Polar bears grab headlines, Americans fret about disappearing glaciers, Al Gore takes home an Oscar. Clearly, going green is red-hot right now.
But the recent earth-friendly government regulations have industries busy puzzling out the new rules, asking questions like, “How do you measure how much carbon your company spews out, anyway?”
Enter the lawyers. Law firm McCarter & English last week said it’s formed a Climate Change and Renewable Energy Group, led by Hartford partner Stephen J. Humes.The team is designed to counsel industries affected by new regulations—or those poised to benefit from business opportunities in a green-friendlier America.
“The writing was on the wall when California passed a climate change bill into law,” said Humes, referring to that state’s new carbon emissions law. “That really became the starting point for a cascade of events.”
Environment Changes
Humes asserted the Democratic victory in November, an international scientists’ report earlier this year on global warming, and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the EPA’s responsibility to regulate carbon emissions all illustrate the growing prominence of climate change issues. And all of it, he asserts, has an effect on business.
McCarter & English’s group tackles the complexities of carbon emissions laws, such as how to comply with new rules and how to navigate financial disclosure issues. But the team covers a broader range of “green”-related topics: insurance coverage, how to manage environmentally friendly construction and how to measure an individual business’s “carbon footprint.”
But McCarter & English isn’t the only firm with green issues on the brain right now. Douglas Cohen, the Hartford-based chairman of the environmental group for Brown Rudnick, said his firm has had a similar team for about three years that also combines lawyers from different legal disciplines.
Take Europe’s carbon trading system, for example, where companies must strike a trade for the right to emit certain amounts of carbon.
Environmental lawyers are involved, Cohen said, but the process needs a greater variety of expertise: It requires an energy lawyer to measure a company’s carbon quantities, a finance and structuring lawyer to figure out how to trade those units across international borders, and a finance lawyer to ensure the trading relationship doesn’t leave the company vulnerable to bankruptcy.
America doesn’t yet have such a system, but both Cohen and Humes said the country could possibly adopt a similar network.
Proactive Stance
Humes said McCarter & English’s team is distinctive because it includes a focus on how industry can benefit from new regulations.
Say an alternative energies company wants to develop a new fuel, he said: the law team can help legally define who owns the rights to energy facilities and who is liable for carbon stored in the group. Interest in alternative energies can open up opportunities, but those opportunities come with questions of their own, he said.
Either way, Humes said, green issues aren’t going away any time soon.
“Climate change represents the new frontier,” he argued, “not just of environmental law, but of business risk and opportunity.”
