Richard Lazarus

The Biden administration on Thursday announced the first regulations to limit greenhouse pollution from existing power plants, capping an unparalleled string of climate policies that,…

Opponents of robust federal climate action were emboldened this week after the Supreme Court signaled that it may be ready to overturn a powerful tool…

This week, President Biden announced that Lael Brainard, the vice chair of the Federal Reserve who is known for citing the financial risks posed by…

In nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer routinely found himself on the losing side of contentious issues but managed to…

The Supreme Court delivered a major blow to U.S. climate change efforts in June when it struck down the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which had…

The cataclysmic Supreme Court term that included the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion and the end of constitutional protection for abortion would, in the…

The cataclysmic Supreme Court term that included the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion and the end of constitutional protection for abortion would, in the…

Some baby boomers were permanently shaped by their participation in the countercultural protests and the antiwar activism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Others were shaped…

If climate change were a disaster film, it would likely be accused of being too over-the-top: wildfires reducing entire towns to ashes, hurricanes swamping cities, droughts draining lakes and withering fields, and raging oceans redrawing the very maps of our coasts. And now, many cities and states are asking, who's going to pay for all of this? ... Richard Lazarus, who teaches environmental law at Harvard, said, "The scope of the problem is one that requires really a national approach. Cities and counties and states are being the ones left with the problem when the federal government doesn't step up to the plate." Lazarus said even if the cities and states prove the fossil fuel companies deceived the public about climate change, it doesn't necessarily mean they will win: "They've done a really good job of showing that the oil and gas industry, I think, engaged in fraudulent activity. The challenge will be causation, to prove that their fraudulent behavior is what prevented the United States from passing the laws we needed to reduce those greenhouse gas emissions."

The Supreme Court looks likely to limit the executive authority to issue sweeping climate rules without new legislation, but it's unclear if they'll unite around broader limits on regulatory power. Catch up fast: The high court held arguments Monday in related cases about now-defunct regulations to curb carbon emissions from the electricity sector, the second-largest U.S. source of heat-trapping gases. A few takeaways: 1. New limits appear likely. Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus said there appear to be six votes to "align" the case with recent rulings against the federal eviction moratorium and vaccine mandates. That would prompt the court to "sharply cut back on EPA’s authority to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal-fired power plants," he said via email.

President Biden’s ambitious plans to combat climate change, blocked by an uncooperative Congress, face an equally tough test next week at the Supreme Court. With the court’s conservative justices increasingly suspicious that agencies are overstepping their powers, the case’s outcome could not only reshape U.S. environmental policy but also call into question the authority of regulators to tackle the nation’s most pressing problems. ... Biden’s team has yet to issue its own plan for the power sector. For that reason, environmentalists took it as an “earthquake” when the Supreme Court accepted the case last fall, said Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus. It appeared to signal a move on the part of the court’s conservatives to delineate — and probably trim — the EPA’s powers before there were even regulations to review. ... The policy that sparked this battle — the Clean Power Plan — is now moot, since the market has done what regulators could not. “The targets were achieved way in advance, more than a decade before they would have been required,” said Carrie Jenks, executive director of Harvard’s Environmental & Energy Law Program.