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Sooner or later, the federal government will assign a price to carbon dioxide emissions via legislation. The contents of that legislation will reflect negotiated agreement – built on various political tradeoffs – over a host of policy issues, ranging from taxes to energy efficiency standards. These tradeoffs would implicate not only the scope and price assigned by the carbon pricing policy, but also the policies with which it would interact. This paper anticipates that price will take the form of a carbon tax and describes interactions between that tax and various existing and proposed policies relating to climate change, energy, and environmental protection. It proceeds in five parts: Part 1 highlights three key points of background; Part 2 summarizes the universe of policies that can be expected to interact with a carbon tax; Part 3 provides a rough typology of interactions among a carbon tax and other policies, labeling them Complementary, Concurrent, or Conflicting; Part 4 identifies several important potential tradeoffs; and Part 5, which is less descriptive and more prescriptive than the other four, highlights the risks of particular tradeoffs to the effectiveness of a climate change mitigation policy suite that includes a carbon tax. One thing this paper omits is a discussion of the quantities of GHG emissions that would likely be reduced by a carbon tax alongside or as a net result of combination with other policies – existing or otherwise. This would be a useful line of further research but is beyond this paper's scope.

"Resilience" has burst into the lexicons of several policy areas in recent years, owing in no small part to climate change's amplification of extreme events that severely disrupt the operation of natural, social, and engineered systems. Fostering resilience means anticipating severe disruptions and planning, investing, and designing so that such disruptions, which are certain to occur, are made shallower in depth and shorter in duration. Thus a resilient system or community can continue functioning despite disruptive events, return more swiftly to routine function following disruption, and incorporate new information so as to improve operations in extremis and speed future restorations. As different policy communities apply the concept of resilience to their respective missions, they emphasize different objectives. This article examines how the definitions adopted by the public health and electricity communities can, but do not necessarily, converge in responses to electricity outages so severe that they affect the operation of critical infrastructure, such as wastewater treatment and drinking water facilities, hospitals, and cooling centers. Currently, such outages cause a form of handoff from utilities to their customers: grid power fails and a small constellation of backup generators maintained by atomized campuses, facilities, or individual structures switch on, or fail to switch on, or were never purchased and so leave the location dark and its equipment inoperative. This handoff is operational, but it reflects legal obligations—and their limits. Enter the microgrid, a specially designed segment of the electricity distribution grid's mesh that can either operate seamlessly as part of the wider grid, or as an independent "island" that serves some or all of the electricity users within its boundary even when the wider grid fails. Microgrids can, but do not necessarily, mitigate the adverse public health implications of the handoff that accompanies widespread and severe grid failure. To encourage the convergence of public health and electricity policy priorities in decisions about microgrid siting, design, and operation, this article makes several recommendations. Some of these should ideally be taken up at the federal level, but the bulk of the work they recommend should take place at the state-level, and would necessarily be implemented at the state and local levels.

New York's Department of Environmental Protection is under pressure to install large amounts of green infrastructure in order to take pressure off of the city's combined sewer system, which currently discharges raw sewage into adjacent water bodies during periods of moderate to severe precipitation. Installing enough green infrastructure to make a difference to that end (and others) means encouraging a large number of private property owners to install rain gardens and green roofs. Efforts to do that to date have fallen short. This paper discusses the city's goals for green infrastructure (and reasons for wanting it), the challenges facing efforts to spend public money on assets installed on private property, and possible sources of solutions.

Sooner or later, the federal government will assign a price to carbon dioxide emissions via legislation. The contents of that legislation will reflect negotiated agreement—built on various political tradeoffs—over a host of policy issues, ranging from taxes to energy efficiency standards. These tradeoffs would implicate not only the scope and price assigned by the carbon pricing policy, but also the policies with which it would interact. This paper anticipates that price will take the form of a carbon tax and describes interactions between that tax and various existing and proposed policies relating to climate change, energy, and environmental protection. Specifically, it proposes a typology for those interactions and applies it to characterize particular policies. It also notes how trading off particular policies for a more robust carbon tax could undermine the climate change mitigation goal of such a tax.

This paper offers an answer to the question, "What levels of greenhouse gas ("GHG") emissions reduction do the constituent programs in the U.S.'s existing regulatory patchwork achieve?" Its answer represents an attempt to measure the same effect from eight regulatory interventions: EPA's Prevention of Significant Deterioration program, as it is expected to operate following the Supreme Court's UARG v. EPA decision in 2014; EPA's Clean Power Plan; EPA's renewable fuel standard; the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for light, medium, and heavy duty vehicles; the renewable electricity generation Production Tax Credit and Investment Tax Credit; the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which encompasses 9 states in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast; California's Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, Assembly Bill 32; and state renewable portfolio standards. Notably, though it seeks to measure the same effect of diverse policies, this paper does not purport to measure the aggregated net effects of those policies on GHG emissions. Most important among its conclusions are the following. First, federal CAFE standards, the Clean Power Plan, and state renewable portfolio standards will be crucial for achieving emissions reduction goals. Second, the reductions available from the renewable fuel standard are uncertain and highly contentious. And third—an important subtext—the effectiveness (and costeffectiveness) of this patchwork of programs is unwieldy even to measure, much less to ensure.

"Climate change is already altering ecosystems, and with them the pathways through which infectious diseases find their way to human hosts. As these changes become still more pronounced, so too will their consequences for public health. Lindsay Wiley describes these changes and consequences, but observes also that the resulting need for integrated responses across policy areas is made especially difficult by key features of the public health field. These include its increasing orientation to health care, as well as the fragmentation of responsibility for basic prerequisites to public health among agencies specializing in environmental protection, sanitation, agriculture, food and drug safety, and workplace health and safety. Having pointed out these barriers to an effective response to novel infectious diseases outbreaks like Zika virus, Wiley describes efforts to overcome them, such as the One Health and Health in All Policies approaches. Both of these support transcending narrow policy areas in service to public health goals"--

Over the last decade, laws codifying national and international responses to climate change have grown in number, specificity, and importance. As these laws have recognized new rights and created new duties, litigation seeking to challenge either their facial validity or their particular application has followed. So too has litigation aimed at pressing legislators and policymakers to be more ambitious and thorough in their approaches to climate change. In addition, litigation seeking to fill the gaps left by legislative and regulatory inaction has also continued. As a result, courts are adjudicating a growing number of disputes over actions – or inaction – related to climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. This report provides judges, advocates, researchers, and the international community with an of-the moment survey of global climate change litigation, an overview of litigation trends, and descriptions of key issues that courts must resolve in the course of climate change cases. One purpose of this report is to assist judges in understanding the nature and goals of different types of climate change cases, issues that are common to these cases, and how the particularities of political, legal, and environmental settings factor in to their resolution. Another goal is to contribute to a common language among practitioners around the world working to address climate change through the courts.