmental law. It examines this relationship from both a normative and a descriptive point of view. Normatively, it brings together various strands from some of the existing literature to form an overall model of the relationship—looking at ‘crowding out’, ‘crowding in’, ‘climate exceptionalism’ and adding in ‘climate unexceptionalism’. In descriptive terms, it considers, inter alia, ‘super wickedness’, instruments and governance, mitigation and adaptation.

The margin of appreciation, domestic irregularity and domestic court rulings in ECHR environmental jurisprudence: Global legal pluralism in action

Global legal pluralism is concerned, inter alia, with the growing multiplicity of normative legal orders and the ways in which these different orders intersect and are accommodated with one another. The different means used for accommodation will have a critical bearing on how individuals fare within them. This article examines the recent environmental jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights to explore some of the means of reaching an accommodation between national legal orders and the European Convention. Certain types of accommodation – such as the margin of appreciation given to states by the Court – are well known. In essence, such mechanisms of legal pluralism raise a presumptive barrier which generally works for the state and against the individual rights-bearer. However, the principal focus of the current article is on a less well-known, recent set of pluralistic devices employed by the Court, which typically operate presumptively in the other direction, in favour of the individual. First, the Court looks to instances of breaches of domestic environmental law (albeit not in isolation); and second, it places an emphasis on whether domestic courts have ruled against the relevant activity. Where domestic standards have been breached or national courts have ruled against the state, then, presumptive weight is typically shifted towards the individual.

Framing fracking: which frames are heard in English planning and environmental policy and practice?

Fracking in England has been the subject of significant controversy and has sparked not only public protest but also an associated framing war with differing social constructions of the technology adopted by different sides. This article explores the frames and counter-frames which have been employed by both the anti-fracking movement and by government and the oil and gas industry. It then considers the way in which the English planning and regulatory permitting systems have provided space for these frames within the relevant machinery for public participation. The article thus enables one to see which frames have been allowed a voice and which have been excluded.

Best Available Techniques (BAT) and coal fired power stations: Can the energy gap be plugged without increasing emissions?

At present, there is much anxiety regarding the security of energy supplies; for example, the UK and other European States are set to become increasingly dependant upon imports of natural gas from states with which political relations are often strained. These uncertainties are felt acutely by the electricity generating sector, which is facing major challenges regarding the choice of fuel mix in the years ahead. Nuclear energy may provide an alternative; however, in the UK, progress in replacing the first generation reactors is exceedingly slow. A number of operators are looking to coal as a means of plugging the energy gap. However, in the light of ever more stringent legal controls on emissions, this step cannot be taken without the adoption of sophisticated pollution abatement technology. This article examines the role which legal concepts such as Best Available Techniques (BAT) must play in bringing about these changes.

Governance, agricultural intensification and land sparing in tropical South America

In this paper we address two topical questions: How do the quality of governance and agricultural intensification impact on spatial expansion of agriculture? Which aspects of governance are more likely to ensure that agricultural intensification allows sparing land for nature? Using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, the World Database on Protected Areas, and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, we estimate a panel data model for six South American countries and quantify the effects of major determinants of agricultural land expansion, including various dimensions of governance, over the period 1970–2006. The results indicate that the effect of agricultural intensification on agricultural expansion is conditional on the quality and type of governance. When considering conventional aspects of governance, agricultural intensification leads to an expansion of agricultural area when governance scores are high. When looking specifically at environmental aspects of governance, intensification leads to a spatial contraction of agriculture when governance scores are high, signaling a sustainable intensification process.

Litigation against fracking bans and moratoriums in the US: exit, voice and loyalty

A number of US states, counties and municipalities have responded to the public health and environmental concerns surrounding fracking by imposing bans or moratoriums on unconventional oil and gas drilling. These restrictions have, in recent years, given rise to litigation challenges by oil and gas companies and by property owners deprived of potential revenues. The current article begins by examining precisely who has litigated. Have large companies dominated or is it mostly smaller independents? Is there a difference in litigation rates between private and public companies? The article then considers how Hirschman’s ideas of exit, voice and loyalty might apply in the context of bans and moratoriums and further explores some of the factors that may have driven litigation in the area.

Excluding exceptions: Housing non-affordability and the oppression of environmental sustainability?

This paper explores the provision of homes for less wealthy households in rural England. By allowing 'exceptions' to UK planning law to provide low-income housing for local residents, the national government seeks to secure dwellings for the less wealthy and so sustain socially mixed rural villages. This paper explores how the production of homes through the exception policy is not conducive to the construction of many new houses. The particular emphasis in the paper is on how responsible agents are discouraged from being more active in erecting new village homes for low-income households. Empirically, the paper draws on documents, interviews and a social survey in the counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk to investigate the process of delivering rural exception homes. It is concluded that, despite Government assertions that a socially mixed countryside is desirable, the decision-making criteria that dominate the worldviews of agents in social housing provision work against this outcome. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.