46622 research outputs found
Sort by
Zeroing in on Net-Zero: From Soft Law to Hard Law in Corporate Climate Change Pledges
Get PDFOne hundred and ninety-seven nations endorsed a target of net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by midcentury in the 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact. As countries around the world have begun to develop their plans for deep decarbonization, it has become evident that the private sector will need to deliver much of what is required for the transition to an environmentally sustainable economy. The commitment to net-zero emissions by the year 2050 has therefore cascaded to the corporate world, leading hundreds of major companies to make their own net-zero GHG pledges. What constitutes a meaningful net-zero corporate pledge, however, remains unclear—and what must be done to implement these commitments remains similarly opaque. In the absence of regulatory mandates, corporate pledges could become little more than empty optimism and may harm companies’ reputations if perceived to be greenwashing. But while governments have long dithered, other stakeholders—notably investors, consumers, NGOs, and the media—are scrutinizing corporate net-zero commitments and pressing companies to explain their climate strategies, business transformation intentions, investment plans, and reporting schedules in search of credible metrics, methodologies, and interim targets.
This Article explains why the scramble to make sense of corporate net-zero emissions targets matters—arguing that these pledges may emerge as a critical point of leverage in the effort to transition toward a sustainable economy, especially in the absence of comprehensive government climate change policies. It provides an analytical framework to highlight what net-zero pledges could—and should—mean. It identifies key considerations and challenges that must be addressed in corporate GHG reduction strategies. And it documents how stakeholder demands for more robust disclosure regarding corporate net-zero pledges, as part of a broader push for more rigorous Environmental, Social, and Governance performance reporting, might establish de facto global climate change rules for major companies—creating a self-regulatory “soft law” structure of emissions reduction guidelines and incentives anticipating future regulation and government action
Successful Collaborations Between Indigenous Activists and Academic Linguists: How the International Year of the Indigenous Languages led to three projects for the International Decade of the Indigenous Languages
Get PDF
The Shifting Economic Allegiance of Capital Gains
Get PDFTechnological advances and the digitalization of the global economy have created an economic environment beyond the imagination of the original designers of the international tax system. Much scholarly attention has been paid to the question of how these economic transformations should affect which country is able to tax a multinational company\u27s income. But which country should be able to tax capital gains income from the sale of that company\u27s shares is an important and overlooked question.
This Article answers this question. It concludes that taxing authority over capital gains income must be reallocated to the countries in which companies conduct business. In our modern, digitalized economy, this reallocation is necessary to align international sourcing rules with international tax law\u27s underlying principles.
While this Article is a primarily a proof of concept, it also seeks to begin a conversation about ways to implement this reallocation and describes one possible approach: an annual mark-to market tax at the company level on increases in company value apportioned amongst source countries based on a set formula
The Right to Vote Securely
Get PDFAmerican elections currently run on outdated and vulnerable technology. Computer science researchers have shown that voting machines and other election equipment used in many jurisdictions are plagued by serious security flaws, or even shipped with basic safeguards disabled. Making matters worse, it is unclear whether current law requires election authorities or companies to fix even the most egregious vulnerabilities in their systems, and whether voters have any recourse if they do not.
This Article argues that election law can, does, and should ensure that the right to vote is a right to vote securely. First, it argues that constitutional voting rights doctrines already prohibit election practices that fail to meet a bare minimum threshold of security. But the bare minimum is not enough to protect modern election infrastructure against sophisticated threats. This Article thus proposes new statutory measures to bolster election security beyond the constitutional baseline, with technical provisions designed to change the course of insecure election practices that have become regrettably commonplace, and to standardize best practices drawn from state-of-the-art research on election security
Electoral Maintenance
Get PDFAccording to the U.S. Supreme Court, the right to vote is fundamental because it is preservative of all rights, and yet in many cases legal protections for the right to vote fall short of protections for the other rights that voting is meant to preserve. Redefining the right to vote cannot solve this problem alone. Election administration has at least as much consequence on the right to vote as any particular definition or legal theory. In Democracy’s Bureaucracy, Michael Morse draws our attention to one of the most important yet understudied issues of election administration: voter list maintenance. In addition to his descriptive account of the novel way states have cooperated to perform list maintenance, Morse’s analysis provides a window into three pathologies of America’s election administration more generally. First, the mechanics of elections directly implicate the fundamental right to vote, raising questions of how stringently these procedures should be evaluated by courts. Second, political interference in the administration of elections can flip representative government on its head by insulating elected officials from political accountability and making elections less secure. Finally, several challenges related to the administration of elections are rooted in our electoral system that narrowly links geography and political representation. Relaxing this link may foster a more effective, responsible, and inclusive system of government
Senate Sponsor List
Get PDFhttps://scholar.law.colorado.edu/colorado-house-and-senate-journals/1601/thumbnail.jp
Senate Journal History
Get PDFhttps://scholar.law.colorado.edu/colorado-house-and-senate-journals/1606/thumbnail.jp
Accounting for Climate Impacts in Decisionmaking
Get PDFEvery significant decision made by government agencies, and many made by private organizations, impacts climate change. Ignoring those impacts is increasingly unacceptable. But how to account for a decision’s impact on the climate is far from clear. This article seeks to answer that question in the context of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that will likely result from a proposed action and begins with a detailed description of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process. EIA is crucial to understanding the likely consequences of a proposed action, including the climate-related consequences. EIA also serves as the primary vehicle for estimating GHG emissions and assessing the social cost associated with those emissions. While EIA is most commonly used by government decision makers, tools like EIA work equally well, and are at least as useful in evaluating private actions and their climate impacts. The article then considers how the environmental assessment should address the difficult questions associated with quantifying GHG emissions. To what extent, for example, should indirect emissions count, and how should decision makers calculate them? Once decision makers quantify GHG emissions, they must quantify their cost to society. The social cost of carbon or, more specifically, the “social cost of greenhouse gases” (SC-GHG), is an increasingly popular tool that provides an estimate of that cost and helps ensure that cost receives fair consideration when an agency is choosing among available options. Finally, the article considers the growing movement towards corporate social responsibility as reflected in the push for investment firms and corporations to adopt environment, social, and governance (ESG) policies. While ESG standards are currently lacking clear definition, and while the idea that corporations should follow ESG policies is controversial within some conservative circles, the movement towards ESG policies in the private sector offers an excellent opportunity to focus organizations on their responsibility to account for the climate impacts associated with every important decision that they make