Climate Change 5: Addressing Climate Change Through Existing Environmental Statutes

This is the last of five CALI lessons on climate change. It explores the ways in which litigants and agencies have tried to use existing federal environmental statutes -- the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Water Act -- to address climate change.

If you are unfamiliar with climate change, you should complete the CALI lessons entitled Climate Change 1, Climate Change 2, and Climate Change 3 before attempting this lesson. Climate Change 4, which discusses the use of common law to address climate change, is interchangeable in sequence with this lesson.

This lesson assumes that the student has a basic familiarity with the federal environmental statutes discussed above. However, it does not assume that the student knows the relevant cases.