Amidst the clamor of political rhetoric and the barrage of proposals and counterproposals, the nation's energy problem emerges rather starkly: a precarious combination of needless inefficiency, lagging domestic energy production, and increasingly expensive and unreliable foreign supplies of oil. President Carter's response¹ has been to impose a ceiling on imports of foreign oil and to propose a massive commitment of public funds to develop on a crash basis a new synthetic fuel industry.

The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA),¹ which has been in effect less than three years, represents perhaps the deepest penetration by the federal government into the activities of the private sector for the purpose of regulating environmental hazards. Recently, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals became the first federal court to interpret a key data-gathering provision of TSCA, and, in so doing, it left the regulators pleased and the chemical manufacturers unhappy.

Until the early part of this decade, the federal common law of nuisance consisted of little more than a nebulous theory asserting the authority of the federal courts to remedy serious instances of interstate pollution. In 1972, Justice Douglas penned his landmark opinion in Illinois v. City of Milwaukee,¹ in which the Supreme Court announced that the federal question statute² conferred jurisdiction upon the district courts to entertain common law nuisance cases.

Recognizing that many areas of the country had failed to achieve the Clean Air Act's ambitious air quality goals, Congress in 1977 ordered major revisions in state implementation plans (SIPs) to incorporate more stringent regulatory requirements for polluting activities in those regions. As a necessary first step in this program, the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977 directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to designate those areas in which national ambient air quality standards had not been attained.

The October 1979 Term of the United States Supreme Court is shaping up as a full one with respect to cases raising environmental issues.

The environmental and economic burdens resulting from the nation's burgeoning use and disposal of packaging materials—principally beer and soft drink cans and bottles—has been the subject of state legislation for more than 25 years. Not suprisingly, the history of packaging legislation has been a stormy one, due in large part to staunch industry opposition in every forum, including the media, legislative chambers, and the courts.

Surface-mined coal comprises over 50 percent of the nation's annual coal production, and strip mining operations affect hundreds of thousands of acres in more than half of the states.¹ Two years after enactment of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA),² substantial progress is finally being made toward establishment of a strong national program for controlling the environmentally detrimental aspects of surface mining.

When Congress, in §102(2)(C) of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), directed federal agencies to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for every environmentally significant major federal action, it could hardly have foreseen the voluminous "detailed statement" that the federal courts would soon require agencies to produce. Modern impact statements have been known to occupy a foot or more of shelf space and cost as much as $100,000 to prepare. Such costs have been justified on the basis of the resulting improvement in agency decisionmaking and in project design.

Mexico's recent emergence as owner of the largest oil reserves in the western hemisphere, if not the world, makes it ironic that its initial attempts to tap these holdings led to the largest oil spill in history. On June 3, 1979, a blowout occurred at the IXTOC I exploratory well in the Bay of Campeche of the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in a continuing discharge of approximately 30,000 barrels of oil per day. After a few days, the spill had exceeded the magnitude of the infamous Santa Barbara spill of 1969.

After nearly a decade of litigation and administrative proceedings, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seems finally to have established the extent of environmental disclosure required by corporations subject to the federal securities laws.¹ Environmental groups have long urged that a reporting corporation must be required to disclose not only the nature of environmental polluting effects of its activities but also the costs of achieving compliance with the relevant environmental laws.