Co-authors Eric Biber and J.B. Ruhl should be commended for providing a thoughtful framework for when agencies should consider individual versus general permitting regimes. They presented a similar framework for the Administrative Conference of the United States, which is a helpful forum for airing perspectives on important administrative law topics.
In The Permit Power Revisited, Professors Biber and Ruhl make a well-articulated and easy to follow argument for a regulatory shift along the “spectrum of [permitting] approaches” from “specific permits” to the more favored “general permits.” At least in the context of the CWA, the Biber/Ruhl article is timely and adds great value to the continuing legal and policy debate on alternatives to tackling some of the intractable environmental problems that continue to elude our aging regulatory programs.
Regulatory permits are ubiquitous in modern society, yet receive little attention in legal and policy commentary and law school curriculums. Broadly speaking, there are two contrasting approaches to permitting. “Specific permits” entail the agency engaging in extensive fact gathering and deliberation particular to the individual circumstances of an applicant’s proposed action, after which the agency issues a detailed permit tailored just to that applicant.
The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute’s Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. ELPAR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the best ideas about environmental law and policy from the legal academic literature. As part of the article selection process each year, Vanderbilt University Law School students assemble and review the environmental law articles published during the previous academic year.
Recent court decisions have awarded the federal government substantial recovery for damages from forest fires caused by a private party’s negligent conduct. In traditional forest fire cases, plaintiffs typically recovered response and suppression costs, in addition to compensation for the value of damaged timber or restoration costs. By framing forest fire impacts as “natural resource damages” and “intangible environmental damages,” the federal government has recovered increasingly large amounts for alleged harm to the environment and the value of lost ecosystem services.
Article I, §27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution creates public rights in natural resources, and tasks the Commonwealth government with conserving and maintaining them for the benefit of all. The section’s expansive language was restricted by the 1973 Payne decision, which created a three-part test focusing on statutory compliance, efforts to reduce environmental effects, and a balancing of harms and benefits; under that test, most §27 claims have failed. In 2013, a plurality of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in Robinson Township v.
U.S. policy to limit greenhouse gas emissions is driven, in part, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan, which seeks a drop in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil-fueled power plants—a “downstream” approach to regulation. An alternative, or possibly complementary, approach is to consider the legal and economic feasibility of imposing an “upstream” CO2 charge on coal production at its extraction site, and specifically on leased coal from federal lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
On September 18, 2015, EPA announced that 482,000 Volkswagen diesel engine vehicles sold in the United States were programmed to pass emissions tests, but when operated under normal driving conditions emit air pollutants well above the legal limit. Volkswagen initially estimated the financial impact of these transgressions may cost the company over $9.24 billion, but by April 2016, the estimate had increased to $18.2 billion to cover the global emissions cheating scandal. This Comment looks at the litigation and at the potential for criminal prosecution.
Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court raises a question for environmental lawyers: What perspectives and predilections with regard to environmental litigation would he bring to the Court? This Comment reflects on Judge Garland’s environmental law opinions in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (D.C.) Circuit: his opinions for the court, his dissents, and his concurrences.
In their book Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the “War on Coal,” Richard Revesz and Jack Lienke detail the history of the Clean Air Act and the political compromises that led to exempting existing power plants from significant portions of the Act’s regulatory authority.