The Undergraduate Law Review at UC San Diego

As federal and international approaches to climate change falter, private sustainability agreements have emerged as a promising alternative for large-scale environmental coordination. However, the absence of a formal legal framework governing such agreements creates a dangerous ambiguity: discouraging climate cooperation through the chilling effect of antitrust enforcement while enabling anticompetitive actors to exploit environmental rhetoric as legal cover. This article examines the tension between Environmental Sustainability Goals and American antitrust law, arguing that the current legal landscape fails both purported goals. This article demonstrates that the absence of clear statutory guidance has allowed investigatory power to function as de facto enforcement, dismantling voluntary climate coalitions without adverse merit rulings. This article recommends creating a narrowly tailored federal safe-harbor statute modeled on the National Cooperative Research and Production Act and informed by the European Union's 2023 Revised Horizontal Cooperation Guideline. Sustainability agreements would receive conditional antitrust protection in exchange for disclosure to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, public transparency, nondiscriminatory participation, and periodic agency review.