Environmental Law

“If they’re going to build housing that’s going to be lived in for 100 years or more, we want to make sure that all of the contamination that they can remove is removed,” said Steve Castleman, an attorney with UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic. “And that will require the Navy to tighten up their cleanup standards and to retest 100% of the work that Tetra Tech did because they did it fraudulently.”

“The great thing about framing this accurately as a violation of human rights,” said Claudia Polsky, director of Berkeley Law’s Environmental Law Clinic, “is that framing is capacious enough to include stories about PFAS health harms, ecological harms, corporate responsibility, about lack of regulatory vigor, about inadequate legal remedies for people who are coming out injured.”

Claudia Polsky, director of Berkley’s Environmental Law Clinic, said it’s rare for the Human Rights Council to send allegation letters to a transnational corporation, rather than solely to national government. “We hope the UN’s action will induce shareholders to bring DuPont in line with international human rights law.”

While charging infrastructure has expanded, it’s still not exactly reliable in may places, said Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “I think some of that is a victim of the success we’ve had with EV uptake, and so the chargers are getting more used. And the more they’re used, the more they’re going to break down.”

Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, said having companies report water-related sustainability targets and mapping their use across supply chains is an important step to using it better.

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment co-writes an opinion for The Hill on the need to rally the IMF toward bold climate action.

Regulating industrial emissions and equipment—as California has been working to do for decades—certainly provides important benefits to surrounding communities, but “it’s not enough to say, ‘Let’s clean this up,’” says Louise Bedsworth, the executive director at the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment (CLEE) at UC Berkeley School of Law.“We have to think about building wealth and investment in communities—it’s all part of implementing environmental law and policy.”

Dan Farber, faculty director of Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment and Evan George, communications director of the UCLA Emmet Institute on Climate Change and the Environment write an opinion piece on the danger Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign poses to climate progress.   

Michael Kiparsky, founding director of the Wheeler Water Institute at Berkeley Law said the idea behind creating these quasi-governmental districts was sound. They brought together a group of landowners and enabled them to pool resources and build costly water infrastructure. The problem, he said, is that you can “get situations where you literally have one or a small number of very large landowners controlling an entity that is managing a public resource owned by the state of California.”

Ethan Elkind,director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses how California is addressing pedestrian safety issues.