The paradox of regulating negative emissions technologies under US environmental laws

Hester, Tracy D. (2018) The paradox of regulating negative emissions technologies under US environmental laws. Global Sustainability, 1. pp. 1-7. ISSN 20594798

Abstract

Non-Technical summary Most domestic environmental laws control the act of emitting pollutants into the environment. As a result, they do not apply squarely to negative emissions technologies (NETs) that remove ambient contaminants and do not emit pollutants themselves. As a result, current US environmental laws cannot readily govern a NET unless it has features that would typically allow regulation of a clean-up, such as ownership of the polluted resources, being at fault for polluting them or instituting projects to restore them. We should reinterpret such laws to focus on actual disruption or harm to the environment instead of using emission of pollutants as a proxy for ecological damage.Technical summary Negative emissions technologies (NETs) promise to remove greenhouse gases (particularly carbon dioxide) from the ambient atmosphere and current plans to attain the Paris Agreement's secondary goal relies heavily on them. Their governance, however, remains an open question, and most domestic environmental laws regulate pollutant emissions rather than their removal from the environment. Under US environmental laws, the clean-up of prior pollutant releases typically occurs when (i) the person releasing the pollutant bears fault or liability, (ii) the contaminated natural resource is owned by a party who must remediate it regardless of fault or (iii) a governmental authority removes it as a public work. The historical releases of greenhouse gases and anthropogenic climate change will not fall into these categories. This governance gap may spark concerns if the uncoordinated or overzealous deployment of NETs might cause unintended consequences, their full use unexpectedly transfers ownership of public resources to private parties or their deployment without transparency disenfranchises stakeholders. We should reinterpret domestic environmental laws to focus on direct harms to ecological systems rather than requiring a pollutant release. Federal and state legislatures and agencies should explicitly declare how (or if) current environmental laws will apply to NETs and provide guidance to the public and stakeholders.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	10.1017/sus.2018.1
Uncontrolled Keywords:	climate engineering,domestic environmental law,governance policy,negative emissions
Depositing User:	maria
Date Deposited:	10 Jun 2024 03:02
Last Modified:	10 Jun 2024 03:02
URI:	http://repository.ub.ac.id/id/eprint/220678

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