Our nation’s infrastructure is deteriorating, damaging our economic growth, security, and environmental quality. Unfortunately, many needed improvements are suffering unnecessary delays from multiple, sequential, and often poorly coordinated federal, state, and tribal reviews, consultations, and approvals. In our experience, controversy, conflict, and delay are often due to a misunderstanding of the intent of NEPA and its contribution to agency planning procedures. Part of its power is its flexibility for integrating the alternative and impact analyses of other environmental laws

Strange things—sometime exciting and unexpected things—happen at the edge, a place that can inspire both creativity and craziness. We can be “on edge,” be “pushed to the edge,” or be “on the cutting edge.” As gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson once wrote: “[T]here is no honest way to explain [the edge] because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” But if one can avoid falling off the precipice, edges often provide some unique perspectives on our social, cultural, or scientific landscape. Nature provides important lessons about why this happens.

Perhaps it is not as exotic as Portugal, but a brief tour of a narrow stretch of the American West provides a remarkably accurate depiction of U.S. energy policy. Get on I-15 and drive southwest from Salt Lake City to southern California. Leave the high mountain desert, its valley of oaks and maples, geometric grids, and charmed streets. Find the palm trees, traffic, beaches, and sun. Between these points, the landscape is a tangible manifestation of our nation’s aims, goals, and aspirations when it comes to energy. Trace this route, and you have traced U.S. energy policy itself.

Two years after the Presidential Commission’s report on the tragic Deepwater Horizon disaster, much happened in the area of oil pollution law, though only one aspect of the Oil Pollution Act was amended. On January 31, 2013, ELI convened a panel of experts to provide a review of recent OPA litigation, including the BP criminal plea agreement and the issues in the pending civil penalty action.

Although most legal attention on shale drilling and hydraulic fracturing has focused on regulatory developments, a growing body of litigation promises to shape this area in the coming years.

Payments to avoid deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries have emerged as a key international strategy. Countries that have the greatest potential to host these market-based mechanisms are often characterized by unclear and contested land and forest rights. For example, Peru faces challenges in creating carbon rights in a context of unclear land rights and legal pluralism. Project developers are currently negotiating carbon rights, though these rights remain weak and contested because of a lack of clarity regarding title to carbon.

On the assumption that a trading system can constitute a performance standard for GHGs under the CAA, the question arises whether “offsets” should be creditable for compliance. Crediting reduces compliance costs. For environmental integrity, however, creditable offsets should satisfy accepted offsets criteria, including additionality.  Incorporating those criteria into a performance standard may be impractical, achievable only incrementally, and entail legal risk.

A good deal can be learned from studying how Germany and the United States regulate the discharge of treated wastewater, but these lessons are not restricted to an enhanced understanding of one aspect of environmental protection. Instead, there are important distinctions in the public law approaches of the two countries, and thus the study of treated wastewater discharge has importance for the understanding of comparative law more generally.

Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has long been touted as a potentially critical means for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from carbon-intense industrial sources. High costs, complex regulatory schemes, and decreasing governmental incentives, however, have hindered the widespread development of CCS projects. But a growing trend of deriving multiple revenue streams from the carbon dioxide (CO2) associated with CCS projects—particularly using captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery—is helping to spur CCS development.

Over the past three years, the additive manufacturing market is estimated to have grown by almost 20% to about $1.2 billion. It is already being used to make prosthetic
devices, architectural components, parts for automobiles or airplanes, jewelry, textiles, sports equipment, and even specialty foods. Over time, additive manufacturing will
become cheaper and more precise and will enable construction down to a nano-scale, atom by atom. But these changes are only the beginning.