Jody Freeman

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and majority leader, is urging governors to defy President Obama by refusing to implement the administration’s global warming regulations. ... However, Ms. McCarthy’s agency is already preparing a one-size-fits-all compliance plan that would be imposed on states that do not create plans. Jody Freeman, director of Harvard University’s environmental law program and a former senior counselor to President Obama, said that option would be worse for states than simply preparing and submitting their own plans. “It would put states at a huge disadvantage if they choose not to file a plan,” she said. “It gives E.P.A. the option of implementing their own plan themselves, but the E.P.A. may not have the best plan for each state. States should be designing these plans themselves.”

Wielding the weapon of his pen, President Obama this week is expected to formally reject a Republican attempt to force construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. But in stopping the transit of petroleum from the forests of Alberta to the Gulf Coast, Mr. Obama will be opening the veto era of his presidency...Jody Freeman, director of Harvard’s environmental law program and a former senior counselor to the president, said there was no doubt that Mr. Obama would veto such an effort if Republicans got it through Congress.

Natural gas power company Calpine Corp. and a group of Harvard University law professors on Thursday told the D.C. Circuit that the EPA must be allowed to finalize its greenhouse gas reduction plan for existing power plants before any legal challenges may be decided. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan has been challenged by coal mining company Murray Energy Corp., along with a variety of states and other industry groups. They have alleged the agency lacks the authority to issue the rule and that the rule would harm their economic health. But in separate amici briefs, Calpine and Harvard law professors Richard Lazarus and Jody Freeman said the EPA is on firm ground.

As Attorney General Eric Holder prepares to leave the Obama administration after five years on the job, environmental attorneys are sizing up his record and generally applauding his efforts to protect public health and natural resources...Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor who wrote some of those early climate rules as White House counselor for energy and climate change from 2009 to 2010, said that ruling was critical to the Obama administration's global warming efforts. "This is a particularly important time," Freeman said. "For climate change, this is the beginning of the process. So if the department wasn't on its game defending these rules, they would run into serious problems implementing [the president's] climate agency. "We're going to see more of it," she added, referring to litigation challenging Obama's Clean Power Plan and proposed greenhouse gas standards for new and existing power plants.

Global leaders are gathering in Lima, Peru for United Nations-sponsored climate change talks. It will be the last major gathering before a new climate pact is finalized in Paris at the end of 2015...Jody Freeman, the director of Harvard University's environmental law program and the former White House Counselor for Energy and Climate Change, says that having two of the world’s biggest polluters at the negotiation table makes all of the difference. “The terrible air pollution problem in China may be driving them even more than the problem of climate change,” says Freeman. “Either way, the U.S.-China deal is a game changer and it adds tremendous momentum to these talks in Lima. The U.S. and China are the two indispensable nations on this problem. Together, they’re responsible for 40 percent of global emissions.”

President Obama could leave office with the most aggressive, far-reaching environmental legacy of any occupant of the White House. Yet it is very possible that not a single major environmental law will have passed during his two terms in Washington. Instead, Mr. Obama has turned to the vast reach of the Clean Air Act of 1970, which some legal experts call the most powerful environmental law in the world...Jody Freeman, director of Harvard University’s environmental law program, and a former counselor to the president, said Mr. Obama was using the Clean Air Act “to push forward in a way that no president ever has.”

Congress does not hide elephants in mouse holes. That colorful legal concept — which means government agencies can’t find sweeping new powers by re-interpreting minor sections of existing law — may determine the success or failure of proposed EPA power-plant regulations, rules that some observers have described as the nation’s most ambitious action on climate change to date...“It’s a beautiful rule. It is incredibly creative. The question is, Is it legal?” said Richard Lazarus, the Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (HLS)...In a discussion on the proposed regulations Wednesday at the Maxwell-Dworkin building, Lazarus and Archibald Cox Professor of Law Jody Freeman, director of HLS’ Environmental Law Program, said that the proposed rules not only step into the gap created by Congress’ refusal to pass climate legislation, but also have the potential to both transform the national energy scene and invigorate international climate-change negotiations.

In a big win for environmentalists, the Supreme Court on Monday effectively endorsed the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from sources like power plants, even as it criticized what it called the administration’s overreaching…The decision, said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, “gave the agency a tongue-lashing and suggested the potential for some significant limitations on how the agency chooses to exercise its authority in the future.”… That statement was “a warning shot,” said Jody Freeman, a law professor at Harvard. “It suggests that the courts will look skeptically at assertions of authority that are very new and very far-reaching.”

On June 2, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it will seek to require the nation’s power plant operators to cut their combined carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030…“It’s no secret that everyone preferred having Congress draft climate legislation,” says Jody Freeman, Obama’s former counselor for energy and climate change. Using the Clean Air Act “was always Plan B.”

In a week of many developments in the world of law, Harvard Law School faculty were online, in print, and on-the-air offering analyses and opinions.