Profile V: Professor Maria Savasta-Kennedy, University of North Carolina

In this issue, The Daily Dynamo met with Professor Maria Savasta-Kennedy, who teaches environmental law at the University of North Carolina Law School. During her career in litigation, which initially started in corporate law in California, she pivoted into public sector litigation, pursuing battles over environmental matters over what she saw as battles between ‘which rich guy or rich company gets the money’. Such an interest led her into academia at Chapel Hill, where she’s been teaching the practice of environmental law for more than two decades. Though her work does not focus explicitly on energy, rather environmental regulation and justice, her perspective can be applied to the relevant energy matters of today.

Throughout her long career in the space, she has argued cases on topics from environmental ethics to environmental justice. Much of her work has focused on working on behalf of lower-income and communities of color, who she argues are often subject to ‘energy poverty’.

‘Certain communities don’t have internet or reliable power”, she stated, adding that tribal lands all across the United States are the most vulnerable to such issues caused by inequities in energy infrastructure. The unequal resource allocation, in addition to the quality of the facilities in these areas, is something Savasta-Kennedy has motivated her students to act on, running pro-bono projects in North Carolina that address weatherization in low income housing and well contamination in rural areas.

In such a pursuit for climate and environmental justice through teaching and practice, her journey has taught her invaluable lessons on the practice of law and working with communities. 

Energy and environmental law, compared to other legal specialties, “requires a deep understanding of science – hydrogeology, environmental science, chemistry”, Savasta-Kennedy explained, noting that the energy sector has its own “underpinning in science.” Despite having a humanities background before entering environmental law, she remarked that “it was easier to explain the science to judges because I had to learn it at a building block level”. That said, law students coming to environmental law with a background in science had a leg up in the field.

At Chapel Hill, Savasta-Kennedy runs a class called ‘Environmental Law Practice’, which allows students to understand real-world cases from the perspective of three key groups: lawyers representing the regulated community (for example, Duke Energy), the regulators (government lawyers) and  impacted communities. She believes that understanding the differing perspectives that comprise the field can  be invaluable, wherever her students practice after graduation. 

After moving to North Carolina from California, Prof. Savasta-Kennedy  she found that there was a marked difference and shift in legal atmospheres between the two regions, as well as over time.

“When I started practicing in California in 1990, the concept of litigator was that you were like a gladiator, fighting for your client.  Now,  lawyers are viewed much more  as problem solvers”, she said, noting that the passage of time has created a shift in lawyering. She also said that she found the legal community in  North Carolina more congenial.

“North Carolina has a smaller legal community with more reputable players… people are just polite – everybody treats each other as a colleague”, she mused. Through her position as the Chairperson for the Sustainability Committee for the state’s Bar Association, Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources Council, she’s worked in such an atmosphere, trying to increase public awareness about the pressing issues of climate change and pollution. One key event she runs is a state-wide essay contest for high school students, where topics such as ‘renewable energy’ are at the forefront of the discussion.

North Carolina itself is a state with a burgeoning energy future with great progress in recent years – Savasta-Kennedy believes that such progress must be continued to be made.

“Energy doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game with a winners and a loser – “I think we need to continue and increase incentivizing renewables through tax relief, working with companies in the State’s Research Triangle to discover how to diversify our grid further, to incentivize small scale solar [projects]” , the professor argued, adding that electing  legislators cognizant of the ethical and economic consequences of an energy transition can substantially facilitate more clean energy bills.  She touted outgoing Governor Roy Cooper’s ‘important’ work in making renewable energy more prevalent in the state. Adding that the state should employ its research facilities in North Carolina’s renowned Research Triangle to find more innovative energy solutions, she remarked an ‘all of the above strategy’ is what is truly needed – “you can’t just leave [renewables] out of the equation”, she asserted, emphasizing again that incentivizing investment is the key to dramatic growth.

As she’s seen throughout her career, corporate actors have an incentive to exploit the system  for profit, particularly in the energy industry. In her  publication on energy titled “The Newest Hybrid: Notes Toward Standardized Certification of Carbon Offsets”, she discussed the tool of carbon offsets and the opaque nature of the field that made it harder to effectively employ. Now, over one and a half decades after that publication, Savasta-Kennedy says she’s grown more cynical about carbon offsets. .

“There still is not a uniform understanding of how to value a carbon offset – there’s been a real missed opportunity – and I’m concerned that people are using them as greenwashing in  a way that  detracts from the urgent need to move to renewable resources”.

In addition to Savasta-Kennedy’s sentiment that offsets are somewhat misguided, she believes that cap and trade systems for addressing GHG emissions  can also result in  unfairly distributed negative health consequences. “You’re essentially buying the right to pollute.  So while a cap and trade system  sounds good on paper, you have a problem with hotspots and ‘sacrifice communities’ that live around the power plants”, she argued, stating that such a carte blanche disproportionately affects those communities which are situated near industrial facilities.

In her  pursuit for environmental justice, the perspective of Professor Savasta-Kennedy on environmental law can be easily related to matters of energy policy and litigation, with her unique arguments on how energy can not only become more abundant, but also more equitable.