After its first session, the 95th Congress can take credit for completing work on long-standing controversies in several major fields of environmental protection.The new amendments to the air and water pollution control laws represent a partial retreat from the strict statutory standards they replaced, but this retrenchment may be a result of both the pressures of economic uncertainty and a widespread inability to comply with past ambitious antipollution restrictions.

Editors' Summary: In December 1987 the Supreme Court held, in Gwaltney of Smithfield, Ltd. v. Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Inc., that citizens could not obtain civil penalties under §505 of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA) for violations that occurred wholly in the past. The ruling seemingly resolved a three-way split among the federal circuit courts of appeal on the scope of such citizen suits. But the Court's analysis actually leaves a number of questions unanswered, as the author of this Article observes.

The passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)¹ precipitated a recurring conflict between the needs of the military to prevent disclosure of military and diplomatic secrets and the public's legislated right to obtain information about the environmental impacts of government actions. NEPA brings environmental considerations into government decisionmaking and simultaneously requires public disclosure of the results of the process.

April 23, 1974, marked the first anniversary of EPA's jurisdiction over United States industrial and municipal ocean-dumping. In 1968—according to Council on Environmental Quality estimates—some 10 million tons of industrial waste and sewage sludge were disposed of at sea. In 1973—five years, a statute, and a treaty¹ later—that figure has climbed to 12 million tons. How did we get where we are? Where do we go from here?

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.