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.