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Temporal Posture and Discount Rates for Groundwater Contamination Damages

Recent experience as an economic expert in a groundwater contamination lawsuit reveals that lawyers and financial experts are unclear about what criteria govern temporal posture for determining economic losses. Whether damages should be benchmarked ex ante at the time of harm, or ex post at the time of trial, has a long intellectual history in financial and legal journals--and in case decisions. The theoretical elegance of some of the considerations discussed in the literature may overwhelm the practical issues governing choice of temporal posture in a contamination case.

The Case for a Crude Oil Price Stabilization Tax

Editors' Summary

Policymakers should work to place a floor under the price of crude oil and derivates by imposing a variable import tax on those products. A variable import tax would give consumers and the alternative energy industries a clear price signal in order to improve their decisionmaking, as well as to provide a steady price signal to domestic energy producers. The tax would also prevent price collapses. Although economists have debated flat oil import fees vigorously, this proposal has been overlooked to date.

The Future of Siting and Building Energy Infrastructure

Janice M. Schneider: As we've seen in California and other states, renewable portfolio standards and greenhouse gas legislation are driving the need for expeditious renewable energy development on the federal level. Of course, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the Stimulus Bill, committed an unprecedented amount of federal resources toward development of renewable energy, but also placed tight deadlines on the development of eligible projects.

The Quiet Revolution Revived: Sustainable Design, Land Use Regulation, and the States

In 1971, The Quiet Revolution in Land Use Control inspired numerous scholarly debates about the states' role in land use regulation. In that book, Fred Bosselman and David Callies recognized that localities have long borrowed states' police power to regulate land use. They nonetheless argued that certain land use issues, such as those involving the environment, transcended local government boundaries and competencies.

Legislating Sustainable Design: The Challenge of Local Control and Political Will

Sara C. Bronin's The Quiet Revolution Revived: Sustainable Design, Land Use Regulation, and the States revisits the age-old, American democratic debate of finding the right balance between local control and imposition of a statutory regime for the greater public good. Fundamentally, I agree with the article's premise that state policy powers are generally underutilized in the land use reform context and could be used productively to advance implementation of local green building design and construction.