Environmental Law Commons^™

Encouraging Energy Efficiency Through Nepa Comments, Adam Reidel

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Environmental impact statements (EISs) should analyze the potential for energy efficiency to reduce the adverse impacts of new projects, to make the projects smaller, or to provide more benign alternatives. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and its state counterparts require EISs for major actions, and provide numerous opportunities for public participation in the EIS process. These opportunities can be used to press for greater consideration, and perhaps adoption, of energy efficiency measures. This paper serves as a guide to commenting on and challenging EISs on the basis of insufficient consideration of the issues of energy efficiency and conservation. It …

Going Rogue: Stop The Beach Renourishment As An Object Of Morbid Fascination, Mary Doyle, Stephen J. Schnably

Articles

Scholarly response to the Supreme Court's decision in Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection has focused on the plurality's strong advocacy of a judicial takings doctrine. We take a different tack. While the concept of judicial takings is worthy of serious attention, it is wrong to treat the plurality opinion as an ordinary object of analysis. It is, instead, the emanation of a Court going rogue.

Three basic symptoms of the pathology stand out. First, sleight of hand. The plurality opinion purports to be about an institutional issue-can a state court commit a taking? - …

Sustainability As A Means Of Improving Environmental Justice, Patricia E. Salkin, John C. Dernbach, Donald A. Brown

Scholarly Works

This article explains why environmental justice provides much of the foundation for sustainable development, and shows how sustainability can improve our ability to achieve environmental justice. The article first explains a basic but often unrecognized truth about environmental policy: environmental pollution and degradation, sooner or later, harms humans. Both sustainable development and environmental justice respond to this problem, though in somewhat different ways. Sustainable development, however, suggests a broader set of tools to address this problem than are often employed for environmental justice. The article shows how four broad approaches — more and better sustainability options, law for sustainability, visionary …

Neoliberal Land Conservation And Social Justice, Jessica Owley

Articles

No abstract provided.

Honey, It’S All The Buzz: Regulating Neighborhood Beehives, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

Beekeeping’s popularity has surged in recent years, perhaps culminating in the introduction of the first ever White House bee hive. Local Apiaries provide a wide variety of benefits to communities, ranging from pollination services for gardens to producing honey that can be used in a wide array of foods and products. Apiaries are not always welcome in a community, however, perhaps because of their potential to cause a nuisance, or to harm crops or people. Although beekeeping regulation implicates both state and federal concerns a number of localities have developed unique and practical regulations that promote backyard beekeeping, while maximizing …

Laws, Institutions And Transboundary Pasture Management In The High Pamir And Pamir-Alai Mountain Ecosystem Of Central Asia, Michelle Mei Ling Lim

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Enhanced rangeland governance is a priority for the governments of the post-Soviet Central Asian states of the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan. Major transitional challenges confront the newly independent states of Central Asia. These challenges include the withdrawal of subsidies previously provided by the centralised Soviet government; moves towards privatisation and the conversion of administrative boundaries to international boundaries. In this context transboundary approaches to rangeland management are essential. This paper highlights the challenges for effective pasture management in the Pamir, Pamir-Alai ecosystem; the inadequacies of pasture-related legal instruments and the absence of institutions for the implementation of these instruments. Transboundary …

Can Vermont Put The Nuclear Genie Back In The Bottle: A Test Of Congressional Preemptive Power?, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Even before the nuclear core meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan re-stoked public anxiety about nuclear energy, Vermont’s Senate, under the auspices of Vermont Act No. 160, voted to block continued operation of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant after the expiration of its forty-year operating license. This article examines whether a state can legislatively override a permit issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission extending the license of a power plant. The author places this question within a broader federalism context, in which states assert their sovereign rights to regulate the environment in the shadow of federal mandates. …

A Risky Business: Generation Of Nuclear Power And Deepwater Drilling For Offshore Oil And Gas, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Government regulation and licensing of industrial activities that create the possibility of catastrophic risk reflect “a political value judgment that these activities provide a social benefit that is greater than the social cost of the risks that they cause.” However, when a catastrophic accident occurs, the cost-benefit evaluations underlying the value judgment that authorized the activity may need to be rethought. Social rethinking is especially warranted when the accident could have been prevented had either the industry or the government more seriously assessed the risk of a catastrophic event and implemented precautionary steps to avoid it. This was the conclusion …

The Coming Water Crisis: A Common Concern Of Mankind, Edith Brown Weiss

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay argues that fresh water, its availability and use, should now be recognized as ‘a common concern of humankind’, much as climate change was recognized as a ‘common concern of humankind’ in the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and conservation of biodiversity was recognized as a ‘common concern of humankind’ in the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity. This would respond to the many linkages between what happens in one area with the demand for and the supply of fresh water in other areas. It would take into account the scientific characteristics of the hydrological cycle, address …

Can We Regulate Our Way To Energy Efficiency? Product Standards As Climate Policy, Noah M. Sachs

Law Faculty Publications

In this Article, I demonstrate that the regulatory strategy for energy efficiency is working. Although information disclosure, financial incentives, and other softer alternatives to regulation play a vital role in reducing energy demand, these should be viewed as complements to efficiency regulation, rather than replacements. The regulatory approach has led to substantial cost and energy savings in the past, it has enjoyed bipartisan political support, and it targets products and behaviors that are difficult to address through other policy tools. Given the politics of climate change in the United States, which make federal carbon taxes or a cap-and-trade system infeasible, …

Reclaiming Global Environmental Leadership: Why The United States Should Ratify Ten Pending Environmental Treaties, Noah M. Sachs

Law Faculty Publications

For more than a century, the United States has taken the lead in organizing international responses to international environmental problems. The long list of environmental agreements spearheaded by the United States extends from early treaties with Canada and Mexico on boundary waters and migratory birds to global agreements restricting trade in endangered species and protecting against ozone depletion.

In the last two decades, however, U.S. environmental leadership has faltered. The best known example is the lack of an effective response to climate change, underscored by the U.S. decision not to join the Kyoto Protocol. But that is not the only …

Distributed Energy Resources, "Virtual Power Plants," And The Smart Grid, Joel B. Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

The specific focus of this Article is on the "virtual power plant" (VPP) concept, an intriguing idea that involves an aggregation of DERs to provide a "fleet" of resources that can serve as the functional equivalent of a traditional power plant. As the name suggests, this fleet of DERs can add up in the aggregate to the equivalent of a significant resource. Under certain conditions, this resource can be used on the grid (i.e., dispatched) much as a conventional power plant would be. This could reduce demand for fossil fuel-fired plants by enabling a utility to avoid generating electricity or …

Hot, Crowded, And Legal: A Look At Industrial Agriculture In The United States And Brazil, David N. Cassuto, Sarah Saville

Animal Law Review

Over the last sixty years, industrial agriculture has expanded in the United States and throughout the world, including in Brazil. Any benefit this expansion has brought comes at significant environmental and social costs. Industrial agriculture is a leading contributor to global climate change, air and water pollution, deforestation, and dangers in the workplace. This Article discusses the impact of industrial animal agriculture in the U.S. and Brazil. It also examines the laws pertaining to industrial agriculture in both countries and provides a comparative analysis of the two legal regimes. Finally, this Article concludes with the observation that although the price …

The Quiet Revolution And Federalism: Into The Future, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

This Article offers an examination of the federal role in land use planning and regulation set in the context of varying theories of federalism by presenting a historical and modern overview of the increasing federal influence in local land use planning and regulation, specifically highlighting how federal statutes and programs impact local municipal decision making in the area of land use planning. Part II provides a brief introduction into theories of federalism and their application to local land use regulation in the United States. Part III provides a brief overview of federal legislation in the United States which affected local …

Government "Green" Requirements And "Leedigation", Patricia E. Salkin, Graham Grady, Nicole Mueller, Susan Herendeen

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

American Electricpower V. Connecticut: Disaster Averted By Displacing The Federal Common Law Of Nuisance, Damian M. Brychey

Georgia Law Review

Historically, the federal common law of nuisance has
provided a means to regulate interstate pollution. With
the passing of legislative acts such as the Clean Water Act
and the Clean Air Act, however, traditional federal
nuisance lawsuits were displaced. The continued viability
of the federal common law of nuisance to regulate
pollution, specifically greenhouse gases, was brought to
the forefront of American jurisprudence in American
Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut. There, the Supreme
Court held that the Clean Air Act and the EPA actions the
Act authorizes displace any federal common law right to
seek abatement of greenhouse gases-reversing the …

Implementation Of The Arizona Water Settlement Act In New Mexico: An Overview Of Legal Considerations, Adrian Oglesby

Natural Resources Journal

No abstract provided.

Introductory Remarks: International Energy Governance, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Judicial Assault On The Clean Water Act, Mark Squillace

Publications

No abstract provided.

Fugitive Emissions: The Marcellus Shale And The Clean Air Act, Joseph Minott, Jonathan Skinner

Publications

No abstract provided.