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...

Temperature records compiled by the International Panel on Climate Change are biased by non-climatic factors that are largely socioeconomic in origin. The result is that as much as 50 percent of the land-surface warming that has been detected in recent decades may not be the product of global...

This article explores the difficulties faced by regulators when they decide to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. For a long time, there was sufficient scientific uncertainty as to encourage a 'wait and see' approach. More recently, as the science has hardened with the release of the IPCC Fourth...

The state-of-the-art British-sponsored fasttrack assessment of the global impacts of climate change, a major input to the much-heralded Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, indicates that through the year 2100, the contribution of climate change to human health and environmental...

In the spring of 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must promulgate automobile tailpipe greenhouse gas emission standards under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act (CAA). American environmentalists hailed the Supreme...

Climate change presents the greatest collective action problem the international community has yet confronted. The unequal distribution of expected costs and benefits from climate change (based on mean damage estimates from probability distribution functions) creates different incentives for...

The United States is awakening to the urgency of the climate crisis; and Congress is poised to respond with a cap-and-trade approach meant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through market mechanisms. A pure cap-and-trade approach, however, raises significant and underappreciated environmental...

This Essay analyzes the characterization of both pollution taxes and so-called cap-and-trade programs addressing greenhouse gas emissions as policies that “put a price on carbon,” a characterization that has come to dominate both policy discussion and much modern scholarship on environmental...

This article places the current controversy around coal seam gas production in Australia in the context of various global energy resources and climate change scenarios. It highlights the range of concerns that have arisen in Australia with regard to this resource including threats to water, farm...

As the implications of anthropogenic climate change are better understood the pressure builds for more effective legal and policy responses at national and international levels. With climate change looming as an existential threat, climate change law ought not to be characterised merely as a...