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Chapter Seven proposes a more modest modification to the anti-commandeering rule, requiring judicial deference to consensual state-federal legislative bargaining over federalism entitlements. Constitutional federalism directives can be viewed as default rules that confer jurisdictional entitlements to state and federal actors, but the normative entitlement of a legal rule is always matched with an infrastructural component that designates how and whether the normative entitlement may be shifted. This chapter explores the extent to which federalism doctrine allows consensually negotiated exchange of these entitlements—such as waiver of Eleventh Amendment state sovereign immunity, or state waiver of enumerated powers limitations when accepting spending power deals conditioned on federal policies. It advocates more uniform use of the Calabresi and Melamed “property rule” remedy rule that enables bargaining with entitlements, rather than the inalienability or liability rule alternatives. When the Rehnquist Court created the anti-commandeering entitlement that states hold against Congress (in partially invalidating the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act in New York v. United States), it did not allow for consensual intergovernmental bargaining to shift the entitlement. Using New York as a case study, the chapter proposes that Tenth Amendment entitlements be harmonized with the rest of federalism doctrine to enable consensual legislative bargaining. Leaving the normative part of the anti-commandeering rule in place while enabling states to bargain with their entitlement would yield new possibilities for balanced interjurisdictional governance while retaining the most protective aspects of the rule. The bilateral nature of the exchange ensures that the negotiated balance reflects the interests of both state and federal actors. It also taps unique legislative resources for values-balancing in the fact-intensive policymaking contexts where legislatures outperform courts. By incorporating state and federal judgment, intergovernmental bargaining is preferable to the unilateral federal assertions of power or deference to state prerogative that characterize traditional political safeguards.

Chapter 12 looks at the lessons that have been learnt over the past three decades in Europe, North America, and Asia on the need for early and meaningful public engagement in radioactive waste management (RWM). India’s Atomic Energy Control Board, though, has stated that technical regulation and control should provide ‘adequate assurance’ to the public and secure their trust and confidence. Will this be sufficient to secure a ‘social license to operate’? This chapter investigates the factors that may positively or negatively influence the Indian public’s confidence in the Indian nuclear establishment—factors that the Government should be aware of to shape a trusted RWM strategy. It traces the various successful approaches in Europe, where some communities now volunteer and compete to host these facilities. This chapter shows that technical soundness is not sufficient to gain the trust of citizens or develop sustainable and socially acceptable RWM solutions; procedural fairness is of equal importance.

Nuclear energy has peaceful applications and non-peaceful applications. The centrepiece of all political efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons lies in attempting to harmonise the proliferation of nuclear reactors with the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. What all nuclear reactors have in common is nuclear fuel, which must contain at least some uranium in the form of the isotope uranium-235 (or very much more rarely 233), or plutonium, or both. This is usually described as ‘fissile material’. This chapter is about nuclear technology and the technical interconnections between commercial and military nuclear programmes. It also discusses the spread of nuclear technology and the use to which it has been put by a number of states, both inside and outside the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, to bring them close to or even take them over the nuclear weapons threshold. Moreover, the chapter provides an overview on critical mass and nuclear bombs, the differences between the United States and its natural allies over nuclear proliferation, radioactive waste and nuclear accidents and uranium enrichment.

Chapter Eight summarizes the federalism safeguards debate, considers the role of negotiated governance, and highlights potential contributions from the academic negotiation literature. Most importantly, Chapter Eight introduces the phenomenon of federalism bargaining among all branches of government. Using the negotiation theorist’s definition, it broadly understands bargaining as “an iterative process of joint decision-making,” encompassing conventional political haggling, formalized methods of collaborative policymaking, and even more remote signaling processes by which state and federal actors negotiate consensus. Reverse-engineering the most successful examples would reveal the very considerations built into the Chapter Six balancing test—rendering bilateral bargaining by the political branches the functional ex ante equivalent of the ex post balancing analysis contemplated there. The federalism bargaining taxonomy charts opportunities for intergovernmental negotiation within various constitutional and statutory frameworks. It begins with the most familiar forms of negotiation used in lawmaking, including conventional negotiations over law enforcement, under the federal spending power, and for exceptions from otherwise applicable laws. It then considers more interesting forms of negotiated policymaking, including negotiated federal rulemaking with state and local stakeholders, federal statutes that share policy design with states, and intersystemic signaling negotiations, by which independently operating state and federal actors trade influence over the direction of evolving interjurisdictional policies. Examples include the 2008 Stimulus Bill, banking and financial services reform, criminal law enforcement, immigration, radioactive waste siting, offshore drilling, hydroelectric dam licensing, medical marijuana, climate governance, and the No Child Left Behind, Endangered Species, Clean Water, Clean Air, Real ID, Coastal Zone Management, and Medicaid Acts.

The primary advantage of nuclear power is that a lot of energy can be generated from very little material—that too with no ongoing CO₂ production. The disadvantage is the problem of dealing with radioactive waste—in particular,¹³⁷Cs. Although somewhat challenging, it still appears to be manageable. Progress in nuclear fusion research has been slow, but the ultimate reward of almost unlimited energy would make it worthwhile to keep going.

Chapter 1 begins by stressing the severity of climate change (CC) and showing how, contrary to popular belief, atomic energy is not a viable solution to CC. Many scientists and most market proponents agree that renewable energy and energy efficiencies are better options. The chapter also shows that government subsidies for oil and nuclear power are the result of flawed science, poor ethics, short-term thinking, and special-interest influence. The chapter has 7 sections, the first of which surveys four major components of the energy crisis. These are oil addiction, non-CC-related deaths from fossil-fuel pollution, nuclear-weapons proliferation, and catastrophic CC. The second section summarizes some of the powerful evidence for global CC. The third section uses historical, ahistorical, Rawlsian, and utilitarian ethical principles to show how developed nations, especially the US, are most responsible for human-caused CC. The fourth section shows why climate-change skeptics, such as “deniers” who doubt CC is real, and “delayers” who say that it should not yet be addressed, have no valid objections. Instead, they all err scientifically and ethically. The fifth section illustrates that all modern scientific methods—and scientific consensus since at least 1995—confirm the reality of global CC. Essentially all expert-scientific analyses published in refereed, scientific-professional journals confirm the reality of global CC. The sixth section of the chapter shows how fossil-fuel special interests have contributed to the continued CC debate largely by paying non-experts to deny or challenge CC. The seventh section of the chapter provides an outline of each chapter in the book, noting that this book makes use of both scientific and ethical analyses to show why nuclear proponents’ arguments err, why CC deniers are wrong, and how scientific-methodological understanding can advance sound energy policy—including conservation, renewable energy, and energy efficiencies.

Dr. Patricia Carter Sluby (Fig. 5.1) is a primary patent examiner retired from the US Patent and Trademark Office and formerly a registered patent agent. She is also the author of three books about African American inventors and their patented inventions. Patricia’s father is William A. Carter Jr., and her mother is Thelma LaRoche Carter. Her father was the first black licensed master plumber in Richmond, VA, and his father also had the same distinction in Columbus, OH, years earlier. Her father was born in Philadelphia, PA, and attended college. Her grandfather went from Virginia to look for work in Canada and became a stonemason. Later he relocated back to the United States, where he soon married in Boston, MA, and several of his children were born there. Later, the family moved to Philadelphia where Patricia’s father was born. Her mother, who attended Hampton Institute, taught school and later managed the office for Patricia’s father’s business. Patricia’s mother was born and raised in Richmond, as were most of her maternal relatives. Patricia had three brothers. They were all born during segregation in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. Patricia was born on February 15, in Richmond. She attended kindergarten through eighth grade in segregated schools that were within walking distance of home. In school, they studied from hand-me-down books, but her black teachers were well trained and well informed. They had bachelor’s degrees; some had master’s or even PhD degrees. To go to high school, Patricia took a city bus across to the east side of town, to the newly built school for black students, which incorporated eighth grade through twelfth grade. Her teachers were excellent instructors who lived in her neighborhood and knew her parents quite well. The teachers looked out for the neighborhood kids and acted as surrogate parents out­side the confines of the home. Teachers and principals were also great mentors, dedicated to their craft; they encouraged students to understand the world and function as responsible adults. Patricia excelled in science and math.

When members of a society coordinate their activities based on a broadly disseminated and reinforced set of dogmatic beliefs in their mythological or religious traditions, anthropologists refer to these beliefs as useful myths. The aim of this chapter is to reveal that the dogmatic beliefs associated with the construct of the sovereign nation-state are useful myths that can no longer be viewed as useful because they are effectively undermining efforts to resolve the environmental crisis. This situation is greatly complicated by the fact that the sovereign nation-state is a normative construct, or a construct that is assumed to be a taken-for-granted and indelible aspect of geopolitical reality. The large problem here is that this normative construct constitutes one of the greatest conceptual barriers to resolving the environment crisis. This brief account of the origins and transformations of the construct of the sovereign nation-state is intended to accomplish four objectives. The first is to demonstrate that the construct of the sovereign nation-state emerged in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries in a series of narratives that transferred the God-given power and authority of sovereign monarchs to the states governed by these monarchs. The second is to reveal that the narratives about nationalism and national identity that emerged during and after the Protestant Reformation abused the truths of religion in an effort to convince core populations living within the borders of particular nation-states that they were a chosen people possessing superior cultural values and personal qualities. The third is to show that the dogmatic beliefs legitimated and perpetuated by these narratives eventually resulted in the creation of churches of state with sacred symbols, rites, and rituals similar to those in Protestant and Catholic churches. And the fourth objective is to provide a basis for understanding how these dogmatic beliefs eventually became foundational to a system of international government, the United Nations, predicated on the construct of the sovereign nation-state. The history of this construct is much more complex and far more detailed than the brief account in this chapter suggests.