Editor's Summary: In the past decade, EPA and over 20 states have created voluntary environmental leadership programs designed to recognize and reward businesses that take steps that go beyond compliance with the strictures of environmental law. Environmental leadership programs seek not only to spur direct improvements to environment quality but also to advance broader social goals that may lead indirectly to environmental improvements, such as improving businessgovernment relationships and changing business culture.

Editor's Summary: Cost-benefit analysis, which is now the dominant approach in American public-sector decisionmaking, suffers from a serious and perhaps even fatal flaw that is unfortunately not widely recognized. Any social policy, among its other impacts, will also have "person-altering consequences" in that it will have geometrically cascading and eventually universal effects on the genetic identities of the members of future generations. The cost-benefit analysis methodology as now applied fails to incorporate those consequences.

Editors' Summary: In 2003, the George W. Bush Administration expanded the definition of an emergency situation to include cases that may result in a "substantial loss of economic value to the Federal Government." During the last few years, the U.S. Forest Service has invoked this new provision to enable implementation of fire salvage decisions on the national forests without waiting for appeals of the projects to be resolved, and has generally won court cases challenging its interpretation.

Editors' Summary: The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 is a grab bag of loosely related provisions that touches many well-known areas of energy consumption and conservation, including energy-saving light bulbs, increased gas mileage requirements for automobiles, and increases in ethanol production.

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The United States has more ocean area under its jurisdiction than any other country. The new Administration, therefore, has every reason to place ocean concerns and opportunities high on its environmental and economic agendas. By reforming national ocean governance, ensuring that changes in energy policy consider ocean impacts, restoring U.S. leadership in marine research, and launching a national ocean health initiative, the new Administration will allow us to better safeguard the marine environment as well as U.S. economic and national security.

President-elect Barack Obama must tackle three major environmental and natural resource issues upon taking office: (1) global warming; (2) oceans policy; and (3) stewardship of our public lands.

As President-elect Barack Obama assesses the current state of environmental law and policy, he will face two large challenges: (1) legislative gridlock that has blocked action on a wide range of environmental issues for too many years; and (2) the daunting but important task of addressing global climate change. The key to meeting both of these challenges successfully is bold leadership.

A specter is haunting American environmentalism--the specter of failure.

All of us who have been part of the environmental movement in the United States must now face up to a deeply troubling paradox: Our environmental organizations have grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to go downhill, to the point that the prospect of a ruined planet is now very real. How could this have happened?

What may prove to be one of the most important events in human history is scheduled to take place next December in Copenhagen, when the world's leaders gather to address global climate change. Building on the fragile foundation of the Kyoto Protocol, their goal is to plan how to reduce global carbon emissions through 2020. Given what we now know about the science of global warming, this is probably our last significant chance to reduce emissions so as to avoid environmental catastrophe.

The election of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) will result in political appointments to the environmental agencies and the policies they pursue which will be much more to the liking of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) community and much less so to industry. The impact of this change will be amplified by Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-Cal.) ouster of Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) as chair of the U.S. House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee. Indeed, environmental policies will take on a distinctly California character with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) as Speaker of the House and Sen.