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Beyond Zero-Sum Environmentalism
Get PDFEnvironmental law and environmental protection are often portrayed as requiring trade offs: “jobs versus environment;” “markets versus regulation;” “enforcement versus incentives.” In the summer of 2016, members of the Environmental Law Collaborative gathered to consider how environmentalism and environmental regulation can advance beyond this framing to include new constituents and offer new pathways to tackle the many significant challenges ahead. Months later, the initial activities of the Trump Administration highlighted the use of zero-sum rhetoric, with the appointment of government officials and the issuance of executive orders that indeed seem to view environmental issues as in a zero-sum relationship with jobs or economic progress. In this series of essays, the authors explore the meaning and the role of zero-sum environmentalism as a first step in moving beyond it
Mega-Regional Trade Agreements and Global Environmental Governance: The Case of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
No full textThis article uses the recently negotiated Transpacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) to examine the potential implications of the rise of mega-regional trade agreements (MRTAs) for global environmental governance. Though unlikely to come into force as planned, the TPP represents the state of the art for MRTAs. It was negotiated among a dozen countries with diverse economies and interests that represent over one-quarter of global trade. Its language is likely to provide a reference point for negotiation of future MRTAs. While the environmental provisions of the TPP do not appear strong in their own terms, they offer the prospect of modest environmental benefits by: (1) directly linking trade to numerous environmental concerns, thereby injecting environmental considerations into trade policy; (2) committing member countries to enact, upgrade, and enforce environmental laws; (3) providing dispute settlement mechanisms for situations where countries may not do so; and (4) creating linkages to environmental governance initiatives of non-state actors
Putting “Human Rights” Back into the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Shifting Frames and Embedding Participation Rights
Get PDFPublished as Chapter 4 in Business and Human Rights: Beyond the End of the Beginning, Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, ed.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1242/thumbnail.jp
Better than Basic Income? Liberty, Equality, and the Regulation of Working Time
Get PDFBasic income has attracted the attention of academics, policy makers, and politicians around the globe. Basic income—a no-strings-attached cash transfer made to all citizens of a country, rich or poor—has been lauded as a plan to eliminate poverty, reduce income inequality, redress imbalances in the labor market, remedy the impending problem of mass technology-induced unemployment—the “robot apocalypse”—and make possible meaningful lives for those otherwise dependent on menial work in the labor market. It has also been proposed as an efficient, nonpaternalistic, and stigma-free alternative to existing welfare state policies. This Article compares basic income to an alternative policy proposal: the regulation of maximum working hours in the labor market. This Article contends that on nearly all of these virtues, working-time regulation does better than, or at least as well as, basic income. In particular, working-time regulation makes “free time” available to a broader array of individuals, also addresses technological unemployment, and is much more conducive to proenvironmental policies. Most importantly, it is more deeply egalitarian than basic income, not only addressing income inequality but social inequality, as well. Although basic income and working-time regulation are not necessarily incompatible—indeed some have advocated the adoption of both policies—there may be other factors that effectively render them policy substitutes. Specifically, not only is working-time regulation more complementary to existing welfare-state policy than is basic income, but—already in existence in the U.S. and most other developed countries—it also does not face the challenges of political and economic feasibility that confront basic income. Thus the choice and comparison is a compelling one, of which legal, policy, and tax scholars should take note