On December 6, 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) increased the statutory maximums for 20 of the 88 civil penalties it administers. At the same time, EPA also revised its civil penalty policies and increased the gravity-based component of all penalties by 4.87% for violations occurring after December 6, 2013. These recent increases are an important reminder that EPA has the statutory authority to pursue significant, and in some cases enterprise-threatening, penalties for environmental violations.

The environmental laws create a complex regulatory system affecting a wide range of economic activity in the United States. Given the wide range of potential environmental violations, it might have been preferable for Congress to specify which environmental violations could result in criminal prosecution. Instead, Congress made only limited distinctions between acts that could result in criminal, civil, or administrative enforcement.

Over the past four decades, increased data availability, new software systems, and exponentially greater computing power have combined to turn spatial analysis—that is, quantitative analysis of data coded to specific geographic coordinates—into the coin of the environmental realm. Thousands of analysts in dozens of fields now spend their days gathering and crunching spatial data. Their efforts serve a wide variety of purposes and are leading to new ways of conceptualizing ecological systems and environmental change.

Substantial reductions in global power sector emissions will be needed by midcentury to avoid significant disruption of the climate system. Achieving these reductions will require greatly increased levels of financing, technological innovation, and policy reform. In the United States, the scale and complexity of the overall challenge have raised important questions regarding prevailing regulatory and business models, with much scrutiny directed at the traditional practice of public utility regulation.

Professor Mendelson’s article is extremely important. Although I have worked on federal regulations and environmental law for over 40 years, until I read Professor Mendelson’s article I had not focused on this critical issue. The idea that the government has a body of law that the public cannot access for free is quite startling from the perspective of the enforceability of federal rules, government transparency, and public access to material that may bind the public. It also raises serious questions about basic due process and fairness.

In Taking Public Access to the Law Seriously: The Problem of Private Control Over the Availability of Federal Standards, Professor Nina Mendelson has done a great service, offering a strong and comprehensive argument for “why law needs to be public.” This comment and the Administrative Conference’s recommendation also agree that the policy goal should be to make incorporated materials freely available online. Where we part ways is with respect to the solution.

In the 1930s, Harvard professor Erwin Griswold famously complained about the enormous numbers of New Deal regulations that were obscurely published on individual sheets or in “separate paper pamphlets.” Finding these binding federal rules was difficult, leading to “chaos” and an “intolerable” situation. Congress responded, requiring that agencies publish all rules in the Federal Register and in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Currently, recent federal public laws, the entire U.S.

The U.S. Army Office of Energy Initiatives is the central management office for large scale renewable energy projects leveraging third-party financing to bring energy resiliency to our Army installations. I would like to thank Professor Light for including the efforts of what is now the Office of Energy Initiatives in her paper. It was the success of the original task force that brought about the transition to an enduring office last year.

While U.S. military operations in the 21st century have largely been spared the nefarious results of “eclipses of the sun,” the central point of Thucydides’ account of a war that happened more than 2,000 years ago still holds: war is a calamity. War consumes money and natural resources and it destroys lives and land. There is nothing environmentally friendly about combat. That core truth is largely absent from Sarah Light’s otherwise thoughtful article, The Military-Environmental Complex.

Two competing theories vie for dominance regarding the relationship between the U.S. military and the natural environment. On the one hand, because legal rules permit the military to disregard environmental laws when they conflict with the military’s national security mission, one might be left with the impression that the military’s mission conflicts inexorably with environmental protection. Yet, the military is currently engaged in an extensive undertaking to improve its sustainable energy use by reducing demand for fossil fuels and developing renewable energy sources.