The U.S. legal cannabis market is an estimated $60 billion industry, with approximately 28,000 businesses operating and employing upwards of 300,000 people, and growing rapidly. Large-scale cultivation requires significant energy usage, nutrient and pesticide inputs, and water usage, resulting in cumulative environmental impacts. Addressing these concerns raises complex legal issues because of cannabis’ federal classification as a Schedule 1 narcotic, which prevents federal agencies from collecting data on, providing guidance to, or regulating the industry.

The circular economy has gone mainstream as a goal in the transitions toward a more sustainable society. Often, however, laws that promote a circular economy remain vague or narrowly focused on resource efficiency, obscuring the fact that they have multiple environmental effects and can lead to environmental trade offs. This Article examines how to properly frame circular economy laws for sustainability, focusing on product-service systems generally and the case of car sharing in particular.

Progressive cities and states have begun enacting policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, one of the leading sources of such emissions in the United States. The same jurisdictions have also generally committed to pursuing decarbonization equitably, without exacerbating the disadvantages faced by historically marginalized communities. Electrification is currently a favored policy for decarbonizing buildings. This Article examines the potential for building electrification to impact tenant energy costs through a case study of New York City.

In Rethinking Grid Governance for the Climate Change Era, Shelley Welton has incisively described the underexplored institutional role of regional transmission organizations (RTOs) in facilitating decarbonization. As an attorney who advocates within the RTO stakeholder process, and before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the federal courts, I see firsthand how the RTO processes for identifying and addressing emerging issues can succeed or be derailed, and the limitations in FERC’s ability to proactively set these processes and their outcomes straight.

In Rethinking Grid Governance for the Climate Change Era, Prof. Shelley Welton makes a compelling case for why “U.S. grid governance must be redesigned to accommodate a new era of regulatory priorities that include responding to climate change.” As the operators of regional electricity markets and managers of the transmission grid, Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) “must play a pivotal role” in achieving clean electricity goals.

This Comment is based on Tom Hassenboehler’s remarks at the 2021-2022 Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review conference, available at https://www.eli.org/ environmental-law-policy-annual-review/2021-2022-ELPAR-conference.

One central but under-scrutinized way that fossil fuel companies impede the clean energy transition is by essentially running the United States’ electricity grid, writing its rules to favor their own private interests. In most of the country, the electricity grid is managed by Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs). RTOs are private membership clubs in which incumbent industry members make the rules for electricity markets and the electricity grid through private mini-democracies—with voting privileges reserved for RTO members—under broad regulatory authority.

This Comment provides an empirical snapshot of the environmental legal literature for the 2020-2021 academic year, as well as  information on the top articles chosen for re-publication by the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR), which is published by the Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School.

Humans are inescapably dependent upon geological processes and structures. Many of these interactions are direct, such as when we cultivate the soil or mine the earth. However, the terms of our interaction with geology are usually invisible and unacknowledged. Although the relationships are complex, a firm understanding of the environment and our dependence on it cannot ignore the interconnections between earth’s systems, including subsurface geology, vegetation, oceans, and atmosphere.