China and the United States deserve a great deal of credit for the successful outcome at the Paris Climate Agreement talks. Their landmark 2014 agreement committing each nation to reduce emissions and promote cleaner energy sources inspired a record number of nations to submit their intended nationally determined contributions to climate mitigation and adaptation.
A coalition of states, utilities, energy producers, and other industry groups has brought a challenge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan (CPP), which limits carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s existing power plants pursuant to CAA §111(d).
Environmental law, with its intricate layers of international, federal, state, and local laws, is more established than its animal counterpart. Yet animal law faces many of the same legal and strategic challenges that environmental law faced in seeking to establish a more secure foothold, both in the United States and abroad. In What Can Animal Law Learn From Environmental Law?, editor Randall S.
This Article is adapted from Chapter Fourteen of Rethinking Sustainability to Meet the Climate Change Challenge, edited by Jessica Owley and Keith Hirokawa and published by ELI Press. The author responds to critics of the concept of sustainability, and argues for its continued relevance by identifying a functional definition of sustainability as a framework for managing change.
This Article is adapted from Chapter Four of Rethinking Sustainability to Meet the Climate Change Challenge, edited by Jessica Owley and Keith Hirokawa and published by ELI Press. The author argues that climate change adaptation is absolutely necessary because we have passed the point of avoiding climate change impacts.
Many practitioners and scholars view enhanced permit coordination as beneficial due to purported efficiency gains and potentially better conservation outcomes, but scholarship on interagency coordination is still limited. The authors conducted extensive interviews and dialogue sessions to evaluate a range of efforts to coordinate proposed California Habitat Conservation Plans/ Natural Community Conservation Plans with freshwater aquatic resource permits under federal and state laws.
The increased need for government-driven coastal resilience projects will lead to a growing number of claims for “partial takings” of coastal property. Much attention has been paid to what actions constitute a partial taking, but there is less clarity about how to calculate just compensation for such takings, and when compensation should be offset by the value of benefits conferred to the property owner. While the U.S. Supreme Court has an analytically consistent line of cases on compensation for partial takings, it has repeatedly failed (most recently in Horne v. U.S.
When the government decides to approve, or not to approve, some activity that has climate change impacts, who has standing to bring a legal challenge? Answers are tricky and, ultimately, unsatisfying. What is clear is that the sheer number of cases presenting this question is increasing, and there is every reason to believe that this trend will accelerate into the future.
On October 1, 2015, after years of delay punctuated by litigation and political maneuvering, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued revised national ambient air quality standards for ground-level ozone. Last set at 75 parts per billion (ppb) in 2008, the new standard of 70 ppb has already elicited promises of legal challenges from industry and environmental advocates. High levels of ozone are linked to respiratory illness, especially among children and the elderly.
This Article is adapted from Chapter Seven of John R. Nolon, Protecting the Environment Through Land Use Law: Standing Ground, published by ELI Press. The book describes how localities are responding to new challenges, including the imperative that they adapt to and help mitigate climate change and create sustainable neighborhoods.