Profile VII: Professor Michael Gerrard, Columbia University
In this issue, The Daily Dynamo met with Michael Gerrard, Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University’s Law School and Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, a renowned figure in environmental law across the last few decades. Through his authorship of several books, where he forged comprehensive dialogue on environmental and climate change law, Professor Gerrard has become one of the premier ‘thought leaders’ in the field in all of North America.
Gerrard traces his initial journey with environmental law back to his childhood in Charleston, West Virginia, a town ‘dominated by the chemical industries’. Through his upbringing in a ‘highly polluted environment’, he became interested in environmental affairs; such an interest was cultivated during his time at university, where he wrote his thesis on air pollution in West Virginia. After working for a few years for an environmental group in New York City, Gerrard found environmental law to be his calling after pushing against the construction of a highway called Westway, which would have disrupted huge parts of the Hudson River. Consequently, he entered law school, and all of his achievements since have been the culmination of his passion for the environment.
Reflecting on his innumerous achievements, Gerrard believes his greatest tool to effect environmental change has been his writing. “I think my most impactful contributions have been through my writing”, he said, “I’ve written or edited fourteen books and hundreds of articles, and I like to think that my writing has really had an impact, certainly in helping people understand what the law is and helping them to practice it”. One such piece of writing is a two-volume book about New York’s State Environmental Quality Review Act – the state level counterpart of the National Environmental Policy Act – which he published in 1990 and has updated every year since. His dedication to ensuring it matches the state’s current legal atmosphere fits the theme of many of his works, which have acted as guidelines for environmental law and practice.
Another book he co-edited, titled Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization, detailed over one thousand legal strategies and tools to combat climate change through deep carbonization. “I focused in particular on the siting of renewable energy facilities [for wind and solar]”, Gerrard explained, stressing the importance of the optimization of wind and solar production given the massive buildup requirements needed for a transition away from fossil fuels.
In regards to the energy transition, Gerrard’s focus goes beyond law and into arenas of policy and economics. “Pollution and particularly climate change impose enormous costs that are just not monetized, but if one works on monetizing them through methods such as the social cost of carbon, environmental measures have a very high benefit to cost ratio”, he mused. However, he demurred about the possibility of a wholly positive-sum process. “We have to recognize that many actions do lead to local displacement, and that’s why the energy transition away from fossil fuels needs to be accompanied by efforts to help the communities that are harmed”, he stressed. He added that two of the Biden Administration’s major legislative feats will go a long way towards ‘minimizing the hardship’ faced by such communities “The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act both devote a great deal of attention to that, and considerable resources are available”.
In these efforts, the renowned professor has seldom stood on the sidelines, pioneering numerous initiatives to accelerate progress, specifically the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative, which he began in 2018. “It became very clear we needed this massive buildout of wind and solar, and local opposition was a major impediment”, he explained, adding that numerous communities were in favor of such renewable energy projects. Accordingly, he set up the initiative to “provide legal representation [to] advance that cause in court and before local and state administrative bodies”. Since its creation, it’s been largely successful, aiding a number of communities across the nation in creating renewable energy infrastructure.
While this particular initiative brought about change at the local level, other initiatives of his have been far grander in scale, from his teaching across the globe to his advisory role with the Marshall Islands in combating climate change. On the international scene, Gerrard has found similar impediments to climate change solutions, specifically the non-binding nature of many international agreements on the environment. “It’s difficult and frustrating that they depend on domestic governments to act”, he lamented, adding there are a number of exceptions such as the Montreal Protocol. Ultimately, such action “goes up and down with the political waves of each nation”, he remarked.
Such political waves have greatly affected American climate policy over the last decade, with President Donald Trump pulling the nation out of The Paris Agreement, which his predecessor, President Barack Obama, had joined. “The day that Trump was first inaugurated, we launched a website called The Climate Deregulation Tracker”, Gerrard recounted. “The day Biden was inaugurated, we rebranded it The Climate Reregulation Tracker”. With a second Trump administration on the horizon, such rebranding is needed again.
The renowned professor asserted that modern American politics play a domineering role in climate policy. “The Sabin Center has been deeply affected by who is in the White House”, Gerrard stressed, noting that he founded the center the same month Barack Obama was inaugurated. “For [those] eight years, we were working to support the [his] administration's climate policies and push them along. When Trump came in, we had to switch to resisting those policies”. While Biden’s term offered a respite, the Sabin Center must once again resist, with many forecasting that the second Trump administration's policies will be more substantive.
The next four years of environmental and energy regulation will share few similarities with the regulation of the last four. Teaching a class on energy regulation, Professor Gerrard highlighted the differences between energy and environmental law. “Energy law and environmental law have fundamentally different objectives. The principal objective of energy law and policy is abundant, reliable energy at reasonable costs. Environmental law aims to protect public health and the natural environment. Those objectives often conflict, and it’s important to understand how disputes are resolved and what rules apply in each sphere, as many activities are subject to both”. Energy law seems to share the same doctrine the second Trump administration aims to pursue.
With the overturning of the Chevron doctrine, regulation of energy production in the United States will become much more difficult. “The Loper Bright case is only one of several that have had an extremely negative effect on environmental regulation”, Gerrard asserted, referring to other cases such as West Virginia v. EPA and Sackett v. EPA. “Collectively, the Supreme Court has massively weakened the power of the federal government to combat climate change and other environmental threats”. However, he stated a silver lining can be found at the state level. “The states have a much greater role because none of these decisions impede state power and pro-environmental states can still do a great deal”.
Once a law-school age intern at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the plaintiff in the case that initially created Chevron, Gerrard has witnessed the complete lifetime of how the precedent has been utilized to enforce government mandates. As the United States moves into a new age of environmental and energy regulation, Gerrard is sure to play an influential role, just as he has always done throughout his storied career.
