Daniel C. Esty

• Yale University

This Article, which is adapted from Goran Dominioni & Daniel C. Esty, Designing Effective Border Carbon Adjustment Mechanisms: Aligning the Global Trade and Climate Change Regimes, 65 Ariz. L. Rev. 1 (2023), proposes a taxonomy of approaches to comparing climate policies implemented in the importing and the exporting countries and analyzes their re...

Government subsidies for fossil fuels, agricultural production, and fisheries amount to trillions of dollars per year. This funding harms economic inefficiency, disrupts trade, and actively exacerbates the global environmental and climate crises. Moreover, the scale of these subsidies far exceeds the support provided to industries and activities th...

Policy work in both the United States and the European Union (“EU”) is underway on how best to structure border carbon adjustment (“BCA”) mechanisms to protect the competitiveness of domestic industries while these enterprises make investments in reducing their greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions. Often, these investments are costly for domestic indus...

Some academics tail off as their scholarly career winds down, while others reach ever-greater heights. Professor E.U. Petersmann confirms his place in the latter camp with his new Oxford University Press book, Transforming World Trade and Investment Law for Sustainable Development. In this volume, Professor Petersmann reviews the state of the globa...

Every country in the world needs to improve its environmental performance, and doing so requires data-driven insights into the factors associated with success in attaining environmental sustainability goals. We analyze here the 2020 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), a comprehensive composite index that provides a scorecard for 180 countries on...

Critics have opposed clean energy public investment by claiming that governments must not pick winners, green subsidies enable rent-seeking behaviour, and failed companies means failed policy. These arguments are problematic and should not determine the direction of energy investment policies.

Over six million people die prematurely each year from exposure to air pollution. Current air quality metrics insufficiently monitor exposure to air pollutants. This gap hinders the ability of decisionmakers to address the public health impacts of air pollution. To spur new emissions control policies and ensure implemented solutions realize meaning...

Providing a comprehensive overview of the current and developing state of environmental governance in the United States, this Advanced Introduction lays out the foundations of U.S. environmental law. E. Donald Elliott and Daniel C. Esty explore how federal environmental law is made and how it interacts with state law, highlighting the important rol...

Background Short-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2·5) is associated with increased risk of hospital admissions and mortality, and health risks differ by the chemical composition of PM2·5. Policies to control PM2·5 could change its chemical composition and total mass concentration, leading to change in the subsequent health impact. Howev...

Marketplace evidence suggests that a significant number of mainstream value investors want to understand which companies are positioned not just to navigate sustainability issues—including climate change, air and water pollution, racial injustice, workplace diversity, structural inequality, privacy, corporate integrity, and good governance—but whic...

Sustainable investing has expanded from a niche interest to a mainstay of investment strategies around the world. With a growing number of investors focused not just on the financial promise of the companies in their portfolios but also the environmental, social, and governance performance of these enterprises, the demand for better ESG metrics and...

Rising interest in sustainable investing has led to intensified scrutiny of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting. But this heightened interest has convinced many investors and market analysts that the existing ESG metrics lack clear definitional foundations, methodological consistency, analytic rigor, and reliable verification, thu...

We are pleased to serve as guest editors of this special issue of the journal Organization & Environment on the State of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) Standards. Calls for standardization of corporate sustainability data continue to mount as a growing segment of the mainstream investor community seeks greater clarity and comparability...

The 2020 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks 180 countries on 32 performance indicators in the following 11 issue categories: air quality, sanitation and drinking water, heavy metals, waste management, biodiversity and habitat, ecosystem services, fisheries, climate change, pollution emissions, agriculture, and water resources. These catego...

Sustainable investing is a rapidly growing and evolving field. With investors expressing ever greater interest in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics and reporting, companies face a sustainability imperative and the need to remake their business models to respond to an array of pressing issues including climate change, air and water...

After more than two decades of inadequate international efforts to address climate change resulting from rising greenhouse gas emissions, the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement shifted gears. That agreement advances a “bottom-up” model of global cooperation that requires action commitments from all national governments and acknowledges the importa...

Waste-sector greenhouse gas emissions have long been accepted as a critical component of climate change mitigation efforts because of the significant radiative forcing of methane (CH4) production from municipal landfills and other emissions from waste management processes. In developed countries, waste generation is expected to peak and decline by...

In the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement, 195 countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in recognition of the scientific consensus on the consequences of climate change, including substantial public health burdens. In June 2017, however, US president Donald Trump announced that the United States would not implement the Paris Agreem...

No baseball team picks players in 2018 the way it did in 1978. Nor does any business do marketing today the same way it did in decades past. Environmental protection, however, remains stuck in a top-down 20th century regulatory model. But new tools and strategies, including carbon pricing, could unleash a sustainability revolution that drives innov...

Suggested Citation: Wendling, Z. A., Emerson, J. W., Esty, D. C., Levy, M. A., de Sherbinin, A., et al. (2018). 2018 Environmental Performance Index. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy. https://epi.yale.edu/ The world has entered a new era of data-driven environmental policymaking. With the UN’s 2015 Sustainable Development...

Putting a value on emissions can lower energy use, write Kenneth Gillingham, Stefano Carattini and Daniel Esty.

Le présent article soutient que l’organisation institutionnelle et politique des États-Unis devrait permettre de limiter les dommages causés par la Présidence Trump à l’Accord de Paris, et à la politique environnementale américaine plus généralement. Nous commençons donc par décrire les récentes attaques de l’administration Trump envers la protecti...

As economies and citizen priorities continue to evolve, governance practices must also adjust to changing circumstances and public expectations. This article explores the important topic of regulatory transformation, drawing from both the academic literature and the author's recent experience heading Connecticut's Department of Energy and Environme...

The Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks countries’ performance on high-priority environmental issues in two areas: protection of human health and protection of ecosystems. Within these two policy objectives the EPI scores national performance in nine issue areas comprised of more than 20 indicators (see EPI Framework). EPI indicators measur...

The world is making progress addressing some environmental issues while others have worsened considerably. When measurement is poor or not aligned with proper management, environmental and human health suffer.

Businesses and the public can keep watch when governments fail to provide environmental data, say Angel Hsu and colleagues.

Incoherent U.S. energy and climate policies have cast a pall over the entire economy and are putting U.S. companies at a serious global disadvantage. The authors offer 10 prescriptions for reforms, two of which they describe in detail. First, they argue that the U.S. should impose a gradually increasing carbon charge; this would help internalize en...

This chapter explores the transatlantic environmental relationship and tries to identify the underlying causes of the current strains. More broadly, it assesses the dispute-settlement capacities of the international environmental regime, including both the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the numerous Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs)...

Environmental performance, encompassing the control of pollution and stewardship of natural resources, is of growing concern in both advanced and developing economies. Environmental quality plays a major role in quality of life, with a direct impact on the health and safety of a nation’s citizens as well as its attractiveness as a place to live. It...

The need to reframe environmental law is great, not only domestically but internationally, where an effective worldwide response to issues that transcend national borders is urgently required. This article reviews the performance of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and other international bodies and urges their replacement with a new...

Until recently, trade policymakers and environmental officials worked on separate tracks, rarely perceiving their paths as intersecting. Now that environmental protection has become a central issue on the public agenda, trade and environmental policies seem deeply intertwined and in some cases badly tangled. Environmentalists are calling the Genera...

But a successful response to climate change and other international environmental problems requires more than good economic theory. Legal, policy, ethical, and institutional underpinnings must also be established for effective global environmental governance. In this paper, necessary elements together with economic logic. I spell out the legal and...

The United States entered the 21st century actively pursuing a “go-it-alone” approach to international relations. This is especially the case in global environmental affairs, where the United States is now widely perceived as a laggard and even an obstacle to collective action. Yet, the United States was the prime proponent and creator of internati...

Global environmental governance has emerged as a hot topic in scholarly circles. The manifest inadequacy of international policy cooperation in response to transboundary pollution problems and the need for better management of shared natural resources has led to a flurry of academic writing. Scholars in environmental studies, political science, int...

Customers, capital markets, governments, and NGOs are putting more pressure on corporations to report on emissions and reduce them. Companies that fail to meet those expectations face serious consequences, for four reasons.

Good governance lies at the heart of both the effectiveness and legitimacy of collective decision-making. In this essay, Professor Esty argues that, if the World Trade Organization (WTO) is to be successful in its designated role of promoting trade liberalization and helping to manage international economic interdependence, it needs a deeper commit...

A wide variety of data-driven approaches, in the corporate sector, helps in increases profits, improving performance and reliability, evaluating the success of advertising campaigns, and determining the optimal price. The ability to collect and analyze large amounts of data has allowed decision makers to cut through the potential distortions to dis...

The Body Shop built a famously green brand, but the company struggled financially for years.

The industrialization of the developing world is now and will continue to be predominately financed by private capital rather than bilateral or multilateral assistance. To the extent that associated pollution problems spill across national boundaries, this industrialization can no longer be viewed by the developed world as simply an investment oppo...

This Article examines the tension between the demonstrable need for structured international cooperation in a world of interdependence and the political strain that arises whenever policymaking authority is lodged in global institutions. It argues that the tools of administrative law, which have been used to legitimate regulatory decisionmaking in...

Today, environmental policy now must include action on several fronts: local, state or provincial, national, regional, and global. This article maps the drivers behind the globalizing of environmental policy over the past 25 years. Technological advances have revolutionized our understanding of how environmental issues transcend boundaries; economi...

The essential guide for forward-thinking business leaders who see the Green Wave coming and want to profit from it. This book explores what every executive must know to manage the environmental challenges facing society and business. Based on the authors' years of experience and hundreds of interviews with corporate leaders around the world, Green...

Efforts to identify the determinants of environmental policy success at the national level have largely been anecdotal and case study based. This article seeks to identify empirically the factors that drive environmental performance as measured by levels of urban particulates and sulfur dioxide and energy use per unit of GDP. Although the data are...

Efforts to identify the determinants of environmental policy success at the national level have largely been anecdotal and case study based. This article seeks to identify empirically the factors that drive environmental performance as measured by levels of urban particulates and sulfur dioxide and energy use per unit of GDP. Although the data are...

Regulatory reformers in the United States call for decentralization in the name of 'federalism'. In Europe, a similar sentiment advances under the banner of 'subsidiarity'. One of the underlying and critical theoretical premises of these two movements is the suggestion that 'regulatory competition' among horizontally arrayed governments will genera...

Information gaps and uncertainties lie at the heart of many persistent pollution and natural resource management problems. This article develops a taxonomy of these gaps and argues that the emerging technologies of the Information Age will create new gap-filling options and thus expand the range of environmental protection strategies. Remote sensin...

This paper seeks to examine the relationship between trade liberalization and environmental protection with an eye toward alleviating conflicts between these important policy goals and making them more mutually reinforcing, especially in the context of regional trade agreements. Part I spells out and categorizes the various concerns that the parall...

Information gaps and uncertainties lie at the heart of many persistent pollution and natural resource management problems. This article develops a taxonomy of these information gaps and argues that the emerging technologies of the Information Age will transform the potential to fill these gaps and thus expand the range of policy tools and strategic...

David Henderson misreads, misstates, and misunderstands my argument in The World Trade Organization s Legitimacy Crisis. He pejoratively refers to my suggestions for restoring the WTO s legitimacy as radical no fewer than three times.

Attention to environmental issues is vital if the full potential economic benefits of international trade are to be realized. Greening the Americas offers a number of analytically rigorous proposals to ensure that economic integration in the Western Hemisphere proceeds in an environmentally sustainable and politically sensible manner. The chapters...

Attention to environmental issues is vital if the full potential economic benefits of international trade are to be realized. Greening the Americas offers a number of analytically rigorous proposals to ensure that economic integration in the Western Hemisphere proceeds in an environmentally sustainable and politically sensible manner. The chapters...

Despite the successful launch of a new round of multilateral trade negotiations at Doha, the World Trade Organization faces a legitimacy crisis. Protests continue to rock major international economic meetings, and the WTO s role in globalization is being questioned by many observers. This paper examines the contours of this crisis and explores the...

Environmental decision-making has long been plagued by uncertainties and a lack of critical information. The data and analyses needed for thoughtful and systematic action to minimize pollution harms and to optimize the use of natural resources are often unavailable or seem too costly to obtain. As a result, choices are made on the basis of generali...

Environmental decision-making has long been plagued by uncertainties and a lack of critical information. The data and analyses needed for thoughtful and systematic action to minimize pollution harms and to optimize the use of natural resources are often unavailable or seem too costly to obtain. As a result, choices are made on the basis of generali...

Many rallied to the banner of sustainable development in the 1990s, but its success as a buzzword is a poor substitute for environmental progress.

Perceived conflict between trade liberalization and environmental protection can be traced to a number of issues. Some tensions relate to the environmental Kuznets curve and whether economic growth yields environmental benefits. Other concerns arise from efforts to address transboundary externalities and disputes over the role of trade measures as...

Regulatory Competition and Economic Integration addresses one of the hottest policy questions on both sides of the Atlantic: at what level of government should regulation be undertaken? Whether called 'federalism' or 'subsidiarity', the struggle between those who wish to centralize governmental functions and those who seek to decentralize them loom...

Regulatory Competition and Economic Integration addresses one of the hottest policy questions on both sides of the Atlantic: at what level of government should regulation be undertaken? Whether called 'federalism' or 'subsidiarity', the struggle between those who wish to centralize governmental functions and those who seek to decentralize them loom...

Regulatory reformers in the United States call for decentralization in the name of 'federalism'. In Europe, a similar sentiment advances under the banner of 'subsidiarity'. One of the underlying and critical theoretical premises of these two movements is the suggestion that 'regulatory competition' among horizontally arrayed governments will genera...

From an environmental point of view, the big news coming out of Seattle was not the (non) results of the Ministerial Meeting but rather what took place in the streets. The presence of 20,000 protestors, many of them motivated by a conviction that globalization in general and the work of the WTO in particular was a threat, marks a watershed for the...

Air and water pollution blighted northern Mexican cities long before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was a glimmer on the political horizon. Not surprisingly, when NAFTA became a political reality, environmentalists argued that commercial competition would weaken environmental standards in Canada and the United States and industrial...

Ten years ago, the world embarked on an extensive negotiating process to address the issue ofpossible climate change due to a buildup of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. The prospect of human-induced changes in mean temperatures, weather patterns, sea level, rainfall, soil moisture, and the severity of storms looms large as a potential t...

In response to a request from Vice President Al Gore in 1994, the CIA established "The State Failure Task Force," a group of independent researchers to examine comprehensively the factors and forces that have affected the stability of the post-Cold War world. The Task Force's goal was to identify the factors or combinations of factors that distingu...

Better environmental results depend less on fine tuning theories of environmental federalism than on improving regulatory performance. Simply put, how we regulate is more important than where we regulate. Current environmental policy efforts fall short for a number of reasons: technical and information shortcomings, "structural" or jurisdictional m...

In the emerging field of industrial ecology one of the unsettled questions is the degree to which design for the environment, closing energy and materials loops, and other industrial ecology concepts apply at the firm level. In this article we examine this issue with a particular focus on whether industrial ecology can guide company strategy and ef...

Environmental problems will increasingly spill over national boundaries. An effective and efficient response to these problems will require international solutions; relying purely on national regulatory mechanisms to address global issues will not suffice. To meet this need, better international environmental programs must be developed that maximiz...

Twenty-five years ago, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so contaminated that it caught fire, air pollution in some cities was thick enough to taste, and environmental laws focused on the obvious enemy: large American factories with belching smoke-stacks and pipes gushing wastes. Federal legislation has succeeded in providing cleaner air and water, bu...

This Article explores the role of the World Trade Organization ("WTO") as part of an emerging system of international governance. I focus on a set of inescapable linkages from the trade regime, to other policy issues and goals, such as environmental protection. I further argue that the future success and effectiveness of the World Trade Organizatio...

Against that backdrop, this article has two main objectives. First, it provides a conceptual framework for examining the relationship between environmental regulation and international competitiveness. Specifically, it categorizes the various competitiveness concerns arising from the intersection of trade liberalization and environmental protection...

Sustainable development has become a central tenet of modem environmentalism. Unfortunately, this concept has often been used as a slogan in environmental battles rather than as a concrete guide to policymaking. This paper analyzes how environmental decision-making might be structured to achieve sustainable development. Sustainable development requ...

The large and vibrant economies of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum are also among the nations of the world with the most significant and deteriorating environmental conditions. This represents a serious policy challenge to the Asia Pacific and threat to planned economic integration through APEC. Ongoing efforts to pursue a far-re...