We now have possibly the first state proposed legislation in the United States to control climate engineering efforts. A bill (H-5480) was recently introduced in the Rhode Island legislature that would require any climate engineering efforts to undergo an approval process and two (at least) public hearings. The bill would impose fines and up to 90 days imprisonment for each day that the unapproved climate engineering continues. The bill also gives Rhode Island's environmental agency the ability to enjoin and halt an unapproved project.
If you’d like to get more details, you can review the bill itself at http://webserver.rilin.state.ri.us/BillText/BillText15/HouseText15/H5480.pdf These local initiatives might pop up in other state legislatures if climate engineering research gains momentum (especially after the NAS reports last month). If so, the prospect of overlapping or conflicting regulations from multiple states will often spur the federal government to impose its own consolidated regulatory scheme to preempt the state efforts. Professor Tracy Hester University of Houston Law Center 100 Law Center Houston, Texas 77204 713-743-1152 [email protected] Web bio: www.law.uh.edu/faculty/thester -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
