CleanLaw

Professor and EELP Founding Director Jody Freeman and Professor Richard Lazarus talk with three HLS students about what drew them to environmental law, their experience at the Emmett Environmental Law Center, including working at EELP and in the environmental law and policy clinic, favorite courses, and what life at HLS is really like. Transcript: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/20...

EELP Staff Attorney Erika Kranz talks with Andy Mergen, Director of the Harvard Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic, about the recent decision to exempt oil and gas exploration and development in the Gulf of Mexico from complying with the Endangered Species Act. The administration has invoked a never-before-used national security provision to bypass the Endangered Species Committee's normal,...

EELP Founding Director and Harvard Law Professor Jody Freeman speaks with Sue Biniaz, former Principal Deputy Special Envoy for Climate at the US State Department and lecturer at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. For nearly three decades, Sue served as the United States’ lead climate lawyer and climate negotiator. Together, Jody and Sue break down the significance of the recent US announc...

EELP director of State and Regional Climate Policies Dale Bryk talks with Jamie Van Nostrand, recent chair of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, the entity that oversees investor-owned electric and gas utilities. Together, they dive into the regulatory frameworks that govern utilities, how those rules drive utility investments, and what that means for consumer energy bills in the tr...

What does it take to electrify a cold-weather state? Maine is leading the nation in home electrification, with more than 150,000 heat pumps installed and counting. Efficiency Maine Trust executive director Michael Stoddard joins EELP’s Abby Husselbee to talk about how Maine’s independent approach, simple program design, and partnership with small businesses are transforming home heating and cuttin...

EELP's Hannah Perls speaks with environmental justice pioneer Charles Lee, former director of EPA's Office of Environmental Justice and principal author of the landmark 1987 report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, and now a visiting scholar at Howard University School of Law, and Sean Moriarty, former deputy commissioner with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. They...

EELP's Founding Director and Harvard Law Professor, Jody Freeman, speaks with Harvard Law Professor Richard Lazarus and Solomon Hsiang, Professor of Global Environmental Policy at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. They speak about EPA's recent proposal to repeal the agency's 2009 Endangerment Finding, and dig into the legal and scientific arguments offered by EPA. They discuss whether t...

In this special crossover episode of CleanLaw and Shift Key, Heatmap's weekly podcast on decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels, EELP’s Founding Director Professor Jody Freeman speaks with Shift Key hosts Robinson Meyer, the Founding Executive Editor of Heatmap News, and Jesse Jenkins, Professor of Energy Systems Engineering at Princeton University.  They discuss the Trump administra...

In the second of this two-part series, EELP's Founding Director and Harvard Law Professor Jody Freeman speaks with William Reilly, EPA Administrator under President George H.W. Bush, and Christine Todd Whitman, EPA Administrator under President George W. Bush. They discuss their time at EPA including efforts to simultaneously advance environmental protections and economic growth. They also discuss...

In the first of this two-part series, EELP's Founding Director and Harvard Law Professor Jody Freeman speaks with Gina McCarthy, EPA Administrator under President Obama and the White House National Climate Advisor under President Biden. They discuss Gina's time at EPA, including the agency's mission to safeguard public health and the environment through actions that rely on robust science, technol...

EELP attorney Hannah Perls speaks with Professor Andrew Mergen, faculty director of Harvard’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, about the latest updates to the National Environmental Policy Act, including new agency implementing procedures, the Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Eagle County, and amendments included in the One Big Beautiful Bill recently passed by Congress. They talk abou...

EELP Senior Staff Attorney Hannah Perls speaks with the Attorney General of Massachusetts, Andrea Joy Campbell, and Vernice Miller-Travis, Executive Vice President and Environmental Justice Lead at the Metropolitan Group. They discuss the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle federal environmental justice and equity programs, funding, and priorities, and what those changes mean for critical...

In this episode, EELP founding director and Harvard Law Professor Jody Freeman speaks with Carrie Jenks, EELP's executive director and Ari Peskoe, director of EELP's Electricity Law Initiative. They discuss President Trump's most recent executive orders on climate, energy, and the environment and what they are watching for as agencies begin to implement the administration’s directives to roll back...

Electricity Law Initiative Director Ari Peskoe and EELP Fellow Eliza Martin discuss their new paper, Extracting Profits from the Public: How Utility Ratepayers are Paying for Big Tech Power. As Amazon, Google, Meta, and other technology companies try to secure electricity for their new data centers, electric utilities are expanding their systems to serve them. Because utility companies profit by b...

EELP founding director and Harvard Law Professor Jody Freeman speaks with Harvard Law Professor Richard Lazarus, Andy Mergen, director of the Harvard Law Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, and Carrie Jenks, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program. They discuss the Trump administration’s actions to date on climate, energy, environment, and natural resources and break...

EELP senior staff attorney Hannah Perls speaks with speaks with Debbie Chizewer and Nick Leonard about environmental justice lawyering, including leveraging Title VI of the Civil Rights Act on behalf of frontline communities. Debbie Chizewer is a managing attorney with Earthjustice based in Chicago, where she leads the organization's Midwest litigation strategy. Nick Leonard is the executive direc...

EELP Senior Staff Attorney Hannah Perls speaks with Olatunde Johnson, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Professor Johnson and Hannah discuss the history and evolution of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, a crucial legal tool for the environmental justice movement. Earlier this year, a federal judge blocked EPA and the Department of Justice from enforcing their Title...

EELP senior staff attorney Sara Dewey speaks with Andy Mergen, Faculty Director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School and former chief of the Appellate Section of the Environment & Natural Resources Division at the Department of Justice. Andy and Sara discuss the origin and evolution of presidential authority to designate national monuments under the Antiquities A...

In this episode, EELP Founding Director and Harvard Law Professor Jody Freeman speaks with Andy Mergen, faculty director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School and former chief of the Appellate Section of the Environment & Natural Resources Division at the Department of Justice. Jody and Andy break down what they call the “Quagmire Quartet” of recent Supreme Court...

California has had a pivotal role in creating US clean car and clean air regulations under multiple administrations. In this episode, EELP Founding Director and Harvard Law Professor, Jody Freeman, speaks with Mary Nichols, former Chair of the California Air Resources Board and California's Secretary for Natural Resources, as well as former Assistant Administrator for EPA's Office of Air and Radia...

Ari Peskoe, director of our Electricity Law Initiative, speaks with Claire Wayner, senior associate at RMI's Carbon-Free Electricity program, and Casey Baker senior program manager at GridLab. They discuss how the utility industry thinks about building new high-voltage transmission lines and how FERC Order No. 1920 attempts to push the industry to develop more transmission to accommodate new, clea...

Hannah Perls, EELP Senior Staff Attorney, and Deanna Moran, vice president of healthy and resilient communities at the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston, walk through some of the surprising ways that law and policy drive adaptation decisions in Massachusetts and beyond, including state and local building codes, design standards and risk disclosures, how to make our utilities more resilient wit...

The Endangered Species Act, which turned 50 years old on December 28, 2023, has been described as one of the most potent environmental law statutes ever enacted. Harvard Law Professor Richard Lazarus and Andy Mergen, director of the Harvard Law Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, discuss the initial bipartisan support for the act, the Supreme Court cases that shaped its implementation, and...

In this episode Harvard Law professor and EELP’s Founding Director Jody Freeman, speaks with Bjorn Otto Sverdrup, Chair of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative’s Oil and Gas Executive Committee, Riley Duren, CEO and Founder of Carbon Mapper, Peter Zalzal Distinguished Counsel and Associate Vice President of Clean Air Strategies at Environmental Defense Fund, and EELP’s Executive Director, Carrie Jen...

Ari Peskoe, director of our Electricity Law Initiative, speaks with Staff Attorney Hannah Dobie about Ari’s new article about power sector governance, Replacing the Utility Transmission Syndicate’s Control. They discuss how FERC’s legal authority shapes regional governance, how independent decisionmaking by Regional Transmission Organizations is compromised by utilities and other incumbent firms,...