Academic Affairs Dean on U of PA Law School panel

Dean of Academic Affairs Tom Bogart participated in a Sept. 25 panel on “Green Energy and Alternatives: Environmental and Economic Impacts” sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He was joined by representatives from the Institute for Energy Research, the John Muir Trust in Scotland, and faculty from Cornell and Drexel universities.

Bogart co-authored a joint study that was released last year, “Seven Myths About Green Jobs,” that analyzed the assumptions, findings and methodologies of green jobs projections that are guiding major public policy initiatives.

The panel discussion is part of a conference, “Can Government be Green?,” scheduled by Penn’s Program on Law Environment and Economy:

The recent multibillion dollar stimulus package proposed by the Administration, passed by Congress and signed by the President (the “American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009”) has been widely promoted as simultaneously accomplishing both economic recovery and environmental progress and protection. The vast expansion in the federal state brought about by the stimulus package and other recent federal regulatory proposals, however, seems at first thought to be inconsistent with environmental protection. After all, what was in some sense the first federal environmental law of the Environmentalist era of the 1970’s – the National Environmental Policy Act – was designed to control the massively harmful consequences of the post World War II expansion in federally funded infrastructure development. Justified primarily by the theory that government spending can enable the U.S. to recover from the Depression of 2008, the recent increase and redirection in federal infrastructure – to the tune of $100 billion -- has also been justified on the ground that it is time for the federal government to intervene to fundamentally change the environmental impact of the American economy. 



 This new era of an activist federal state raises a host of interesting and novel issues that may well come to comprise the forefront of environmental and natural resource policy and scholarship. By stimulating lively and informed debate among participants with contrasting backgrounds and perspectives from both academia and government, the proposed Panel Discussion program is intended to begin the discussion of these issues, to identify core areas for future research, and thus to set the stage for future conferences and scholarship.