JASON J. CZARNEZKI

My former colleague Tseming Yang (Santa Clara) has posted: The Relationship between Domestic and International Environmental Law

The Abstract:

The connections between domestic and international law have proliferated in the last few decades as a directed result of the explosive growth of environmental treaties and other developments. Yet, most U.S. environmental lawyers remain relatively unaware even though these connections are increasingly affecting the practice of environmental law itself. Other parts of the book provide background on the specific substantive content of global environmental laws, both international as well as the environmental law systems of other countries. This chapter will address the relationship between the international and the domestic system, primarily the US. It will address three related question: 1) What is international environmental law?, 2) what is its relationship to U.S. domestic law?, and 3) how is international environmental law implemented and applied in the U.S.?

You decide:
Obama to Outline Ambitious Plan to Cut Greenhouse Gases
Promises about Cap and Trade on The Obameter

When I teach environmental law, I teach it through discussion of various regulatory methods that may (or may not) effectively regulate environmental farm. Examples include bans; informational regulation; education; infrastructure; mandates; standard-setting; and economic (dis)incentives. Well, while there are certainly environmental crimes, this would be a very serious approach: China warns it will execute serious polluters

Due the extreme air pollution in Mainland China, Hong Kong over the last 5 years has experienced increased air pollution and smog. My former student, in 2012, wrote about poor air quality in Hong Kong while she was doing her internship there with WWF. A year earlier, in 2011, I wrote about "Westerners and businessman moving their families from Hong Kong to Singapore due to the increasingly poor air quality in Hong Kong." But now it seems Singapore’s air quality is under the microscope, though in this case the poor air quality is due to fires in Indonesia. See these articles:
Singapore air pollution hits record high
Singapore’s record-breaking smog is so bad, birds are falling from the sky
Air quality at dangerous levels in Singapore and Malaysia

Since I’ve written before on this issue before, check out the NY Times blurb and decide for yourself: is this a small step of progress or a very weak public relations announcement?

With CO2 Cuts Tough, U.S. and China Pledge a Push on Another Greenhouse Gas – NYTimes.com
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/dotearth/2013/06/08/with-co2-cuts-tough-u-s-and-china-pledge-a-push-on-another-greenhouse-gas/

Horrified by the hot lunch at your kid’s school?…I am.  I try every so often to have hot lunch at my kids’ school with them.  They usually take a cold lunch so we can prepare a healthier meal, but this Friday I went for hot lunch with my younger daughter.  First the positive: the school did have fresh salad available for the kids, but this was special situation as the kids grew the veggies themselves in the high school’s greenhouse.  The rest of the regular lunch was an utter embarrassment and I’m not sure how kids can be expected to learn when they allowed to ingest so much sugar.  The average kid chose a slice of cheese or pepperoni pizza, chocolate milk, ice cream, a piece of fruit and a box of raisins.  The chocolate milk, ice cream and raisins alone are over 70 grams of sugar.  It doesn’t need to be this way either from a comparative standpoint (schools meals are much healthier in Sweden and China where we’ve lived before) and a legal/policy standpoint.  We should be on our district School Food Administrators (SFAs) to make our kids’ meals healthier.  Some things to keep in mind:

-The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act amends the National School Lunch Act to foster the growth of the burgeoning organic food and “farm to school” movements. Under the Organic Food Pilot Program, grants are provided on a competitive basis to SFAs to establish programs to increase the quantity of organic foods provided to schoolchildren under the National School Lunch Program.

-Congress amended the NSLA to encourage participating institutions to purchase “unprocessed agricultural products, both locally grown and locally raised, to the maximum extent practicable and appropriate.”  This provision allows SFAs to give preference to locally grown foods in their contracts with producers and suppliers.  SFAs can prescribe the geographic preference in the form of preference points or as a percentage in their solicitation for bids.

-While the amendment to NSLA’s geographic preference provision certainly gives SFAs freedom to purchase local unprocessed products, SFAs face another barrier in attempting to integrate those fresh ingredients into school lunch menus. Decades of prepackaged and prepared menu items have rendered full facility kitchens obsolete, and today it is hard to find a school that has more than bulk freezers and massive ovens.

Factory food and prepackaged meals have become dominant in school meals, but several players—SFAs, parents, teachers, and health and legal professionals—can work together to reverse this trend.  Learn more in Chapter 13 of my new book, Food, Agriculture and Environmental Law.

In my last month of directing the U.S.-China Partnership for Environmental Law, I am happy to report on the following updates:

Public Interest Lawyers and NGOs in Western China Address Environmental Disputes

Gansu Province stretches over 1000 kilometers from high altitude plateaus and grasslands in the south to delicate Gobi Desert ecosystems in the northwest. As China continues to shift industry and manufacturing from its wealthier east coast to western China, the pressure on these ecosystems and the people that rely on them is increasing. Since 2000, the number of environmental disputes in Gansu has nearly doubled. To equip lawyers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to become better advocates for the environment and pollution victims, USAID’s US-China Partnership for Environmental Law (PEL) program supported two training events in May. USAID’s implementing partner, Vermont Law School, and the Huanzhu Law Firm, the first public interest environmental law firm in Beijing, collaborated with the Gansu Lawyers Association to train 34 lawyers on the latest developments in China’s civil procedure law. New revisions to the civil procedure law enable NGOs to sue on behalf of the public interest to protect the environment, increasing the role lawyers can play as legal advocates for change. Twenty NGO workers learned how to build a public interest environmental case and how to engage with local governments on environmental matters. Through the trainings, the lawyers and NGOs learned how to use the law to promote public participation and improve environmental decision-making.

Improving Prosecutorial Enforcement of Environmental Law in China

Weak enforcement of environmental laws is a major challenge to environmental protection in China. To address this challenge, China has amended its laws to lower the threshold for prosecuting environmental crimes and to enable certain governmental agencies and organizations to bring environmental public interest litigation. However, the language of the new laws is vague, making implementation difficult. On May 20, the US-China Partnership for Environmental Law (PEL) program, implemented by USAID-supported Vermont Law School, held a workshop entitled “Judicial Safeguards to Building An Ecological Civilization” in Shanghai to advance prosecutorial enforcement of environmental law in China. Co-sponsored by the All-China Environment Federation, the Legal Research Department of Shanghai Social Science Academy, and Shanghai Putuo District People’s Procuratorate, the workshop engaged scholars, lawyers, and prosecutors in a vibrant exchange on how to prosecute environmental crimes more effectively and steps to increase the role prosecutors could play in civil enforcement of environmental laws. Participants also discussed legislative reforms, including amendments to the Environmental Protection Law and the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Law, that could broaden specific enforcement provisions and further clarify prosecutors’ role in environmental public interest litigation.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/05/27/1211908/-The-Onion-Calls-it-Quits#

I hope so, but you should decide for yourself. Some relevant links:

For Bloomberg and Bike-Sharing Program, the Big Moment Arrives
Questions and Answers on Citi Bike
Citi Bike website

I look forward to seeing the actual ridership data a year from now.

I thought I’d note a blog post by Dan Farber entitled "The Emergence of Food Law." He notes, and I agree, that:
"the new focus on food systems is a positive development. Agricultural law has been a sorely neglected topic in the academic world, considering that it is a major economic sector, crucial to society, and a focal point for many legal issues such as pesticide use, worker safety, water pollution, GMOs, and biofuels. But agriculture should not be considered in isolation from the processing and consumption of foods, with their impacts on health and global food security. It remains to be seen whether food law will gain a real foothold or remain a niche subject, but it’s good to see that the subject is getting some overdue attention."

Of course, I hope food law gains a real foothold given the title of my new book.