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VOLUME 2, NUMBER 2
Current Issue | Spring 2012
Consumer Liability for Harms Linked to Purchases
by Nathan Ostrander
While the problem of negative externalities has long been recognized by environmental law, legal responses have uniformly focused on producer behavior. There is growing recognition, however, that consumption also contributes significantly to climate change and other forms of environmental degradation in ways that are not fully reflected in the prices of products. A major reason is that the harms from consumption develop many years after the consumer makes a purchase. But in the future, a virtually cashless society reliant on electronic payments will record the purchases of consumers. Technological developments will set the stage for the viability of consumers as class action defendants who could be held liable for societal harms that subsequently develop as a result of their purchases. Today, consumer class action plaintiffs discover they are entitled to portions of class action verdicts; in the future, consumer class action defendants will learn they must pay plaintiffs, including state governments suing on the basis of public nuisance, for the damages resulting from their purchases. Consumers, of course, would have to be put on notice, perhaps through a labeling system, that they are assuming liability for future harms. By taking advantage of technological developments that enable a cashless society, it will become possible to sue consumers who purchase goods that contribute to environmental degradation and other social harms.
The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility: Parametric Insurance Payouts Without Proper Parameters
by Lauren Brooks
The small island states of the Caribbean are highly exposed and extremely vulnerable to catastrophic weather events, especially hurricanes and earthquakes. During the one to six months following a serious hurricane or earthquake, after emergency funds have been exhausted and before donor pledges come in, Caribbean governments experience a "liquidity gap," when their monetary resources fall far below what is required to provide essential governmental services and begin the recovery process. Established in 2007, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility ("CCRIF" or the "Facility") offers a solution to the liquidity gap through the use of an innovative insurance scheme. This Article first engages in a background discussion of the Facility, reviewing why it was created, how it works, and what it has accomplished for its insureds since taking effect. It then examines the many facets of CCRIF that have earned it its good name - specifically, its efficiency, fairness, and attentiveness to Caribbean needs and interests. At the same time, the Article attempts to provide a more pragmatic critique than can be found in the existing literature by shedding light on a rather notable CCRIF flaw that has thus far received little recognition: the risk that the Facility's insurance payouts are inaccurate. Finally, the Article considers the possible ramifications of this flaw and suggests a grassroots solution requiring the participation of the Caribbean people.
Adapting Environmental Justice: In the Age of Climate Change, Environmental Justice Demands a Combined Adaptation-Mitigation Response
by Raina Wagner
The Environmental Justice Movement of the late twentieth century had a lofty goal: to protect poor and minority communities from being adversely affected by environmental harms such as toxic waste dumps and polluted waters. Many agree that today's greatest environmental danger is climate change, a worldwide problem with intensely local impacts; and poor and minority communities may be adversely impacted by that environmental harm as well. In the climate change case, experts foresee that the people in developing countries and island nations stand to face climate-change-related dangers ranging from increased hurricanes to desertification of cultivating lands to total inundation as sea levels rise. One goal of the Kyoto Protocol's carbon-exchange market is to mitigate the impacts on developing countries. Yet not all the consequences of climate change will be felt on the international scene, and within the United States, Environmental Justice concerns dictate that mitigation should not be the only regional and national response to the planet's rising temperatures. Environmental Justice demands an adaptive response.