Climate change is one of the most pressing topics of our time, and U.S. energy policy also reverberates around the world. When he came into office, President Joe Biden reversed many of the policies put in place by his predecessor, Donald Trump. With Trump set to return in January, bolstered by majorities in the House and Senate as well as the Supreme Court, climate and energy policy will be high on his agenda.
To talk about what’s happened and what to expect, UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is joined by three renowned experts: UCLA Law Professor Ann E. Carlson and UC Berkeley Law Professors Daniel A. Farber and Sharon Jacobs.
Carlson is the Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law and faculty director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment at UCLA Law. From 2021 to 2024, Carlson served in the Biden-Harris Administration as Chief Counsel and Acting Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Farber is the Sho Sato Professor of Law and faculty director of our Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE). His most recent book, Contested Ground: How to Understand the Limits of Presidential Power, was published in 2021, and he’s written extensively about the collision of climate policy and executive action.
Jacobs, a member of the CLEE Advisory Board, joined the UC Berkeley Law faculty in 2022. Her work has been published in many leading journals, including the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Ecology Law Quarterly. Her most recent article is “The Challenges of Participatory Energy Administration.”
About:
“More Just” from UC Berkeley Law is a podcast about how law schools can and must play a role in solving society’s most difficult problems.
The rule of law — and the role of the law — has never been more important. In these difficult times, law schools can, and must, play an active role in finding solutions. But how? Each episode of More Just starts with a problem, then explores potential solutions, featuring Dean Erwin Chemerinsky as well as other deans, professors, students, and advocates, about how they’re making law schools matter.
Have a question about teaching or studying law, or a topic you’d like Dean Chemerinsky to explore? Email us at morejust@berkeley.edu and tell us what’s on your mind.
Production by Yellow Armadillo Studios.
Episode Transcript
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Hello, listeners. I’m Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of Berkeley Law. And this is more just a podcast how law schools can help solve society’s most difficult problems. Climate change is one of most pressing topics of our time. United States environmental and energy policies reverberate around the world.
When he came into office, President Joe Biden reversed many of the policies put in place by his predecessor, Donald Trump. With Trump set to return to office in January, bolstered by majorities in the House and the Senate as well as on the Supreme Court, climate and energy policy will be high on Trump’s agenda.
What will the election of Donald Trump mean for Energy and Environmental Policy? And what can law schools do? In this episode, I’m joined by three renowned experts in these important fields. Professor Ann Carlson is the Shirley Shapiro professor of environmental law and the faculty director of the Emmett Institute on climate change and the environment at UCLA Law School.
Ann Carlson also served as Chief Counsel and acting administrator for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2021 to 2024 under President Biden. Professor Dan Farber is the Sho Sato professor of law and faculty director of our Center for Law, Energy and Environment.
And Professor Sharon Jacobs is a professor of law here at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Welcome and thanks so much for being here. So, Ann, let me start with you. What’s the election likely to mean for Energy and Environmental policy?
ANN CARLSON: Well, it’s not a secret that President-elect Trump has pledged to roll back climate rules and regulations to really depend on fossil fuels, to try to roll back the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the largest climate bill Congress has ever passed. And he will succeed to some degree. He will slow our energy transition.
But I actually want to make a claim that might seem counterintuitive or even controversial, and that is that, he’s not going to stop the energy revolution that is taking place right now. We are getting most of our new energy from renewable sources solar, wind, geothermal. We are transitioning to zero emission vehicles, maybe a little slower than initially predicted. But just to give you a sense, there are now 117 electric vehicle models available for consumers to purchase in the United States.
The global energy revolution is really similar, something like 90% of new energy sources are, again, coming from wind, sun, not from fossil fuels. Those are going to occur whether or not President-elect Trump is successful in rolling back rules and regulations.
As I said, he will do that. And he can slow the energy transition. We can talk about how much he might succeed, but we’re not going to return to the days where fossil fuels are the dominant fuel for our electricity sector. And we’re moving pretty rapidly to the days when petroleum products are much less dominant in the transportation sector.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Dan, I would ask you the same question as to what the election’s likely to mean. I’d also be interested, following up from what Ann said, how much can President Trump do by executive order? How much can be done by rulemaking through the Environmental Protection agency? How much would take federal statutory change through Congress?
DAN FARBER: Well, there’s a lot to handle there, but let me see if I can respond in a reasonably concise way. I think Ann is right that Trump will not be able to reverse the energy transition. He tried really hard to support coal in his first term, and yet coal production and use was lower when he left office or even before the pandemic, I should say than it was when he came into office.
There are some basic economic and technological forces. Costs for solar and battery storage and EVs in particular have dropped incredibly over the past dozen years or so, and those trends will still remain intact.
That being said, there’s a lot he can do to slow things down, and I don’t think we should be complacent about that because we’re under increasing time pressure as a globe to arrest and reverse the trend of increasing global emissions. And so a delay is– even if it’s only a delay, is going to be very harmful.
We know from his first term that his at least I think default mode will be to roll back everything Biden did. That’s what he did to Obama the first time around. He’ll try to get rid of all of the greenhouse gas emissions regulations that the government came out with under Biden. And we know that he will try really hard to expand production and use of fossil fuels.
So the first term provides a roadmap of what he’s likely to do and get out of the Paris Agreement right away, pull out of any kind of international engagement on climate issues, go after climate scientists and the government and try to– we’ve got that playbook.
There are a few things that are different, though. That could be wild cards. One of them is Elon Musk, who’s been a very influential player in the administration so far as an advisor to Trump. And we know Musk has a big investment in electric vehicles. He is a believer in climate change. And so he may at some points actually skew the trajectory away from Trump’s first term. That could also be true to an extent of RFK jr. At least on some issues, but probably not on climate issues.
What can Trump do through various different modes? Probably the most important single issue will be the Inflation Reduction Act, which was the signature, claim achievement of the Biden administration. I’ve written about this several times. I think it moves climate policy in a whole new direction, away from regulation toward economic incentives.
And I think it’s going to have a long term permanent impact. I think it’s already had an impact because of all the money that’s been invested and so forth. The question is, what will happen with the IRA under Trump?
He can do a variety of things to sabotage or slow down payments. He can try to fiddle with the tax credit rules in the IRS to try to make the tax credits less available, but really to do anything very significant. He’s going to need Congress.
There’s a lot of talk in Congress about repealing the IRA, but there are also quite a large number of Republican House members who have big IRA funded projects in their districts and who are very reluctant to be responsible for killing those projects.
So I like most observers, I don’t think he’ll be successful in repealing the IRA wholesale, but they may go after some specific things. They really hate the tax credits for people who buy electric vehicles, so that might be a vulnerable target, but that will need Congress anyway.
On Biden’s regulations. Those have to be done by the same process. So if it’s an EPA regulation, it has to be done by the EPA. If it’s a Department of Transportation regulation of the kind that Ann was recently involved with as a member of the Biden administration, that will have to be done through the same agency and so forth. And that’s going to be very time consuming, complicated endeavor.
What about executive orders? One thing Trump could easily do through executive orders is get rid of all of Biden’s executive orders. So that means all the directives that Biden gave to agencies, all of his emphasis on environmental justice, I think will be out the window. Trump will tell the relevant White House Office to eliminate any discussion of the social cost of carbon and so forth. Those are things that he can do.
Most of the other things he will– President’s claim that they’ve done x, y, or z in executive orders. But really what they’ve generally done is they’ve told some agency to go and take care of it, but nothing really happens on the ground until that happens. All of that’s going to be in litigation.
And I think that more or less covers the waterfront. But I’m anxious to find out what Sharon thinks, especially since she comes to this with an expertise in energy law that I don’t really have.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: And Sharon, as I was listening to both Ann and Dan, I think we’re talking about two very interrelated things. One is the energy policy aspect of it, the desire to focus on more fossil fuels. And then there’s the environmental policy part of it, which is the environmental standards that exist. Where do you see Trump going as to each of these?
SHARON JACOBS: I wish I could disagree with Ann and Dan and have a more interesting conversation, perhaps, but I think they’re largely right about what we can expect out of this administration. I think that the rhetoric that we’re going to hear, including the rhetoric from executive orders on the first day of Trump’s second term now is going to be dramatic.
We’re going to see the repeal of executive orders on everything from climate priorities to energy and environmental justice, and perhaps the replacement of some of those executive orders with new ones that express a set of new priorities, including favoritism of oil and gas and other fossil fuels.
But as Dan said, the rhetoric and the reality are quite different things. It’s one thing to say something in an executive order. It’s another thing to put new policies in place. And when it comes to energy policy which you asked about, we actually might have some room for agreement between Democrats and Republicans on a few core elements of the energy transition.
And one of those is nuclear power. So this is an area where we’ve seen bipartisan legislation in the Congress promoting, streamline permitting of nuclear power plants and the permitting of advanced nuclear power plants.
Another might be policy on geothermal development, where in the first Trump administration there was actually broad support for promoting geothermal development in the West on public lands and private lands. These are areas where we can move forward on low carbon technologies in the energy sector regardless of what happens with our environmental and emissions reductions policies.
So there are areas for agreement in energy policy. There will be a number of areas, though, where we will see the Trump administration try to roll back policies that are essential to the energy transition. And in addition to the ones that Dan and Ann mentioned, maybe I will just add to that. The Department of energy has energy efficiency programs that set efficiency standards for consumer and commercial appliances.
President Trump has expressed disdain for those programs and will likely not continue to set more efficient standards over time. However, those programs have anti backsliding provisions, so there’s a limit to how much the Trump administration can roll back the efficiency standards we already have.
And we have the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as well. It’s an agency whose work people might be less familiar with, but they’re doing very important work right now on our electric transmission grid, on rules to interconnect with the grid, on the co-location of loads for data centers, on planning for new transmission.
And that is an agency that is a little bit more insulated from presidential impact because it is a so-called independent agency with commissioners from both political parties. So it remains to be seen what kind of effect President Trump will have there.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: As I’ve listened to each of you give a very nuanced answer, but also an answer that predicts significant change. How worried should we be with this is going to mean for climate change in the environment? How much damage should we fear is going to happen in the next four years?
ANN CARLSON: I think the damage– And again, this might be controversial. I think the damage is mostly marginal and if the Inflation Reduction Act stays in place, something that Dan discussed. The Inflation Reduction Act is really important because it is spurring technological innovation and development. And that’s really what we need across every sector of the economy.
It has, for example, tax incentives for industrial emissions, something we haven’t spent enough time or enough effort trying to reduce. It’s got tax incentives for manufacturing electric vehicles in the United States. It’s got tax incentives for nuclear power, as Sharon was discussing. All of these things can go a long way to spur technological development.
And in my view, the most important thing the United States can do is develop technology that then disperses across the globe. We need to have a ripple effect. Our emissions alone are important, but if we cut our emissions dramatically, we still don’t stop the problem of climate change. We need global action.
And so I think it’s really, really important that we continue to spur the kind of technological innovation and cost reductions that we’ve seen across the energy sector. I think there’s another place that is really hard to predict, but really important and interesting, and that is that the President-elect has said that he’s going to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement.
That’s the agreement that the global community came together to enact that basically provides an opportunity for countries to commit to reducing their emissions. It’s not a top down treaty. It’s actually something that we think about it as ground up, where countries voluntarily do what they can to reduce their emissions.
If the United States pulls out, I think what we’re going to see is actually a global realignment. We’re already seeing that to some degree with China really taking the lead in climate leadership and also technological and green leadership. And that’s something that this president ought to be concerned about. We care a lot about our relationship with China. We care a lot about global economic competition, and we want to be a player in that competition.
And so I think what we could see is rather than massive problems reducing greenhouse gases, a shift to where those are occurring, who’s developing the technology to do that, and so forth.
So for me, again, I’m going to say the same thing Dan said, which is I think the most important thing we can do is stay committed to the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the biggest climate legislation ever passed, and does a lot to speed the transition to a clean energy economy across sectors.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: And Dan, can I ask you the same question based on what you said we can expect. How worried should people who care about the environment be as to how much can happen in the next four years? Sharon.
SHARON JACOBS: So I’m very concerned about the government’s ability in the next four years to execute a lot of the programs that Ann is talking about under the IRA and in other domains as well. If we’re to maintain our leadership on the clean energy transition, we need to actually implement laws, not just write them. And that means we need our government agencies to be functional.
And one of the things that I’m most was concerned about is the vitality of those agencies. President Trump has made no secret of his desire to drain the swamp, to go after what he calls faceless bureaucrats to dismantle federal agencies like the parts of the Department of Energy, like the EPA.
And these are the agencies that implement some of the important loan programs. We have agencies that are implementing the tax support programs of the IRA. And that are doing the day to day work of government that frankly, people may not think about, but it helps protect our clean water, our clean air, but also this technological shift.
And so I’m worried about President Trump’s desire to reclassify civil servants in a way that allows him to simply remove them without the Civil Service Protections that they’ve come to expect. I’m worried about his plans, talking about moving the EPA headquarters out of Washington. That’s 7,000 employees that would be faced with a choice of either retiring or moving their entire lives somewhere else.
He’s made very clear that move would be an effort to get employees to quit. And agencies can’t function without staff. And it’s very hard to replace the staff of the federal government in any large scale way if we’re seeing people retire, quit, seeing people removed from office. So I am very concerned about whether the federal government is actually going to have capacity to implement any of its existing programs, not to mention ambitious programs like the IRA.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Dan.
DAN FARBER: Well, I agree with everything that both Ann and Sharon said, so I’ll just add a couple of things. I do think we have to worry about permanent effects of the Trump administration that go beyond, say, rolling back a regulation that later on somebody can put back into place the issues that Sharon was talking about are very real.
And in addition, another point is that the federal judiciary is going to change. We already have the most conservative Supreme Court. We’ve probably had in at least a century. We have courts of Appeals that have already a large number of Trump appointees.
I don’t know if there will be a chance for Trump to do a Supreme Court appointment in the next four years. I think that’s unknowable. But he’ll definitely have the chance to do lower court appointments, and those judges are going to be around for a long time. It’s not that they’re all like crazed ideologues or something, but they’re not exactly sympathetic with government regulation or advocates of Environmental Protection. And I think that is going to make it more difficult in the long run for the government to take effective environmental action. So I’m quite worried about that.
I’m also really worried about delay. I mean you can say, well, we’ll get back on track after Trump, and maybe we will, but in the meantime, we will have lost four years even if we don’t backslide below that. We are already behind schedule.
Even with the IRA, the US was not set and the Biden administration policies was not set to meet the target that President Biden gave the international community of 50% cuts in US emissions. And with Trump, we’re going to be farther behind that. We need to get to something very close to net zero by 2050. And 2050 is getting increasingly closer.
So it’s like we’re running a race and yes, we’re only going to be waiting on the starting line a few more minutes before we start running. But that’s going to make it a lot harder to win the race. So I’m very worried about that.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Let me ask you each this question. In light of what you’ve said, what can be done to push back against the Trump efforts? And how successful are they likely to be? What can a state like California do? What can be done by challenges in the courts? And is any of it likely to succeed? Ann again, if I could start with you.
ANN CARLSON: There are a lot of ways to resist and push back. I don’t think they’re completely successful. But let me give you several examples. One is that in the first Trump administration, something like 83% of court challenges to efforts to roll back environmental regulations by the Trump administration succeeded.
Why is that? Because the administration did not follow appropriate procedures. It frequently undermines substantive law. And I’m going to guess that’s going to happen again. So having a really robust set of environmental organizations, state attorneys general to challenge a lot of these rollbacks is going to be really important.
It is true that Trump has appointed a lot of judges to the court. It’s also true that President Biden did. So there are a lot of Biden judges. There are circuits of the Courts of Appeal that are actually more friendly to getting regulations right, not undermining the law. So we’re going to have to push there.
California plays a very special role for a couple of reasons, and I think will continue to do so. But I’m also very worried about what might happen to some of its power. So one of the things The State does is that it has special authority under the Federal Clean Air Act to issue its own standards for transportation emissions. That’s for regular pollution and for greenhouse gases.
Right now pending in front of the EPA are eight separate what are called waivers, because California can’t actually act unless it gets permission from the Environmental Protection Agency. I expect that the Biden administration will grant all or most of those waivers, and then the Trump administration will come in and try to withdraw them.
By the way, that takes time too. Last round it took 18 months. In the meantime, the California laws are actually in effect. So there’s some ways that delay can be offset by the existing laws that remain in place until the Trump administration succeeds in rolling them back.
So I’m worried about that power. But California has a lot of other powers to really push toward zero emission. It’s been doing that across a bunch of different sectors. It’s got a robust cap and trade program to cut carbon emissions. It just tightened something called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard to transition us to cleaner fuels and lots of different ways. And I expect that the state will continue to use those powers and then add some.
So, for example, if it can’t actually cut emissions from vehicles directly, it can use some powers under different statutes to get fleets to be cleaner, to reduce the emissions that go into ports, that go to all these burgeoning warehouses in the Inland empire that are servicing the economy and moving goods from the Los Angeles ports all the way across country.
And I think Governor Newsom has already shown he’s calling a special session to bring the legislature back, to make sure that California is not backsliding, that we are, in fact, pushing toward our climate goals. I think we’re going to see that.
And then I want to just make one other point, which is something that Sharon and Dan have both said, but I want to stress it. And that is it is actually hard to repeal regulations and you can’t do it without really good and competent and technical civil servants.
The great little secret about the government is it’s not the political appointees who do all the work. It’s the career staff. And I know that from having run an agency under the Biden administration. And I can tell you that we could not have withdrawn rules that the Trump administration had issued and reformulated them in a way that we thought was much more consistent with the statute and was consistent with an executive order that President Biden had issued.
We couldn’t have done that without really sophisticated technical staff doing all the modeling, doing a lot of the drafting, figuring out what the costs and benefits are, all those sorts of things.
So ironically, if the Trump administration goes forward with its project 2025 recommendations to seriously slash the civil service and replace those civil servants with political appointees, they’re not going to be able to carry out their own agenda. They could cut off their nose to spite their face.
So I think a lot remains to be seen about actually how effective they’re going to be. I’d add one more thing, which is we now who the EPA administrator, at least the nominee, is. He’s not somebody who has experience in running an agency.
He’s not somebody who’s very experienced in environmental law. That hurts when you’re trying to carry out very sophisticated regulatory rollbacks that again, require complying with all sorts of laws and processes. And if you don’t get it right, the courts will strike you down. And in the meantime, the Biden policies remain in place.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Dan and Sharon, I’d ask you the same question, what can be done to push back against these changes? And how successful is the push back likely to be? Dan.
DAN FARBER: So I agree with Ann that litigation against the Trump administration is going to continue to be very important. There was a thought that they lost a lot of cases in the first term because they were sloppy. They had learned their lessons and they weren’t going to put incompetent people this time around to make sure that the work got done right. There is no indication that that’s happened.
Ann’s already talked about the proposed EPA administrator. It’s also true that the Supreme Court has made some changes in administrative law, which I mostly don’t like. But the effect of those changes is to make it more difficult for administrative agencies to get their way in court. And Trump may find that those decisions which conservatives hailed as victories, are actually going to make it harder for him to get things done.
On the state side, absolutely California is crucial. California is now struggling a bit to meet our own internal codant reduction goals, and we’ve got to take some action to make sure that happens more effectively. But I don’t think California, is important as it is in this sphere, is going to be able to do things alone.
We’ve got to start working more effectively than in the past with other states. There are a dozen states that I think have net zero targets or just zero emission targets. And so there is the basis for a coalition of the willing. But I think we really need to help each other if we’re going to succeed and take up some of the slack from the federal government’s going AWOL from the climate effort.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: And Sharon, your thoughts.
SHARON JACOBS: So I would add to that, that there are two things that we’ve heard from those surrounding President Trump and from Republicans more generally over the last few years, that I think we can maybe all agree on and that provide some cause for hope that we can both resist some of the anti climate measures we might see and continue to move ahead in the energy transition.
And one is, there’s been a lot of talk about state autonomy and the importance of states being able to choose their own destinies. And I think this is an area where California, as both Ann and Dan have said, is at the forefront of a number of climate and energy policies.
But as Dan has also said, there are a number of state partners out there eager to work with California. California has the advantage of abundant resources in our agencies at the state level, and we can share knowledge with other states and learn from their experiments as well.
So I think if all of us can be serious about state autonomy, this is a chance for states to step up and showcase some of their innovative programs, things like New legislation on climate standards, things like building standards and energy efficiency. I mean, this is detailed work, but it’s important work.
And I agree with Dan that if there can be a coalition of states working together, we can make a lot of decisions in energy policy. Energy is not like environmental law in that, there is just a huge amount of authority that’s been left with the states. There’s some environmental authority that’s also been left with the states.
But in the energy sector, the Federal Power Act, the natural gas is some of our big statutes have drawn a fairly clear line between what is the federal government’s business and what is the state’s business. And the states have a lot of authority to decide what kind of power mix they want in their state, for example. So I think there’s a lot that we can continue to do in that area.
The other thing that we’ve heard a lot that I think we might be able to find some agreement on is this idea of legislative supremacy in some of the Supreme Court opinions. Some of the justices have talked about the importance of allowing Congress to make important decisions. It turns out Congress has made a lot of important decisions when it comes to environmental law, when it comes to energy policy, when it comes to the energy transition.
And in some of these challenges that Ann and Dan have been talking about in the courts, there’s a fair amount of substance in the federal statutes that I think will make it hard for the Trump administration to do too much when it comes to rolling back certain programs.
In particular, there are jobs that Congress just assigns to agencies that they must perform if they are to be faithful to their authorizing legislation, reviewing certain types of standards every so many years. And statutes can be quite detailed about that.
And so I think there’s a lot of room to bring lawsuits to just make sure that the work of government continues if it looks like there’s an effort to delay, to nullify, not to proceed with the work that Congress has already required.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: I’d like to ask you each one more question, and that really goes to what this podcast series is all about. What should law schools be doing as we contemplate the next Trump presidency in the environment?
DAN FARBER: One of the things that both UCLA and Berkeley have in common is that our law schools have a very sophisticated environmental law centers. And these are really think tanks that engage in policy work. They’re part of the academic institutions. That means that they’re not engaged in politics. But what they are engaged in is working on ways to improve environmental policy and help figure out better ways to implement it.
Both of our research centers work very closely with state and local officials in California in particular, but not only in California to help do some of the things we’ve been talking about, try to make California’s programs a success, try to find ways that they can be models elsewhere.
And so I think that that’s a very important role, in my opinion. UCLA and Berkeley have the best environmental law centers in the country, but we definitely– that would be contested by some people. And we definitely don’t have the only ones. There are a number of very active environmental law centers at law schools, from here all the way to the East Coast. And I think they can play a really important role.
I think another area where maybe Ann would have a little more to say than I do would be environmental law clinics. That’s because Ann, I think, has been more involved with the clinical program there. But that’s clearly another way in maybe more direct and immediate way that law schools can be involved in making a constructive contribution to moving the energy and environmental world forward.
And then finally, of course, there’s teaching. In the long run, the most important thing we do is train the lawyers and leaders for the future generation. And that may or may not have an effect within the next four years. But it’s crucial for what will be a very long effort to deal with our most crucial environmental problems.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: Sharon and then Ann.
SHARON JACOBS: So maybe I’ll just pick up on the tail end of Dan’s comments and say that with respect to our teaching mission, Law schools will continue to educate our students and prepare them for the energy system of the 21st century. And that’s true with respect to environmental law as well. I mean, things change sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.
We’re actually not very good as humans at predicting how things will change in energy law. Nobody predicted the hydraulic fracturing revolution that made the US a net exporter in natural gas. People were predicting the rise of data centers and the incredible rise in electricity demand that will accompany them.
So our students have to stay nimble. We have incredible students here at Berkeley Law and at UCLA and across the country that will have to help stakeholders understand these new trends, new laws and rules at the federal and state level.
Lawyers help people navigate conflicts, and we are going to see I think, an increased number of conflicts over what the right way is to implement laws and policy over the next four years. And we have to make sure our students are ready to do that. And that’s not just teaching them in the traditional courses, but also the rich world of interdisciplinary opportunities that we offer, working with students across campus in engineering schools, in design schools, in the business school.
We have an incredible cross campus energy group here at Berkeley that’s student led, the Berkeley Energy resources collaborative to help students build networks to solve problems in the law and beyond. And maybe I’ll just add, I think one of the most important things that law schools can do right now, even though it’s not specific to energy and environmental law, is to continue to foster critical thinking skills.
I think it can be very tempting at the time of a change in presidential administration, whether it’s one that you celebrate or one that causes you some concern to retreat to black and white thinking. And I think that we have to continue to subject our own impulses to scrutiny. I think we need to continue to engage respectfully with others’ views.
I think we need to continue to realize that just because a politician that we don’t favor puts forward an idea, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad idea. So I think we need to continue to foster that critique and that respect in our classroom environments.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: And Ann.
ANN CARLSON: So I think our best and highest mission right now is to train the next generation of environmental lawyers. The good news is that that’s something that we’ve been doing at Berkeley and at UCLA for the past 20 years. I won’t say 30 because when I started at UCLA 30 years ago, I was the first environmental law professor in a long time to be there. But you can see the results already throughout state and federal government and private practice.
Just to give you a couple of examples, when I was in the federal government, the general counsel of the Environmental Protection Agency was a UCLA Law grad, the head of the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Administration at the Department of Transportation, which has responsibility for making sure that methane doesn’t leak, among other things, is a Berkeley Law grad.
Our grads are scattered all over the place doing really, really important work there in the California Attorney general’s office, defending California’s powers, sometimes litigating to hold the federal government responsible for the statutes that it needs to administer. There in the Environmental Protection Agency, there in the Department of Energy, there in the Department of Transportation.
And I think they’ve got an incredible training at our law schools because as Dan has said, both UCLA and Berkeley have really invested in environmental law, energy law as important cutting edge subjects, given that we face the greatest existential environmental problem we’ve ever faced in climate change. And that means devoting a lot of resources to the training of students and again, not just in law, as Sharon said, across disciplines.
I’m happy to say that my son is a part of the Berkeley Energy student group and just got to see Sharon speak at a conference. He’s getting an MBA at Haas. So all of the work that the centers do, I think are as aimed at really giving our students the greatest environmental education they can. We do that with clinical education.
UCLA has both an environmental Law Clinic and a legislative clinic that works on with the California legislature on cutting edge energy and environmental issues because the law is not just about being in court. It’s also about crafting the laws, crafting good laws. So we provide a huge number of opportunities, and we’re going to keep needing to do that because this is not an environmental problem we’re going to solve overnight.
If we’re lucky, we get to net zero by 2050. That is something we’re going to be working on in 2040 and 2045. And then we’re going to continue to need to ensure that we are responding to climate crises, that we’re building resilience into our communities, that we’re adapting to the temperature increases that are already going to occur.
Dan Farber is the leading scholar on disasters in the law. Disasters are something that are regularly occurring at greater pace and at greater magnitude because of climate change. So law schools have a huge role to play in training our leaders, our next leaders, our next generation of environmental lawyers, leaders, judges, legislators in tackling this great environmental problem.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: And so echo it, all three of you said, I’m often asked what gives me the most hope for the future, and my answer is immediately our students. Last, we’re out of time now, I want so much to thank Ann Carlson, who’s the Shirley Shapiro professor of environmental law and faculty director of the Emmett Institute on climate change and the environment at UCLA Law School.
My colleague Dan Farber, the Sho Sato professor of law at Berkeley Law and faculty director of our Center for Energy Environment, and Sharon Jacobs, Professor of law here at Berkeley Law.
I thank you all for joining me, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of more just. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m UC Berkeley Law Dean, Erwin Chemerinsky.