“Extreme” weather has become the new normal. What were previously considered to be inexplicable and unpredictable “acts of God” can no longer reasonably be said to be so. They are acts of man. The established doctrine of contractual impracticability rests on the notion that a party may...

Currently, there are no adequate mechanisms under international law to balance the competing tensions climate change presents to state sovereignty. On one hand, climate change threatens state sovereignty because the catastrophic loss of life and property of millions of people would deprive...

The issue of climate change has at long last made its way into mainstream policy discussions in the United States. However, the focus both in the United States and internationally has been on reducing energy production and transportation emissions. This has led the media, policy makers and the...

During the 1990s scholarship about water security abounded. However that debate abated at the ‎turn of this century. This lack of exploration is surprising, particularly given the negative impacts ‎of climate change upon the world's water resources, and the concomitant water insecurity that...

In this Article, I focus on what I term “cooling infrastructure,” by which I mean the infrastructure used to (either directly or indirectly) cool indoor environments so that they are safe and comfortable even in heat wave conditions. The cooling infrastructure currently in place in the...

This paper describes the challenges victims, insurers and governments face in dealing with insurance for low-probability high-consequence events in both developed and developing economies. In developed economies, given their limited experience with catastrophes, there is a tendency for all three...

Personal choices drive global warming nearly as much as institutional decisions. Yet, policymakers overwhelmingly target large-scale industrial facilities for reductions in carbon emissions, with individual and household emissions a mere afterthought. Recent advances in behavioral economics,...

Global regulations involving clean energy technologies have evolved in recent decades. Such evolution came as a result of technological disparities between the North and the South. Such regulatory changes came because of the failure of developed nations to assist developing countries in...

This article assesses the prospects for liable entities under Australia’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) to rely on international and domestic offset credits. This is crucially important for liable entities as, under the CPRS, they must surrender a permit for every tonne of...

In this article, the author builds on previous work in the area of electricity restructuring to pay special attention to proposals to privatise the electricity sector in New South Wales, Australia. The privatisation initiative is assessed in the context of moving to a low carbon economy under an...