The congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) is approaching the end of its first year of operation. Already, it is drawing considerable attention from environmental groups, and for good reason.

For decades, local governments have guided land development in the United States with antiquated techniques like zoning and a general lack of expertise. Growing public concern over this situation prompted the American Law Institute (ALI) to investigate the possibility of model legislation aimed at providing comprehensive land use planning at the state as well as municipal level.

I would like to welcome everyone to the Sixteenth Annual Airlie House Conference on the Environment. Our topic this year—"Burdens of Environmental Regulation on Private Property Ownership and Business Transactions: Reasonable or Unreasonable?"—is one of particular timeliness or, as some in this audience would say, urgency. It is a topic that cuts across many traditional disciplines in the law and affects many different constituencies.

It is said that nothing is constant except change. For industry trying to keep up with its environmental obligations, perhaps the more appropriate saying would be that nothing is constant except regulatory uncertainty. Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has pursued wide-sweeping regulatory initiatives under virtually every major environmental statute. These include the Agency's groundbreaking efforts to monitor and regulate mobile and stationary sources of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Recent literature describing how criminal law should ideally be shaped to play its crucial role in environmental governance holds that a combination of provisions should be utilized in order to enforce not only violations of administrative norms, but also unlawful emissions. To date, environmental criminal law in China is the result of norms to be found in a wide range of provisions and statutes covering a large number of crimes. The formulation of these norms is in some cases not very precise or clear.

This Article is adapted from The Law of Green Buildings: Regulatory and Legal Issues in Design, Construction, Operations, and Financing ch. 1 (J. Cullen Howe & Michael B. Gerrard eds. 2010). Copyright © 2010 by the American Bar Association and co-published with ELI Press. Reprinted by permission. This book provides an overview of green building law from a variety of well-know attorneys and other professionals in the green building field. These legal issues are likely to evolve quickly—and perhaps radically—in the coming years.

[Editors' Summary: This Article is adapted from The Law of Green Buildings: Regulatory and Legal Issues in Design, Construction, Operations, and Financing ch. 2 (J. Cullen Howe & Michael B. Gerrard eds., 2010). Copyright © 2010 by the American Bar Association and co-published with ELI Press. Reprinted by permission. This book provides an overview of green building law from a variety of well-known attorneys and other professionals in the green building field. These legal issues are likely to evolve quickly—and perhaps radically—in the coming years.

The CAA's PSD program is extraordinarily complex. This Article is the fourth in a series on PSD under the CAA. The first three Articles, which appeared in the December 2005, January 2006, and January 2008 issues of News & Analysis, focused on baselines, increments, and ceilings, and on the permit triggers for new facilities. In this Article, Prof.

A battle is waging in the Northern Rocky Mountains, with environmental groups supporting the return of the wolf to the region to restore ecological balance, and the livestock industry fighting the species’ return based on the threat it is perceived to pose to the industry’s economic success.

In almost every state, local regulation plays a significant role in wind power siting. To create an effective and predictable regulatory environment, lawyers and environmental professionals will need to help local governments draft and administer ordinances that address the specific issues involved with electric power generation from wind facilities.