FLATTENING THE CURVE – COVID-19 AND CLIMATE CHANGE … · Devising and implementing lasting solutions for communities with differing needs requires a collective effort. Climate

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ROUGH DRAFT TRANSCRIPT NOT A VERBTIM RECORD

AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION FLATTENING THE CURVE – COVID-19 AND CLIMATE CHANGE Tuesday, June 30, 2020 3:00 p.m. Remote CART Captioning

Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) captioning is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. This transcript is being provided in rough-draft format.

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>> Good afternoon, everyone, or good morning, from wherever you are in the world. My name is Lisa Benjamin, and I'm your moderator for today's panel. We are really thrilled to be presenting a timely panel entitled "Flattening the Curve, COVID-19 and Climate Change." This is sponsored by the ABA section of civil rights and social justice, and this is one of in a series of rapid response webinars. We're actively planning additional programming on a variety of issues, so please visit Americanbar.org/crsj for updates on these programs.

Before I go into our program and housekeeping notes, I'd like to introduce Judy Perry

Martinez, president of the American Bar Association, for some introductory remarks. >> Well, thank you, Lisa, very much. And thank you all who have joined here today for this

wonderful and important discussion on flattening the curve of the coronavirus and the parallels to rampant climate change. I want to thank the ABA section on Civil Rights and Social Justice and the Environmental Law Institute for their co-sponsorship in support of what I know will be a wonderful webinar.

You know, like the pandemic, we are seeing the adverse effects of climate change and we

know that it knows no boundaries, and both can affect us all, but they seem to have a disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations and communities, and both of those are global issues with hyper local effects. So the parallels here are significant.

And the American Bar Association has shown its support in action to address climate

change. In August of '29, the ABA, through its house of delegates called for greenhouse gas emissions to net zero or below and the policy encourages lawyers to engage in pro bono activities to

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address climate change and advise their clients of the risks and opportunities that climate change provides.

Like most sectors, the legal profession contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, although

at a smaller scale certainly than manufacturing or energy production does, but the legal community is already addressing our contribution. And the ABA section of environment, energy and resources, and the EPA's law office climate challenge, and the American legal industry sustainability standards show how law firms and lawyers can take individual steps to ensure that their practices and work environments promote sustainability.

In early May, the New York Times reported on a survey involving the National Academy of

Sciences, noting that within 50 years, as the climate continues to warm, and the global population rises, up to one-third of the world's population is likely to live in areas that are too hot for humans, and that's certainly a sobering finding.

On the positive side, cited in the Economist, in late May, is that the pandemic has resulted

in a drop in greenhouse gas emissions, estimated to be 10 percent less than 2020. However, the reduction in travel and commuting emissions during the pandemic is not in any sense enough to reach climate goals.

So we stand at this moment of innovation and the damage the pandemic has caused has

opened discussion on how to rebuild and recover smartly, and through May and June, we've heard about dozens of world leaders in business finance and politics convening to discuss how the global economy can be reset with climate change as a defining theme, as nations recover from the pandemic.

Devising and implementing lasting solutions for communities with differing needs requires a

collective effort. Climate change remains a defining challenge of our times, and I can tell you as a born and raised New Orleanian, where I live now, this issue is important and personal to me.

As nations around the globe enter various phases of reopening after months of

stay-at-home orders were instituted, there are increasing efforts to curb the spread of COVID, and as we continue, all of us continue, to learn about this pandemic and the effects of climate change, I look forward to the insights of this panel and to their expertise on these matters.

So I thank all of the wonderful speakers and really appreciate their bringing their expertise

forward to share with all of us, and I know we'll have an invaluable discussion. Thank you on behalf of the entire ABA.

>> LISA BENJAMIN: Thank you very much, Judy. So just a few housekeeping notes. During today's program, we encourage you to ask questions using the Q & A function, and not the chat function. If you don't see the controls, make sure your screen is not idle, and then you can re-invigorate the controls.

So we'll address questions at the end. Our speakers will have 12 to 15 minutes to speak,

and we'll also be sharing a recording of the program to everyone who's registered so you can share

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the recording on your social networks. So with that, we're really thrilled to bring you today's program, Flattening the Curve,

COVID-19 and Climate Change. I would also like to reiterate Judy's thanks to the committees of the sections on civil rights and social justice, environmental justice, economic justice and environmental human rights committees.

You're all here because you are aware that the effects of COVID-19 and climate change are

systemic, extreme, non-linear, and have cascading and largely inequitable effects on society. In the United States, communities of color and low-income communities, many who make up the categories of essential workers, have been devastated by the impacts of COVID-19.

Segregated housing policies, discriminatory citing of fossil fuel facilities and highways, near

or sometimes even through these communities have led to underlying health conditions such as respiratory issues, cardiac disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes, which, of course, make these communities more vulnerable to the impacts of COVID-19.

A 2019 study by the University of Washington pointed to pollution inequity, so the

dimensions pollution, and they found that fine particulate matter is disproportionately caused by consumption of goods and services, that are disproportionately inhaled by black and Hispanic minorities. In the international context, a 2019 report on extreme poverty and climate change stated that the world is heading towards what they called a climate Apartheid, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger while the rest of the world, predominantly poor communities, suffer the consequences of emissions that they're largely not responsible for.

The agreement in 2015 has a bottom-up structure. It has annual conference of party

meetings. This year's meeting has been delayed due to the impacts of COVID-19, has been moved to the end of 2021. So as a result of that structure, and the delay, it means a climate action is really centered on national and sub national actions for the near future.

Both COVID-19 and climate change require collective action. They require re-thinking our

economic systems and shifting incentives to protect public goods like clean air and a sayer atmosphere, and responses should also be spaced and protected of human rights.

The overlook on what's possible may be shifting. So things have previously seemed

unfeasible, like universe basic income, increases in minimum wage, green new deals, targeted investments in low-income communities of color now look a lot more feasible.

Today's webinar is going to look at the role of lawyers in facilitating this kind of meaningful

change. I'm so excited to introduce our four panelists. Sara Bronin is a faculty director for the Center of Energy and Environmental Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Michael Gerrard is the professor of professional practice at Columbia Law School and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Law at the Columbia Law School. Tracey Roberts is an associate professor at Samford University, and Adam Zipkin is the counsel for United States Senator Cory Booker. We're going to start with Sara, so -- I'm sorry, an architect and attorney who runs the University of

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Connecticut School of Law Center for Energy And Environmental Law and chairs the City of Hartford's award-winning and zoning commission. She sits on the board of the Sustainable Development Code, and serves as an advisor to the National Transfer Historic Preservation.

She's the primary author of the Forthcoming Land Use Volume of the Fourth Restatement

of Property. Sara, you have the floor. >> SARA BRONIN: Thank you so much, Lisa, and thanks to the ABA for having me. So

originally, when we were first starting discussing this panel, I think I was asked to join primarily because I just published a piece called "what the Pandemic Can Teach Climate Attorneys, " which is very on point I think with what we were talking about today. But as we led up to the panel, I think that, you know, as the weeks kind of went on, the tide has turned.

And so I think what I'm going to talk about today at the request of the other panelists and

the ABA is mostly talk about state and local issues as these COVID climate and racial justice issues are intertwined. So both Judy and Lisa gave an excellent introduction to the scope of the issues that are at stake, at the intersection of all of these areas, but I'm going to just touch on a couple of other things and briefly frame climate COVID injustice, talk about some state and local issues, and then I'll circle back around to the article, which I think, again, may have prompted the first invitation, the invitation to begin with, but we'll circle back around to it at the end.

So just on this framing of climate, COVID and justice. So climate justice is racial justice.

Relating to the pandemic, as we've seen, climate has played an integral role in how the pandemic has developed over the last few months.

So we've seen the impacts of emissions go down. Again, this was already mentioned.

We've seen the fact that climate change may have caused the spread of the disease, the interaction with animals and humans, and to -- this pandemic is giving rise to species, resume interactions down the line or relating or prefacing them, rather.

The other thing that we've seen with the coronavirus, though, is that the greatest impact of

coronavirus is on the poor. And we've seen that again and again. For those of you working in the environmental community, on climate, too, so we've seen that climate affects the poor quite a bit.

Wrapped up right now, as we all know, during the pandemic, is another push that, a

long-simmering and long-overdue push for racial justice and racial equality through the Black Lives Matter movement and other sources. People just feeling that they don't have the rights that they should, and rightly so.

So I think this just came out yesterday in the Washington Post. Climate change is also a

racial justice problem. Dealing with the pandemic brings up these issues, too, and so I thought I might just step back and talk about a couple of areas of intersection that might be unexpected for attorneys. And specifically, I wanted to talk about land use and land use battles and land use development. Because I actually really think that the way that we treat land use affects all of these issues, equity and climate, in that we have a moment right now, as we emerge from this pandemic, or as we start to emerge, or as we continue to descend, I think as we're dealing with this

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pandemic, I think land use -- really dealing with how do we settle our communities. When it comes to climate, how we settle our communities, what things are close to each other, whether we're developing densely or in a sprawling manner, all of these contribute to how much energy we use and the impact of humans on the environment.

So just looking at this local and state question, I wanted to bring you to Hartford,

Connecticut, which is where I chair the planning and zoning commission. This is a picture of our planning and zoning commission and staff. So Hartford is a post-industrial city that is 85 percent people of color, including myself, I'm Mexican-American, and just 15 percent white, non-Latino. It's also a very poor city, and it has struggled with many of the issues that post-industrial cities have struggled with across the country. So Hartford, in some ways, 125,000 people, is a microcosm for what might be for central cities around the country, if they start to grapple with the issues of climate land use, equity and so on.

So I just wanted to talk a little bit about what we're doing here in Hartford, and also in the

rest of the state, to kind of grapple with these issues. So about four years ago, we did a sweeping overhaul of the zoning code, and in doing that,

we engaged hundreds of people within our community, lots of different -- business owners, small business owners, the environmentalists, the local neighborhood associations, and really through the zoning process, tried to figure out what does this community want to be.

And in a lot of ways you might you thought well, people are not interested in zoning or

people are not interested in land use, but once you explain to them, you know, what is the power of zoning to shape the way your community is built and to influence whether you're next to a landfill, which we have in Hartford, despite only being 18 square miles, or a trash energy plant, which we have in Hartford, despite only being 18 square miles, and so many environmental justice issues that that raises. It was through that overhaul, and it was unanimous in one night, by the way, we enabled and unlocked a forward-looking environmental approach toward our community that was really community-driven.

And the zoning code sets the rules for community. Now, what does this have to do with

climate? In the zoning code itself, and, you know, not enough time to go through each of these, but in the zoning code itself, we tackled a number of issues that relate to climate change and really environmental health as a whole.

So energy usage, and trying to figure out, okay, is this community ready to enable solar and

wind everywhere to require electrical charging stations in the transportation area, are we ready to get rid of minimum parking requirements completely? Are we willing to put in waterway buffers to protect our waterways? Are we ready to completely unleash urban food systems?

And I guess I'll just give you the answer to all of that, and the answer was yes. Once we

engaged people in the self--- process of self-determination and process of really shaping their zoning code, they said yes to all of this, because I think people here in Hartford, fairly diversity see these land use development issues as being, you know, very intertwined with a healthier environment, with

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their public health, long-term public health, and actually with economic factors, too. After that, we developed a climate action plan. And again, robust engagement across the

community, focusing on economic development, public health and social equity. Each of the action items within the climate plan speak to one, two or three of these issues very squarely. And again, that process enabled us to set a path for the future that we used to raise millions of dollars, start a city sustainability office, work with park organizations, and really soar in this area. And something that might be unexpected from a local government like Hartford.

Kind of last in this local government list of sort of things that we've done is our city plan,

which was just adopted a few weeks ago. That, too, 2300 people. In a city of 125,000 people, engaged with this plan. Stakeholders of all different ages, races. We had seventh graders. We went to both senior centers. We really got I think a very robust idea about this the people in the city wanted to go for our long-term planning and a fifth of that plan is devoted to the environment, and a fifth of that plan is devoted to sustainable multi-modal transportation systems.

So if you think about the role of attorneys in climate change, I mean, I think a lot of what

you'll hear today is really looking at the big picture and major federal legislation or litigation, working through the courts. But I would just encourage people to look really locally and also think, you know, what can I do on the local level, and what is the role of an attorney, in this case, you know, my role was to really help everybody synthesize what they wanted in to law and into statements of priorities.

Just on the statewide level, too, looking at an issue that we're seeing here related to

climate, COVID and racial equity issues is another issue, and it really relates to housing. So we've seen cities and towns across the state declare that there's a public health crisis in

racism. So we're not even -- we're post-COVID here in Connecticut. Our numbers are going down, thanks to great state policies, so we're really thinking, you know, what are our public health crises? So we're still wearing masks, doing everything we need to do there, but looking forward.

Racism, we're really seeing is actually a public health crisis. So right now, there's a special

session that may be declared this month to address some of the issues of police accountability and mail-in voting and things like that.

But advocates, including myself, are pushing for housing and zoning reform on the

legislative agenda. This just came out yesterday, and it said how are we going to tackle housing segregation. A group of advocates has gotten together to work on this, desegregatect.org, in case anybody's interested. And what we're seeing there is actually that some of the main barriers to affordable housing in the State of Connecticut are environmental in nature.

So things like septic systems and how big they can be, whether they can be alternative

septic systems, where they can be placed. Things like environmental interventions for allowing our environmental policy, our statewide environmental policy act. This just happens to be a hearing in Mystic on a zoning issue, and public hearings.

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In addition, parking. So we're seeing that the requirement that we over-pave our cities by

having minimum parking requirements for zoning is something that could be addressed at the statewide level, too. It would have equity concerns. It would be -- it would address equity concerns because it would make it less expensive to develop affordable housing. At the same time, it would be beneficial to the environment. I'm big on minimum parking, if anybody wants to talk about that in the Q & A.

So I just wanted to raise the local and state issues, as just a very high-level couple of

examples, as to how climate law can extend to the local level, can extend to the state level, and that often the solutions, or even people talking about their own solutions, and devising their own solutions, are very much or can be very much one in the same with environmental justice and helping us move forward economically.

Just quickly back to the article. I think I have two minutes. It is online, you know, for those

who may want to check it out again. It's called "What the Pandemic Can Teach the Climate Attorneys." The two questions I ask are really why might courts be important to watch, and what lawsuits specifically should we be watching. And there are three categories I talk about in that article. So this is back putting my law professor hat on rather than my advocate hat on.

The failure to protect-type lawsuits, where plaintiffs are alleging in the coronavirus crisis that

government officials failed to protect them. So whether it's imprisoned persons or incarcerated individuals, or institutionalized individuals, there's a whole slew of lawsuits about this, somewhat reminiscent of the Juliana case. There's also misinformation lawsuits out there. Against media entities like Fox News, for failing to provide accurate information about coronavirus.

Well, the climate attorneys out there know that half of the battle is the message, and the

amount of misinformation about climate has been pretty dramatic over time. And then finally, the slew of cases about takings. Essentially small business owners

saying that government shutdowns of their businesses constitutes a taking, or an unlawful taking. Now, we don't think those are likely to be successful, and even in the coronavirus case, but

if they were, climate attorneys should be really worried. So again, very quick summary of that article. Just to summarize and say, COVID presents a really big opportunity, and I would say, in

addition to looking at scholarship about the courts and even federal legislation, I would encourage attorneys on this call to think about local, state opportunities at the nexus of COVID, climate and equity.

So thank you very much. I'm on twitter, if you guys are, and would love to engage with you

there in the Q & A. Thank you. >> LISA BENJAMIN: Thank you, Sara, that was fascinating. And very timely, so you didn't

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require a two-minute warning. So thank you. Next up we have Tracey Roberts. Tracey Roberts teaches tax, environmental law and real property at Samford University, the Cumberland School of law in Birmingham, Alabama.

She earned her J.D. from Vanderbilt. She's published articles on tax, the environment, in

the northwestern law review, the Columbia journal of tax law and the ecology law quarterly. Her book, Tax Law and the Environment, published in 2018 is now available in paperback.

Tracey, over to you. >> TRACEY ROBERTS: Thank you, Lisa, and thanks to the ADA section on civil rights and

social justice for organizing this meeting. Today I'm going to talk about the common economics and the regulatory responses, the

regulatory lessons, from our responses to COVID-19 and climate change. Basically I'm going to talk about first about the risk management that are coming to both crises. I'll talk about legislative and administrative failures that we've seen from both problems, and lessons that we can learn from the COVID-19 emergency response.

Second, I want to talk about the free-rider and externality problems that are coming to both

crises, and possible long-term regulatory responses that we can take. The Trump Administration has been dismantling much of the existing regulatory system,

and therefore in restoring regulation, there are a number of tactics that we can borrow from their play book.

In addition, there's been a lot of energy around the Green New Deal and deep

decarbonization efforts. So these efforts are going to face some legislative road blocks. So I'm going to talk also about budget reconciliation and the carbon tax as providing an Avenue for success.

The first challenge relates to risk management. One of the problems with managing risk is

that we've got a fat-tailed distribution. This is a catch phrase that describes the notion that events that are expected to occur rarely are actually going to occur more frequently. We can't look to historical averages to predict future losses.

The second problem is correlated risks. This is when one risk causes another risk, or two

or more risks stem from a latent common cause. And then finally, we have tail dependence. There's a likelihood that bad outcomes will

occur together. So with both COVID and with climate change, we've -- we see probably each of these

problems occurring inside of our risk management and our risk assessment processes. The risk can spread of diseases increase with loss of habitat and changing ecosystems. In addition, old cultural and economic systems have combined with new wealth mobility to increase the spread of these diseases. These are the problems with COVID.

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With climate change, we see rapidly changing ecosystems and possible large-scale

discontinuities, we also have correlated risks for COVID-19, pandemic health risks lead to quarantine and quarantine may lead to a number of economic risks.

We also see with climate change that there's a correlation between natural disaster losses

of human life and losses of property, and we note that securitization in to aggregate and spread correlated risks can exacerbate the likelihood of insurance failure.

Finally, we have tail dependence inside of COVID-19. Pandemic health risks may lead to

quarantine and quarantine leading to economic risks from business closures, dependence on Web-based work, and mail-based delivery systems, and their personnel can lead to further health risks. So you've got a feedback mechanism.

Furthermore, with climate change, natural disasters lead to evacuations, and as we've seen

in Katrina, evacuations have reduced the personnel needed to respond to the natural disasters. In addition, we've seen a number of common legislative failures to these two different

crises. The COVID-19 response, we saw there was planning and preparation by prior administrations, but the current administration disregarded the National Security Council's plan and issued a pandemic exercises.

In terms of transparency and accountability, we've seen cronyism, possible self-dealing,

price gouging, lack of coordination. In terms of capacity building, instead of building capacity, the current administration has

terminated experts and teams. There's been a problem -- a long-term problem with maintaining stockpiles for needed supplies. There have been problems with the supply chain network that result from the COVID-19 pandemic.

We have inexperienced intermediaries that have impeded delivery of supplies. In terms of

coordination and cooperation, federal and state governments, instead of cooperating and collaborating, have competed. And cooperation with the federal government was conditioned.

Finally, with regard to coordination and cooperation, the United States has withdrawn from

a variety of international bodies and has threatened or has promised to defund the World Health Organization.

In terms of norms and communications, we've got confused messaging, misinformation,

science denial, promotion of antisocial norms. Many of these problems we've also seen inside of our existing regulatory regime, and

responses with respect to climate change. We've saw this administration withdraw the clean power plant and substitute profossil regulations. We've also seen some cronyism, several different people who headed the EPA and other relevant agencies have been asked to leave after discovery of some

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problems with self-dealing. There have been secret meetings with industry, and in terms of building capacity, instead of building capacity, several different administrative agencies have been removed to remote locations to undermine the experts that are living in, say, Washington, D.C., and possibly make way for the hiring of political allies.

In terms of coordination and cooperation, we've withdrawn from the Paris Accord, or the

Paris Agreement, and then federal government has an impeded state engagement on a number of levels.

In terms of communication and norms, again, we've seen science denial, misinformation

and promotion to anti-social norms as well. So the big administrative and legislative take-away is that we need to plan, identify the ways

that risks are connected and dependent, decouple and disaggregate those risks, develop new model to estimate losses.

We need to prepare by redesigning and testing systems. We need to add redundancy to

improved resilience. In terms of building, we want to maintain and develop infrastructure, adaptive response systems, supply chains and communication networks. We want to develop social capacity and increase administrative competency and norms to coordinate, cooperate and collaborate at the international, national and state and local levels.

And then finally we need to provide society with clear messaging and support around

community-based responses. Finally, we need to mandate accountability and transparency. This is important for the trust needed in order to move forward. The second thing that I want to talk about is the economic characterizations of goods.

So I see global health, global public health and the global atmosphere as common pool

resources. They are subtractive, rival goods. This means that they diminish with use and and use by one person or some persons may lead to the value of that common good being reduced for everyone. They're also non-excludable, because it's difficult to draw boundaries around them and to prevent over-use or misuse. This leads to a couple of problems.

We've got a free rite rider problem and externality problem. Free riders, individuals

pursuing their own short-term self interests, will take actions that diminish the value of the resource to all, without paying for their share of that resource, or paying for the diminution of value.

In addition, these individuals, in taking those self interested actions, they have these

harmful spill-over effects to other individuals or other individuals' use of that resource. So two ways of saying a similar thing. So with COVID-19, obviously, failure to wear a mask, social distance, take these kinds of actions, increases risks to others and spreads contagion. Likewise with use of climate change, our resources that were manufactured or distributed using fossil fuels races the CO2 in the air and -- now, there are a series of common law solutions to externality problems. We have liability rules. The labor rules face a number problems. First, in terms of climate change, there's issues of causation, and then also, as I mentioned before, there are insurance problems with

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regard to the kinds of risks that we're seeing. We also have property rules. So potentially we could allocate property rights and have the

individuals trade their entitlements. There are some limits to use of the property rules. We've got assignment problems. Who equities the property right and who has to pay. Transaction costs. How do we get everyone together to allow them to make those trades?

We've got collective action problems. We've got another set of free rider problems, and the

possibility that we have hold-outs. And finally, we've got distributional impacts from any kind of change in the allocation of

rights under the common law. So a regulatory solution is preferred, so command and control regulation, control of

quantities, the government can ban fossil fuels. The government can require people to use new fuels. The government can cap, which is often what we are currently doing, that's what the clean power plant anticipated, capping CO2 production, or mandate minimums. We can see renewable fuel standards being mandatory minimums.

We can also respond with market incentives. The government can fine people for

producing CO2. The government can supply alternative mechanisms so that people don't need to use fossil fuels. The government can tax or the government can subsidize those activities.

Now, the problems with new regulatory responses is that we have a real severe lack of

bipartisanship, and any proposal may be subject to senate filibuster. There have also been problems with existing regulation being dismantled. And we can

take some lessons away from this. For instance, the Trump Administration used executive orders to reverse changes -- to

make changes to agency practices, and we can reverse those using executive orders. We can withdraw and replace the pro-fossil fuel regulations that the Trump Administration put in place. And just as they withdrew the clean power plant.

In terms of regulatory -- or sorry, legislative branch responses, the senate has used the

congressional review act to reverse pro climate rules, and so it can also be used to reverse pro fossil fuel rules.

There is We can reverse the plan to move the agency office to Grand Junction and to Kansas City

and re-hire the existing expertise. In addition, we can use the budget reconciliation process to pass revenue and spending legislation. And this is one way of side-stepping the senate filibuster.

>> LISA BENJAMIN: Two more minutes, Tracey. >> TRACEY ROBERTS: Okay. So the senate filibuster uses minority -- the senate minority

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uses the filibuster to block legislation and it takes 60 votes to override the filibuster. Now, potentially a new senate could end the filibuster, but possibly more attractive response is to use the budget reconciliation alternative. This process is not subject to the filibuster, but it does have some limitations.

Provisions that do not produce a change in outlays of spending or revenues which are taxes

may be removed from the legislation if a senator calls for a point of order. And then there is also a limit about budget deficit increases. Based on the congressional

budget offices cost estimates, legislation that increases the budget deficit beyond a ten-year budget window must be changed to meet the deficit requirements in the budget resolution.

So when we look at recent estimates of the deficit as a share of the gross domestic product,

it's very high. If we look at the share of the federal debt, as a share of GDP, it's also very high. And then if we look at the post-crisis percentages, those are increased substantially, just for 2020, instead of having a 1.1 billion-dollar deficit between our revenues and our expenses, we're going to have a 3.7 trillion-dollar deficit.

These all add up to add to the federal debt so that we can see by 2050 there's just a

substantial federal debt increase. As a result, the carbon tax is a natural fit. It's a regulatory -- it can be used as regulatory

taxation. It is a tax. It falls within the Byrd Rule, and it is completely germane to spending and taxes. In addition, it will produce income. It will produce revenue, and so if we wanted to try to employ some of the spending identified in the Green New Deal and the Deep Decarbonization Initiatives, we will have funds to do that. Thank you.

>> LISA BENJAMIN: Great, Tracey, thank you very much for your presentation. So next we're going to move on to Mike Gerrard. Michael Gerrard is a professor at Columbia Law School where he teaches courses in environmental and energy law, and founded and direct the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. He also a member and former chair of the faculty of Columbia's earth institute before moving in to academia in 2009.

He practiced environmental law full-time in New York City for 30 years and most recently is

a partner in charge of the New York office. He's written 13 books on environmental law. >> MICHAEL GERRARD: Thank you very much, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here today. As

Judy Perry Martinez, the president of the American Bar Association, said at the beginning of this program, the ABA has called upon lawyers around the country to work on pro bono projects to fight climate change.

Now, many of the pro bono matters that we hear about concern litigation, but litigation is

also difficult for some lawyers and some lawyers have conflicts. I want to talk about a kind of pro bono work that does not involve litigation that stead

involves legislative drafting and advocacy. Some of it at the federal level, and some of it, as Sara suggested a few minutes ago, at the state and local levels.

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It starts with a project that was done about eight years ago in conjunction with United

Nations, the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project, that 16 major economies came up with pathways of how each of those countries could greatly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the volumes that was produced by that project was Pathways to Deep

Decarbonization in the United States. And it rested on four pillars. In order to achieve net-zero or net-negative emissions of greenhouse gases, which is where we need to be headed, first we have decarbonization of the electricity supply, completely eliminating the use of coal for electricity, almost no oil is used for electricity anymore, and greatly reducing the use of natural gas.

And instead, having renewables and possibly nuclear. The second pillar is energy efficiency. Reducing by 40 percent the per-capita final energy

demand. The third pillar is electrification, moving many of the current uses of liquid fuels to electricity, led by transport. So virtually all of the new passenger cars would have to be electric. Heavy-duty vehicles like trucks might have to use hydrogen-based fuels. A lot of home heating and cooking would be changed to electricity.

And the fourth pillar is carbon capture, capturing the carbon coming out of mostly industrial

processes before it goes to the atmosphere and also removing some of the carbon dioxide that is now in the atmosphere.

The various scenarios for how that would be done, but let's just take a mixed scenario and

you see out to 2050, you see a tremendous decline in emissions resulting from the -- with the elimination of coal, the virtual elimination of diesel and gasoline and the replacement by electric vehicles, increase in renewables.

So these are the technical pathways. Another law professor, John Durdenbach of Widener

Law School and I then got together and asked the question, how does U.S. law need to change in order for the U.S. to be on these pathways?

We enlisted about 50 lawyers, all on a pro bono basis, mostly law professors, some

practitioners and some in NGOs, to think about how the laws should change, and the result was this book that was published a little over a year ago by the Environmental Law Institute, Legal Pathways To Deep Decarbonization in the United States, now available on Amazon for about $65. Setting forth in enormous detail, it's a book of about 1200 pages, what the current law is and how it needs to be changed to be on these pathways.

We also put out this abridged volume which is available online for free as a PDF. Tracey just walked us through a number of the kinds of legal techniques that can be used,

and here the book utilizes 12 different types of legal techniques. We, of course, do have additional regulations in there, but we have a lot of other legal techniques that can help achieve these objectives, including market-based approaches like carbon price, removal of incentives for fossil fuel

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use. Insurance, lots of other techniques are available. So the book is divided in to several parts. Each of these bullets represents a chapter.

Each chapter goes through the existing law and how it needs to be changed. So we have chapters on light duty vehicles, heavy duty vehicles and freight, transportation demand and mode shifting, aviation, shipping, lighting, appliances and other equipment, old buildings, new buildings, and the industrial sector.

We have chapters on decarbonization of the electricity supply, utility scale renewables like

large-scale wind and utility scale solar. Distributed renewables, such as rooftop solar. The transmission, distribution and storage that will be needed for all of it. Maintaining some of the existing nuclear fleet. Hydropower and ways to phase out fossil fuels in the electricity sector.

One thing I need to point out is that if we are going to move to electricity for transport and

for a lot of building, heating and cooling, we're going to need a whole lot more electricity, even after tremendous energy efficiency improvements. So we will need to replace almost all of the existing fossil fuel generation we have now with renewables and build a whole lot more with renewables to provide the additional electricity we need for vehicles and buildings.

Some liquid fuels will still be necessary for things like aviation and freight and shipping, and

to be as low-carbon as possible, and a lot of that will have to come from bioenergy. We also need to capture the CO2 that is, nonetheless, going to escape into the

atmosphere -- that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere from processes that are difficult to control, such as a number of industrial processes, and any remaining fossil fuel facilities.

We need to withdraw a great deal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We've already

put too much there. We need to draw some of it down, and there are a number of technologies under development that could do that.

There's a great deal that could be done with the agriculture sector. Right now, the

agriculture sector is a net emitter of greenhouse gases through various changes, mostly in soil management. It can become a sink for greenhouse gas emissions.

And there is potential for forestry, for different methods of forest management to also

capture more CO2 from the atmosphere. There are a number of climate pollutants other than carbon dioxide that also need to be

controlled because they are significant contributors to climate change. Black carbon, methane, fluorinated gases and nitrous oxide, and there are others that can be used to reduce all these substances.

And then we talk about cross-cutting approaches. Carbon pricing. Tracey has talked

about technological innovation, financing issues, materials consumption and changes in international trade.

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So that's what the book has to say. But we don't want the book just to lie on the shelf. We

need to get it implemented. And so there are a couple of projects we have that involve a lot of pro bono help to try to implement the recommendations.

The first is to draft the model laws that are recommended by the book. And so Richard horseshoe recently retired from the law firm Of White & Case has volunteered to lead the project of mobilizing pro bono lawyers to draft these model laws. So far we have about 24 big law firms that are at work in drafting these model laws. We need more. Not just big law firms, small law firms, individuals. We need more to draft the large numbers of model laws.

We are also subjecting each of these model laws to peer review. Because we want them

to be of high quality. We also set up something called the renewable energy legal defense initiative, which

provides pro bono legal help to community groups and others that want renewables in their communities but are facing local opposition. We could use more pro bono help with that.

We created a Web site, the model laws for deep decarbonization Web site, which -- let me

see if I can slide this over -- on which we've already posted about 1800 resources, all the model laws that we have drafted, plus lots of other laws that already exist, and it is a resource that can be used by people in every state and municipality, as well as at the federal level, in order to find laws that they might be able to adopt for their own purposes.

And so we have more than 1800 laws here, as I say, and many more on the way. So we need lawyers, pro bono lawyers to draft these model laws. We need pro bono

lawyers to peer review the model laws. We need pro bono lawyers, and this is the largest number of them we need, to promote these model laws. In congress, you know, just today, the House Select Committee on The Climate Crisis released a massive package of proposals. There are other proposals that we'll hear more about from the next speaker, but a great deal can and needs to be done at the state level, and at city and town levels. And so we need lawyers to be out there and looking at the model laws and the actual laws we have, and getting out to these legislatures at every level to try to get them actually adopted.

And finally, we need to defend the construction of renewables from the associated

transmission and storage. In order to achieve these objectives, in order to shut down the existing fossil fuel electricity generating we have, and move away from fossil fuel-fired vehicles and so forth, we need to build very large number of new renewable energy facilities. There's just no way around that.

This often faces local opposition and we need people to support these projects, both, you

know, at the administrative and legislative level and also in court. So the final slide I have, and we'll make all these slides available, has contact information

for the people who are relevant, and anybody who might be interested in getting involved in any of

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these projects, you have the information for myself and my co-editor, John Dernbach. Richard Horsch, who is the lawyer who is heading up our effort to recruit pro bono lawyers to do all this drafting and Marcy Kahn, a retired justice from the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division, who is leading our efforts to peer review all of these model laws and make sure they are of high quality.

So thank you very much for this opportunity. >> LISA BENJAMIN: Thank you, Mike. So a lot of work to do. So we had a very quick

question for who to contact to assist in drafting and review, so the slide you put up at the end is appropriate contact for people?

>> MICHAEL GERRARD: Yes. And we'll make these slides available to anyone who wants them.

>> LISA BENJAMIN: Great. Thank you. I also would like to remind participants to put your questions in the Q & A. We have a couple coming in.

And next we're going to move on to Adam Zipkin, who currently serves as counsel to the

United States Senator Cory Booker. In his role, Adam advises Senator Booker on issues related to the environment, energy, agriculture and animal welfare. Before his employment in the senate, Adam was deputy mayor for economic development for the city of Newark in New Jersey. Prior to working in city hall, Adam operated a law office, primarily devoted to providing pro bono legal services to New York residents in need with a focus on providing representation to low-income tenants. over to you, Adam.

>> ADAM ZIPKIN: Thank you, Lisa, and thank you to the ABA for inviting me to participate in this important webinar. And starting with the point of sort of the connection between coronavirus and climate change and the potential for transformative climate change legislation, I think, you know, it was mentioned before that the coronavirus is both a crisis and an opportunity, and I think from a climate change perspective, that is very, very true.

You know, we have advocates for whether you want to call it a Green New Deal or just, you

know, for taking really bold action on climate change that's in line with what the scientists are telling us we need to do, you know, to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and stay not only below 2 degrees Celsius increase, but hopefully, you know, below 1.5 degrees.

You know, you had this push for a Green New Deal, but you didn't really have the economic

conditions in our country where a new deal, so to speak, is what we needed. And actually, what the coronavirus has wrought is now we actually need a new deal type of economic stimulus that fits perfectly with the potential for big climate change legislation.

And so I think that heading in to 2021, it's seeming to me like the Democrats are really

aligned on wanting to do something on climate change at the scale that's necessary, and, you know, look, we've passed now trillions of dollars of legislation here in D.C. to deal with COVID, and we're recognizing the reality that we're going to need trillions more. And so I think there's now an alignment and an opportunity for really transformative climate legislation to pass in D.C. next year, obviously depending on what the landscape is in D.C. after November. And I think that the comments that were made earlier about how that could happen were exactly right. At the end of

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the day, the way that a climate change bill will pass the senate next year, you know, most likely would have to be by using budget reconciliation, which means that it can be a bill that does direct spending at pretty much unlimited levels for at least ten years that does all kinds of tax code changes, and what it really can't do is just make policy changes.

And so to the extent that something does not have a budgetary impact directly, but more

just if you wanted to amend the clean air act, or if you wanted to create a federal renewable portfolio standard or something like that, those are the types of things that are not well-suited and probably not in order for a budget reconciliation climate change bill.

But that said, from my having focused on this now for multiple years, I think that within

the -- what a budget reconciliation bill would allow, we could do enough from a climate change perspective to put ourselves on the trajectory that we want to put ourselves.

And so I think both on the tax side, which is potentially, you know, the opportunity to put

some type of price on carbon, through a carbon tax and dividend, or however that might be structured, the ability to do that is clearly within the framework and making other changes to the tax code. So removing, you know, subsidies that currently exist for fossil fuel companies or other industries that are contributing to the climate change problem and contributing to carbon emissions versus also the ability to extend and modify and enhance tax credits for solar and wind and energy storage and other renewables. So all of that is on the table on the tax side, and then from a spending perspective, you know, the whole -- what was great about the green new deal sort of idea and sort of burst of enthusiasm and energy, it seems like so long ago, but I guess was a year or so ago, was that it kind of shifted the conversation in Washington, at least, away from so much focus on putting a price on carbon or doing cap and trade, which I still think is an important piece to the puzzle, but it expanded it to this idea of making really large-scale, direct federal investments and using federal spending through a new deal type lens to accomplish climate change goals. And so I think that anything that would be within that spending lens could be done through a reconciliation bill.

And so I think focusing on incentives for clean electricity and for electrifying the

transportation sector and all the different ways you might try to do that just with direct federal investment, whether it's literally building out infrastructure or creating tax incentives or direct grants for local governments or states or private individuals to make these types of transformations, it's all potentially possible, and I think what will be very quickly, you know, an agenda item in Washington in November, in post-November, and in, you know, January -- in early 2021, if the stars are aligned.

I want to talk about a couple of the bills that Senator Booker has focused on that are climate

change related. Some of the focus on decarbonizing electricity and electrifying transportation and all those things, there's a lot of legislation and a lot of thought that has gone into it and a lot of I think potential bills that could be taken, as well as, like, as was mentioned, the house came out today, the House Select Committee, with their proposed climate change plan, and so I think there's a lot there to work from and to pull from that could all pass both the house And the Senate potentially. Senator Booker, in this space, has focused a lot of energy on environmental justice, and on natural climate solutions. And so environmental justice, the senator has introduced

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legislation that would do a whole bunch of important things in terms of codifying executive orders that President Clinton and President Obama put in place to protect low-income communities, indigenous communities, communities of color. It would overrule some supreme court precedent that has narrowed the scope of the Civil Rights Act and taken away some private causes of action where there's discriminatory impact but not necessarily discriminatory intent that can be shown. And it also would -- this environmental justice legislation would require the EPA to consider cumulative impacts before granting new air pollution or water pollution permits.

So right now, essentially if you want to build a new garbage incinerator, or whatever the

source of pollution might be, really the analysis is in a vacuum, well, what's the -- is it using best available technology, essentially, right? Whereas what the question that they don't ask and the analysis that they don't do is, well, where we're proposing to build this facility, what's the air pollution levels already in that community, and what's the potential impact on the health of local residents if we add another major source of air pollution in to that mix.

And so the legislation would do that. But now, a lot of those things that I just said would not be the types of direct spending or tax provisions that could go into a reconciliation bill. And so what could go into a reconciliation bill that's environmental focused I think would be a historic investment to clean up legacy pollution.

So you have super fund sites and abandoned coal mines and hard rock mines and other

types of mines. You have former Department of Defense contaminated properties. You have lead service lines throughout the country, you know, into drinking water.

You have lead -- other sources of lead in housing. You have households in the United

States that don't have complete plumbing. And so it's an environmental justice issue where you have literally huns of thousands of households that don't have a waste water disposal system. So they're not connected to a sewer, and they don't have a septic. And you have households in the U.S. that are literally straight piping waste out to their back yards, and you see that in the black belt you see that in various parts of our country, in, again, low-income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities. And what you have in some of those communities is the scientists are starting to find neglected tropical diseases that we didn't even think we still had in the United States like hook worm in these areas because we have untreated waste just being, you know, piped out into these areas.

And so that is something, you know, taking some percentage of a trillion-dollar or whatever

the investment is going to be, and taking, you know, 50 billion or a hundred billion, or whatever the right number is, to clean up all of that legacy pollution. First of all, it's something that if we want these communities to thrive, the communities that we're seeing hardest hit by COVID, low-income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities, if we want them to thrive in the future, we have to clean up this legacy pollution that is impacting their health and creating underlying medical conditions that make them more susceptible to both, you know, getting COVID and the seriousness of COVID and the death toll of COVID. And so I think that is a potential big part that Senator Booker will be pushing into the climate change conversation, along with others.

And I will say that over the last couple of years, this idea of environmental justice and, you

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know, the house select committee report that came out today pretty much any plan that you're seeing now from the various candidates on the campaign trail, environmental justice is to greater and lesser extent a focus of everyone that's talking about addressing climate change, which is great.

And then the other bill that Senator Booker introduced with the idea that Democrats are

really using this year to put out their ideas, and socialize them and get feedback on them of, like, what are important pieces of a big climate change bill in 2021. You know so that we're not coming in next year and starting from scratch, right? Like, we have now all this legislation in the house report that will be a blueprint for what we could do. Senator Booker introduced a bill last September called the Climate Stewardship Act that is focused on natural climate solutions. And so these natural climate solutions today in the U.S., our forests, our wetlands, our soils, absorb something 10, 11, 12 percent of all carbon emissions, you know, that is in the U.S. from all sources. So from cars and trucks and coal plants. More than 10 percent of it is currently absorbed and sequestered from these sources, but there's the potential, scientists in the last few years, have come out with reports showing that with the right investments, we could substantially increase the amount of carbon that we're sequestering in these forests and wetlands and in our soils.

And so the bill would -- and by the way, the original New Deal, they planted three billion

trees. And so the bill that Senator Booker introduced, we would plant four billion trees by 2030 and over 15 billion trees by 2050. We would restore millions of acres of coastal wetlands and then we would use voluntary existing USDA conservation programs and, you know, ten times the funding in some instances to those programs, but not just putting money into the programs at large, but for a subset of the practices that the scientists are telling us are beneficial from a climate change perspective that either reduce emissions from the agricultural sector, or that more often increase soil carbon sequestration, and really can go from making the agricultural sector, which today in the U.S. is 9 or 10 percent of total emissions in the U.S. come from the ag sector. It's a part of the problem.

We could make the agriculture sector a part of the solution by incentivizing these practices,

like planting cover crops and using less fertilizer and engaging in rotational grazing. And there's a whole, you know, pasteau, planting trees out with the growing of crops and grazing livestock, and so for both, you know, going back for a second to the environmental justice clean-up of the legacy pollution, it's also climate change mitigation, right? Or it's climate change adaptation.

So there's a big focus on mitigation, rightly so. We have to, on a trajectory, you know, get

to quickly decarbonizing and stopping emitting, but we also need adaptation and both of these bills would do both, because the environmental justice cleaning up all this legacy pollution right now, as we're seeing more extreme weather and we're seeing more flooding, you're seeing now these low-income communities, indig.ius communities, communities of color, the super fund sites are flooding. Right? Now you have neighboring properties and additional people being exposed to all this contamination and all this pollution ask and with the natural climate solutions, so just --

>> LISA BENJAMIN: Two more minutes. >> ADAM ZIPKIN: Okay. So the reforestation alone, the trees that we would plant in the

future decades, would have the potential to sequester, you know, millions and millions of tons of

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carbon. And the same if we could really sort of change practices on a big level with our farming practices, we can't sequester a lot of carbon. But equally important, by investing in those natural climate solutions, planting trees, farming differently, restoring coastal wetlands, you're preventing flooding. You're making farms and ranches and communities more resilient. You're protecting drinking water, right? So it's mitigation, but it's also really important climate change adaptation. There are so many co-benefits. And I'll close with this. Going back to the connection to COVID, if we restore forests, if we stop deforestation and we restore forests, not only is that beneficial from a climate change perspective, but we also reduce the risk of future pandemics because we know that these viruses, these zoonotic diseases, the predictions are, they're going to be more frequent the more that we keep destroying these natural ecosystems and encroaching on habitat and having more interaction between humans and wildlife that we historically would never have had.

So I do think it ties all together as well. And then last last last, opportunities for lawyers, I think -- I agree with what everyone said,

and putting back on my local government hat, coming from Newark, I think there's opportunities to work with these environmental justice stakeholders. When you have a place like cancer alley in Louisiana that's already the cancer rates are through the roof, but you have new companies coming in proposing to build new chemical plants, or new, you know, types of sources of pollution those stakeholders and those communities, they're low-income communities, communities of color, they don't have the resources to take on the deep pocketed interests that are proposing these projects. And so I think that is an area where trying to connect lawyers with those communities, they really need the help. So thank you.

>> LISA BENJAMIN: All right. Thank you, Adam. That's helpful. So we have a number of questions. I'm going to try to bunch them. So Sara, I have a

question for you. In relation to heat and health, is the focus more on human health for workers or the focus more on being able to grow agriculture? Where's the focus?

>> SARA BRONIN: Yeah. So the question of heat waves and a warming climate really affects both humans and plants and I guess also animals, of course. So, you know, we were thinking about climate action in Hartford, we identified heat waves as being a particular concern for our vulnerable populations.

So even in Connecticut, you still need air conditioners during the summer, as the climate

warms. So a lot of our families can't afford that and their homes are not made to be energy efficient. So going back to the kind of strategies that Michael was pointing out, there's a lot of different strategies that we can use to address those through the law, but one question is right now, what do we do to help those families.

So for me, the heat wave -- the heat, the warming planet, heat wave issue really does tie

very well in to equity and what our low-income populations can afford, literally afford to bear. >> LISA BENJAMIN: That's great. So Tracey, I have lots of questions for you on cronyism.

So the first two are for you. One, is there an overlap in terms of political affiliation between cronyism in the sense you've identified between COVID and climate change? And the second question is on tax structures. So on our tax -- there are currently tax incentives for over consumption and bad land

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use, the examples of proposition 13, California, is there a way to educate legislators to overturn those laws?

>> TRACEY ROBERTS: With regard to cronyism, with regard to the cronyism that we've seen and that has been reported in all the newspapers, we have the APA administrator and various individuals within the Department of Interior, they have relationships with energy incumbrance, this fossil fuel investors, fossil fuel resource owners, and investor-operated utilities.

So most of the subsidies that we're seeing and most of the engagement that we've seen

behind the people who have since stepped down relates to those subsidies and those relationships. COVID-19, the relationships that we've seen where we've seen particular people who have

no experience, no background, are providing supplies and developing supply chains and responding crises, they are new entrants. They don't have a historic relationship in terms of with this area of engagement.

Now, the current administration is republican, so they have -- they're in a position to have

those potential patronage relationship, but Democrats are not without sin as a historical matter. So my proposal is that we incorporate in all of our legislation. We incorporate in to ethics

standards some transparency and accountability to prevent this to keep from happening no matter who's in office.

With regard to the various subsidies that are littered throughout the tax code, I've written a

lot about those, and so has Roberta Mann, and so has Janet Mill, and so all of these problems with regard to the connection between land use and the tax system, a lot of these have been written about, so there's a lot of material out there. In terms of educating legislators, I suspect that most, certainly at the federal level, many of the legislators already know about this and they've actually been button-holed by people who want to see those tax subsidies expanded. We have a tax expenditure budget at the federal level. After Stanley Surey began noting that these subsidies in the tax code are problematic, they are ever-expansive, they increase every year, they're upside down, after he identified that to congress, congress said, oh, wow! This is a great little cubby hole for us to hide away all our handouts.

And so one of the problems is that you really need a massive overall of the tax legislation.

You need massive support on a grassroots level to make that happen. And but in terms of advocating, my latest information from California is that people are

feeling the pinch from Proposition 13, and there are enough new people who have come to California that are subject to high tax rates that they are ready to be active and overturn the interests of those who have been enjoying the low tax rates on their property because they were there from the 1970s.

So I think that this may be a moment where you'll be able to get rid of Proposition 13. >> LISA BENJAMIN: Great. Thank you, Tracey. I have one more question which may sort

of straddle you and Mike, and then the second question we'll move over to Mike.

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So the question for potentially both of you is what's the role of international investment law for deep decarbonization. And then Mike the second question which I'll throw over to you is what's the role of tort law to compensate people harmed by coronavirus or climate change exacerbated by cronyism, for example populations living near a chemical plant in Houston?

>> MICHAEL GERRARD: So first with respect to international investment law, there are quite a few bilateral investment treaties between states, countries, and many of them say that a state may not impose -- may not take actions that would hurt the investment.

And so there's concern that some of these may be used to inhibit the enactment of

anti-fossil fuel laws by a country. There hasn't been a lot of that. There's some litigation now pending in Canada about

restrictions on frakking. There's a little bit of that, but there's tremendous concern that that may happen, and that was one of the issues in the trans-Pacific agreement of a few years ago.

International trade law also has real concerns. It inhibits certain kinds of local subsidies for

renewables, and had a number of these international trade doctrines have gotten in the way of the growth of renewables.

Before I get to your other question, Tracey, do you want to say anything more about the

investment law question? >> TRACEY ROBERTS: No. I agree with you 100 percent. That was one of the big

oppositions to passing or agreeing to ratify the trans Pacific partnership. However, in terms of international engagement, one of the places where the WTO and other international agencies tend to turn a blind eye is to tax, mechanisms of tax financing.

So when we look at what's happened in terms of measures of subsidies for fossil fuels, in

general, those are overlooked because in the United States they're primarily through the tax code. However, when you look at budgetary costs or budgetary provisions to provide subsidies,

those are scrutinized heavily. So I suspect that if we use a tax mechanism to try to achieve this, this may also side-step some of these concerns under EU and other treaties that we have with respect to international investment.

>> MICHAEL GERRARD: On the question about the role of tort law, you know, this is a raging issue. There are about 15 tort suits that are pending around the United States, mostly brought by cities and counties against energy companies, and right now, the focus of the litigation is whether they belong in federal court or state court.

We've had a couple of appellate decisions from the ninth circuit and the fourth circuit saying

that they can stay in state court. The decision coming out of a lawsuit brought by the City of Baltimore, where the court of

appeals said it could stay in state court, which is where the plaintiffs want it, there's a cert petition by the defendants before the supreme court. We'll see what happens with that.

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Now, these aren't based on cronyism. They're based on mostly the public nuisance theory. Two very recent suits have been filed just in the last week, one by the State of Minnesota, one by the District of Columbia claiming deception by -- deception of consumers by energy companies. So we'll see what happens with that.

I haven't seen much tort litigation growing out of the pandemic. There's a lot of contract

litigation and many other things, but it may be that that will come. Causation is a tougher issue with that.

>> LISA BENJAMIN: Thank you. I have one more question for you, Mike, and then I'll move over to Adam for a couple of agriculture-based questions.

So on the Web site, does it link to other -- I think you mentioned 16 economies that were

participating in the decarbonization, and the question is how do we scale these initiatives up to the global level, particularly in countries in the global South where there's limited capacity? So is there an international coalition of lawyers, if it is happening through the international arena?

>> MICHAEL GERRARD: So we have encouraged and are seeing the launching of similar projects in some other parts of the world. There is a project to come up with legal pathways to deep decarbonization in Brazil that has begun. There's another project in Europe, a Europe-wide project. There's another project in Australia, and we're working with all of those and would love for more of these.

In terms of overall, the role of international law, I mean, of course, most emissions are

domestic within a country, and the laws on trans-boundary air pollution, we have international doctrines on that but they are very weak, and it's tough for a country to sue another country because of its emissions.

The truly international emissions that we have are from aviation and shipping, and if they

were added together, they would be about the fifth largest emitting country. The Kyoto protocol punted those to the International Civil Aviation Organization and the

International Maritime Organization, which had been very slow and very weak, so international control of aviation and shipping emissions is something that is very important.

I think the most important area for international law is in the area of mass migration, you

know, the climate change that is happening, and it's going to cause horrible, horrible mass migration and countries need to accept people who are migrating, they're not legally refugees, but this is going to be a massive problem. But that's four other webinars.

>> LISA BENJAMIN: Yes, it is. Adam, I had a couple of questions that hopefully you can address. So the first is -- they're agriculture related. So the first is how do panelists feel about increasing animal feeding operations and meat packing plants where they're both high emission sites, but also super spreader and employ a lot of people from low-income communities and communities of color.

So are there any other approaches to this issue besides tightening zoning requirements?

And the second question is how do we -- related, how do we diversify farming, particularly when a lot

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of farming operations are owned by large corporations? >> ADAM ZIPKIN: So thank you for those questions. So on the first question, the answer is a definite yes, and it could be its own webinar to talk

about, you know, sort of COVID did not break our food system, but COVID has exposed how broken our food system is, and literally we have a food system today, it's harmful, for the most part, to farmers and ranchers. It's harmful to rural communities, it's obviously terrible the way it treats animals, the way it treats workers. The environmental impacts and the impacts on rural communities.

The one beneficiary of the current food system are these massive multi-national

corporations that have consolidated to such an incredible extent that you now have like four companies that control 85 percent of the beef market or something like that. And I mean, look -- so this disproportionate economic power that they have has given them disproportionate political power.

The fact that the president would not use the defense production act to get more PPE to

hospitals, but he used it to keep meat packing plants open despite the risks to workers, and by the way, primarily, like, or in a big way, what we're seeing is that exports to China and other countries were at all-time highs in the last couple of months.

So this whole thing about, like, oh, we need to feed people here in the U.S. by, you know,

keeping the food system that these big companies are really the ones that broke it, and now they come asking for help, and they got it, and so I think -- so Senator Booker introduced a bill at the end of last year called the Farm System Reform Act and Senator Warren recently co-sponsored it and there was a house companion introduced, and it would phase out -- it would put a moratorium on new large factory farms and it would phase them out completely by 2040.

It would also make a whole bunch of -- to our anti-trust laws that, you know, a hundred

years ago, we passed laws to keep these meat packers from getting so big, and then about 40 years ago, we stopped enforcing those laws, and now here we are, and so figuring out how to create a more diffuse system.

And something that both the natural climate solutions bill I mentioned before and also the

food system reform act, we would invest heavily in programs that -- and this will answer the second question -- that provide incentives for local and regional food systems. Right?

So ultimately what we need to do is go back to a model that just a smaller scale model and

not with these massive, you know, supply chains that go across countries that we're now seeing the pandemic, you know, shine a light on how broken the current system is.

And so I think that there's a lot that we could do, and I think that what COVID, by putting a

light on the meat packing plants and other parts of our food system. Because by the way, the parts of our food system that have shown to be really resilient during the pandemic have been the small farmers who have switched to a direct consumer and CSEs and switching from farmers markets and stuff.

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So this is something that Senator Booker will be super focused on in the months and years

to come, and that I think hopefully, you know, can bring about change quicker than we might have thought because of, you know, the moment that we're in.

>> LISA BENJAMIN: That's great. So there's so many great questions, I didn't get to ask my questions to the panelists, but I did want to thank you all for joining us. I would really like to express a sincere gratitude for the esteemed group of panelists that we had today. Thank you all for the critical work that you're doing. Thank you for taking time out out of your schedule to actually share your expertise and your experience.

The section on civil rights and social justice produces free webinars and we hope this

webinar has been helpful for everyone who participated in the work that you do every day. Please consider joining the ABA, and you can go to theamericanbar.org/crsj and find information on upcoming webinars. I've been informed hot off the press that the Environmental Justice Committee will be having an event on climate migration and refugees.

So an issue near and dear to my heart. Thank you all very much for joining us. Best of luck in all that you do and stay safe.

Thank you very much. >> Thank you. [[Webinar concluded]

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FLATTENING THE CURVE – COVID-19 AND CLIMATE CHANGE … · Devising and implementing lasting solutions for communities with differing needs requires a collective effort. Climate