Overboard? The Complexity of Traditional TMDL Calculations Under the Clean Water Act
The Clean Water Act (CWA) requires states to calculate total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) of individual pollutants that impair their waters.
The Clean Water Act (CWA) requires states to calculate total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) of individual pollutants that impair their waters.
Although a vast literature focuses on the efforts of states on climate change, they are not the only sovereigns who are working to address its negative impacts. This Article argues that though tribal governments are not part of the federalist system, they are still capable of regulatory innovation that may prove helpful to other sovereigns, such as other tribes, states, and the federal government.
Recent assessments of the international community’s ability to hold the increase of global average temperature to well below 2°C, while pursuing efforts to limit that increase to 1.5°C, indicate that this goal is unlikely to be achieved without large-scale implementation of climate engineering (CE) technologies.
Established in over 65 countries and territories, marine protected areas (MPAs) embody a range of habitats, enable the provision of fundamental ecosystem services, protect marine biodiversity and cultural resources, and provide spaces to conduct cutting-edge research and implement innovative policies. Yet management of MPAs can face challenges, including the lack of adequate tools, the need for rules to secure comprehensive monitoring, the vastness of the ocean, and more.
As climate change worsens, so does the risk of wildfires. This is especially so in already hot, dry areas such as the western United States. Adding to this problem is the rapid growth of the wildland-urban interface (WUI).
Economywide legislation to address climate change will be ineffective unless it addresses greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land use. Yet incorporating these sectors into the most popular policy proposal—a carbon tax—carries legal risk that policymakers and legal commentators have ignored. This Article explores whether a carbon tax, as applied to agriculture and land use, is a direct tax within the meaning of the Constitution; it concludes that text, history, and Supreme Court precedent up through National Federation of Independent Business v.
Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation in the United States have remained persistently high. One cause is common low-density land use patterns that make most Americans dependent on automobiles. Reducing these emissions requires increasing density, which U.S. local government law makes difficult to achieve through the political process. Mount Laurel, a 1975 New Jersey Supreme Court case that addressed an affordable housing crisis by restraining local parochialism, provides a potential solution.
Limiting future temperature increases and associated climate change requires immediate action to prevent additional carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere and to lower the existing atmospheric carbon dioxide load. This could be advanced through carbon capture and storage (CCS), which involves collecting carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released by power plants or similar facilities and injecting it into underground geologic formations, where it will remain permanently sequestered.
Access to water is a fundamental climate change issue in North America and internationally. It is related to significant political, social, and ecological struggles that indigenous peoples face, and governments and courts so far have done little to address these inequities.
Climate change has important implications for the management and conservation of natural resources and public lands. The federal agencies responsible for managing these resources have generally recognized that considerations pertaining to climate change adaptation should be incorporated into existing planning processes, yet this topic is still treated as an afterthought in many planning documents. Only a few federal agencies have published guidance on how managers should consider climate change impacts and their management implications.