This Comment explores climate exactions and the other ways cities already control the emissions of greenhouse gases.

This Comment examines the legal viability of climate exactions and likelihood of their success.

Monetary exactions are a tool that can mitigate the environmental or other public harms of land development. Local governments commonly impose fees, or monetary exactions, on new development to offset public costs such development will impose, such as exacerbated traffic congestion. This Essay argues that monetary fees offer significant potential as a tool to help local governments manage land development’s contribution to climate change.

This Comment points out the weaknesses of the options to purchase conservation easement.

This Comment points out the strengths and weaknesses of the options to purchase conservation easement.

This Comment points out the strengths and weaknesses of the options to purchase conservation easement.

Land conservation transactions have been the most active component of the conservation movement in the United States for the past three decades. Practitioners use traditional real estate tools to preserve habitat, scenery, and historically significant places. The prospect of climate change diminishes the value of most real estate tools currently used by proponents of land conservation transactions.

In 1975, 80 countries entered into the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Today, CITES covers 35,000 species. Though CITES is widely used, protected species continue to slide to extinction. Two main obstacles hinder its success: (1) fraudulent paperwork, where an individual attempts to pass an endangered or threatened species as a non-protected one in order to access a legal market; and (2) illicit poaching and trafficking.

In the South Pacific, midway between Hawaii and Australia, lies the beautiful island nation of Tuvalu, home to about 10,000 people. In about 40 years, Tuvalu will be uninhabitable, and in 70 years, at best, it is likely to be underwater. Due to rising sea levels caused by global warming, other low-lying island nations such as Kiribati, Fiji, Marshall Islands, Vanuatu, Micronesia, and Nauru are bound to suffer the same fate eventually. This raises pressing calls for remedies for sinking small island nations, in the forms of migration, compensation, and reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

EPA's recent call for regulatory reform suggestions offers a good opportunity for ending a long-standing regulatory overreach: EPA’s “once in, always in” policy for standards applicable to a major source of hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The policy asserts that if a facility ever had potential hazardous air pollutant emissions above levels that trigger a major source control standard, the facility must comply with that standard permanently, even where the facility has since reduced its potential emissions below the trigger levels.