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Abstract
International climate change diplomacy has tried a rigid top-down approach (the Kyoto Agreement) and a more flexible bottom-up approach (the Paris Agreement). Neither approach has gained sufficient traction on the climate change problem. The authors of Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World propose a new direction. Borrowing from the framework of the Montreal Protocol of 1987, which made great strides in eliminating use of ozone-depleting chemicals, they outline a framework for "experimentalist governance" that relies on public and private organizations to promote a problem-solving approach that is, at the same time, both bottom-up and top-down, market based and institution based, technocratic and democratic. Using case studies and examples across a wide array of contexts—from U.S. coal-fired power-plant sulfur dioxide emissions to dairy farm pollution in Ireland—they build the case for infusing climate change governance with innovation-driven institutions, processes, and instruments. The case studies and examples, however, share several common features that suggest experimentalist governance thrives under ideal conditions, including clearly defined technology challenges and ability to contain the impacts of innovation largely to the incumbent industry. Under the Montreal Protocol, for example, switching chemicals in products did not require consumers to change behavior or make substantial sacrifices. Many of the challenges of climate change policy fit these and the other ideal conditions, but many do not. The full extent of the necessary energy transition, as well as the demands of climate change adaptation, present complex socioeconomic policy issues fraught with political division. Experimentalist governance can go a long way toward fixing the climate, but ultimately, fixing the climate also will require fixing the climate politics.

Despite the heavy emphasis in legal scholarship on federal and state governance of environmental policy, cities have had their champions as well. Legal scholars who stand out as having defined a position for local governance in the environmental domain include John Nolan, Jamison Colburn, Keith Hirokawa, Tony Arnold, and, on any such list, Julian Juergensmeyer. Indeed, in the United States and many other nations, cities have been leaders in many of the looming issues of environmental policy, including those with global dimensions, like climate change mitigation, and surely those with local focus, like climate change adaptation. In the United States, starting with the wave of federal legislation in the 1970s—commonly portrayed as the beginning of modern environmental law and policy and its distinctive "cooperative federalism" model—cities have worked to leverage their traditional role as the locus of land use planning and regulation to insert themselves in the new wave of environmental policy. Expanding land use regulation into a mechanism for advancing an environmental protection agenda, while fraught with political and practical obstacles, became a central goal of many local governments. Broadly speaking, this dispersed but coherent policy initiative to integrate broader environmental goals into local policy has flown under several flags. For example, many cities began focusing on environmental policy as a mechanism for, and one goal of, what came to be known as "growth management."

What could be greener than wind power? That's easy-saving endangered species! The wind power industry has learned the hard way what timber companies, federal land management agencies, hydropower generators, state highway departments, real estate developers, small coastal villages, the Environmental Protection Agency, farmers, major metropolitan governments, and more like them around the nation know all too well-never, ever take your eyes off the Endangered Species Act ("ESA"). It may be green and one of the darlings of our nation's renewable energy future, but wind power has no "green pass" to get out of the ESA. The reason wind power has cause for concern with the ESA is, in a nutshell, that wind power needs wind, and many bats and birds- including some protected under the ESA-like windy places. So, it is no wonder that wind power developers frequently find their choice facility locations in the path of protected species. This potential for bats, birds, and other species to collide with or otherwise feel harmful effects from wind power turbines necessarily implicates the ESA, as well as several other federal wildlife protection statutes. Only in the past few years, however, has wind power capacity across the landscape reached levels making the intersection of wind power and the ESA of critical importance to the nation's renewable energy policy.