The drive for "regulatory reform" is now in its ascendency as a dominant influence on federal regulatory policy.

Over the last two years, the federal common law of nuisance has been described in these pages as a "potent legal tool"¹ the significance of which, due to its "revolutionary growth,"² could foreseeably rival the citizen suit provisions in the major federal environmental statutes.³ These observations were not hyperbole.

The cornerstone of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 is the requirement that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set geographically uniform national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS). Congress' goal of assuring healthy air quality across the nation is embodied in its commitment to achieve attainment of the NAAQS by prescribed dates.

The federal consistency provisions embodied in §§307(c) and 307(d) of the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA),¹ have, for almost a decade, been a lurking presence in the federal coastal zone management program. These provisions were designed to ensure that actions for which the federal government has responsibility conform to state coastal zone management objectives. Although the interaction in the consistency process among federal agencies such as the Department of the Interior, the U.S.

In 1977, the federal government, at President Carter's direction, launched an unprecedented two-part effort, first, to determine what population, resource, and environmental problems may face the world in the year 2000 and, second, to devise a plan of action to deal with those problems.¹ The first of those studies, the GLOBAL 2000 REPORT,² was delivered to President Carter in July 1980. Its purpose was to make projections as to the state of the world's resource problems absent intervening policy changes.

The harnessing of the sun's direct energy to heat and cool homes and to heat water for household uses is changing residential architecture across America. As the use of conventional fuels is reduced globally, residential solar systems will become a common sight in the 1980s and beyond. Today, there is a large variety of residential solar designs because the technology is young, decentralized, and rapidly growing and because there is much diversity in climates, latitudes, and architectural styles in the regions where the technology is applied. Each solar design has a unique visual impact.

Over the past 40 years, the United States Congress has constructed a body of law aimed at salvaging fish and wildlife resources from the impacts of federal water resource projects—dams, canals, channelization, and their attendant improvements.

In 1972, as part of the process of detente, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) entered into an Agreement on Cooperation in the Field of Environmental Protection. One of the more than 40 specific projects under this exchange deals with "Legal and Administrative Measures for Environmental Protection." The scope of the project includes studying the roles of nongovernmental organizations: public interest groups in the U.S. and mass movements for nature protection in the Soviet Union.

In January 1981, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took its first steps toward enforcing the noncompliance penalty program authorized by §120 of the Clean Air Act.¹ A novel enforcement tool established by the 1977 amendments to the Act, §120 prescribes automatic administrative money penalties equal to the economic benefit of delayed compliance for sources still in violation with Clean Air Act requirements two years after passage of the amendments.

Enforcement was much on the mind of Congress when it drafted the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970.¹ The Act gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broad authority to monitor the emissions of individual polluting facilities and to seek the imposition of potentially severe sanctions on violators. In the first six years of the Act's existence, however, EPA's attention focused less on enforcement than on developing and defending a regulatory and institutional framework for implementing the Act.