The quadratic assignment problem and plant layout

Imperial Users onl

Climate Change and Human Trafficking After the Paris Climate Agreement

Climate change is a major contributor to migration and displacement. Persistent drought forced as many as 1.5 million Syrian farmers to move to overcrowded cities, contributing to social turmoil and ultimately a civil war that drove hundreds of thousands of people to attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. Drought also worsened refugee crises in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and other parts of the continent. Climate change can cause displacement in multiple ways. No reliable estimates exist of the number of people who will be displaced partly or wholly by climate change, due to uncertainties concerning the rate of climate change, the ability of different societies to cope with this change, and other factors. However, several estimates put the number of people in the hundreds of millions in the latter part of this century. It is well documented that displacement leads to a considerable increase in human trafficking

Legal Pathways for a Massive Increase in Utility-Scale Renewable Generation Capacity

Decarbonizing the U.S. energy system will require a program of building onshore wind, offshore wind, utility-scale solar, and associated transmission that will exceed what has been done before in the United States by many times, every year out to 2050. These facilities, together with rooftop photovoltaics and other distributed generation, are required to replace most fossil fuel generation and to help furnish the added electricity that will be needed as many uses currently employing fossil fuels (especially passenger transportation and space and water heating) are electrified. This Article, excerpted from Michael B. Gerrard & John Dernbach, eds., Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States (ELI Press forthcoming 2018), discusses the four most important legal processes and obstacles involved in this enormous project: site acquisition and approval; the National Environmental Policy Act; state and local approvals; and species protection laws. It also presents recommendations for lowering the obstacles and briefly discusses several corollary actions that are needed

Courts Rulings Accept Climate Science

Viewers of certain television networks, readers of certain newspapers, and anyone visiting Capitol Hill would come away with the impression that there are serious questions about whether climate change is occurring and, if it is, whether it is mostly caused by human activity. One place where there are few such questions is the courts. In fact it appears that (with one lone exception in a dissent) not a single U.S. judge has expressed any skepticism, in a written opinion or dissent, about the science underlying the concern over climate change. To the contrary, the courts have uniformly upheld this science, and in one notable recent opinion a judge has gone so far as to suggest that those who accused a leading climate scientist of fraud may have acted with actual malice by making claims that are provably false, potentially subjecting them to damages in libel. This column begins by discussing the several litigations involving one embattled climate scientist, and then describes how other courts have dealt with issues of climate science

America’s Forgotten Nuclear Waste Dump in the Pacific

During the Cold War the United States detonated sixty-seven nuclear weapons over the atolls of Bikini and Enewetak in the Marshall Islands. In the late 1970s the United States addressed the massive amount of residual contamination by abandoning Bikini as permanently uninhabitable and pushing much of the waste at Enewetak into the open lagoon. Much of the plutonium was dumped into the crater that had been left by an atomic bomb explosion, and then covered with a thin shell of cement. The resultant “Runit dome” sits unmarked and unguarded in a small island and one day will be submerged by the rising waters of the Pacific Ocean, unless it is first torn apart by typhoons. Radiation from the Marshall Islands has already been detected in the South China Sea. Using the experience of the Marshall Islands as a case study, this article seeks to shed light on the environmental and security challenges of nuclear waste disposal in the Pacific and beyond

Summary of Presentation: Climate of Environmental Justice Conference

Presenter: Michael B. Gerrard, Partner, Arnold & Porter LLP, New York, NY 2 pages

Environmental Justice and Natural Areas Protection Trends & Insight

There are 3,119,963 square miles in the continental United States. That sounds like plenty of space to put just about anything. However, when the facility seeking a home is environmentally controversial, finding even one square mile can seem almost impossible. This country is now in its third major era in making siting decisions. The first era – unconstrained siting – lasted until the late 1960s. Then began the second era – protecting natural areas. In the early 1990s, we embarked upon a third era – environmental justice. The growing tensions between protecting natural areas and achieving environmental justice suggest that we should strive for a fourth era, in which these two important goals are reconciled and allowed to work together

Direct Air Capture: An Emerging Necessity to Fight Climate Change

The Paris Agreement of 2015 declared that we must keep global average temperatures well below 2.0°C (3.6°F) above preindustrial levels, and as close to 1.5°C as possible. However, a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed that even 2.0°C would be catastrophic; 1.5°C should be the firm goal. We are now around 1.0°C and are already seeing wildfires, hurricanes, inland precipitation, and other events of unprecedented magnitude

Reflections on Environmental Justice

Environmental justice is a very hot topic. Yesterday\u27s New York Times on the front page of the Metropolitan section had a story stating: Mid-Sized Plants Headed to Poor Areas. The story stated, The Pataki administration acknowledges in its own study that the electric generators that it wants to install around New York City would go into poor heavily minority communities, a finding that supports some of the arguments of the project\u27s opponents. This is quoting an unreleased environmental justice analysis that may or may not be valid, but it certainly shows how hot a topic it is. This morning I would like to say a couple of words about what environmental justice is, on what is the over-arching law on the subject at the federal level, and then to speculate a little bit – we\u27re still at such an early stage that only speculation is warranted – as to how it will affect SEQRA [State Environmental Quality Review Act] and related processes.