Myanna Dellinger interviews Guðný Nielsen who explains how her organization, SoGreen, uses carbon offsets for the education of girls in Africa and how that, in turn, helps reduce climate change.

SoGreen is an Icelandic Climate Tech startup based out of her hometown Reykjavik, Iceland. SoGreen focuses on scaling up climate solutions that are founded in social impact and community development in low-income countries.

While the U.S. and other national governance systems are arguably not taking sufficient and certainly not sufficiently urgent action against climate change, other inroads may work better.  Further, new behavioral science shows new ways of persuading both corporations and individuals to think and act in better ways in relation to climate change.  In this episode, EinStrong law and policy director Myanna Dellinger, Esq., will talk with Dr. Kristian S Nielsen of Cambridge University about private and public climate governance for climate change mitigation in the U.S. and beyond.

Dr. Kristian S Nielsen is a postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge. Kristian received a PhD from Copenhagen Business School in 2019 with a dissertation examining the role of self-regulation in environmental behavior change. Kristian's current research focuses on behavior change in the context of climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable clothing consumption.

Special thanks to David Dellinger for recording and editing this podcast.

Professor Myanna Dellinger interviews law professor and Brazilian attorney Dr. Carolina Arlota of the University of Oklahoma College of Law, who compares climate change action in Brazil to that in the United States.  Among other things, she promotes the view that litigation may help advance the agenda even if positive outcomes are not achieved at the judicial scale because of, among other things, the “poltical question doctrine.”  Professor Arlota also discusses the Brazilian Constitution, which promotes environmental protection.

This interview is based on Dr. Arlota’s article "The Amazon Is Burning—Is Paris, Too? A Comparative Analysis Between The United States And Brazil Based On The Paris Agreement On Climate Change" published in the Georgetown Journal of International Law, Vol. 52, 2020.

The findings demonstrate that, given the silence of the U.S. Constitution on environmental matters and the decades-long congressional inertia on climate issues, an effective way to update the U.S. constitutional text will be through judicial review. As the comparative analysis unveiled in this article shows, standing is a major barrier to judicial review on climate change claims. Accordingly, this article includes a recommendation for the flexibilization of the traditional standing requirements for the United States to achieve effective environmental protection and related mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.