Environmental credit markets for mitigating impacts to wetlands, endangered species, water quality, and carbon emissions have been established throughout the United States. Recently, there has been much debate about whether a conservation project should be allowed to produce credits for multiple markets, a practice broadly referred to as credit stacking.

Absent legislative intervention, CAA regulation of GHGs is moving beyond mobile sources to the industrial and power facilities that emit significant U.S. GHG emissions. The authors analyze the mechanisms available to EPA for regulating such sources, and identify one, NSPS, as the most predictable, likely, and practical, i.e., knowable, pathway. Indeed, EPA announced in late 2010 that it intends to pursue this pathway.

This Article briefly describes a new basis for the objection that EPA has employed whereby operating permits can be delayed for significant periods of time without the expenditure of significant resources by EPA or environmental groups. In many cases, its use has shifted resource-intensive enforcement questions to the states.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency embarked on an ambitious schedule of air pollution rulemaking following the vacatur of several Bush Administration rulemakings. The “transport rule” seeks to cap interstate emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen oxides (NO_x) from power plants to replace the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR).

Several key issues have emerged as pivotal in ongoing efforts to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Progress on these complex issues is central to the success of TSCA reform. To foster further discussion of these critical topics, the Environmental Law Institute convened a series of issue-specific lunchtime teleconferences during the summer and fall of 2011 to provide a forum for focused dialogue among key players. The first panel of the series, held on June 30, 2011, set the stage for the series by examining the status of TSCA reform in the larger context of the U.S.

For nearly 40 years, EPA allowed application of pesticides directly to or over waters of the United States without an NPDES permit and instead relied on the FIFRA registration process to regulated such pesticide use. Following mixed results from the courts regarding the legality of this practice, the pesticide industry filed a petition for rulemaking and obtained a favorable rulemaking outcome. Nonetheless, the pesticide industry challenged the results of its own rulemaking petition in hopes of obtaining an even more generous rule.

The Federal Circuit Cienega X decision imposes insufficient financial analysis of Penn Central’s two economic prongs to satisfy either economic practice or the Penn Central test. The decision’s imposed change in value measurement evaluates only one prong of the Penn Central test. Change in value satisfies the economic impact prong but does not establish severity of the economic impact vis-à-vis frustration of distinct investment-backed expectations (DIBE).

In Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that U.S. treaty negotiators severed the perpetual right to use land from formal title to the land in an 1837 (and 1854) Treaty. The Mille Lacs majority and dissent differed only as to whether treaty-guaranteed usufructuary property rights had been abrogated by subsequent events.

Major emitting facilities are required to comply with BACT standards for each pollutant subject to regulation under the CAA. This requirement—initially thought to be inconsequential—has now become a dominant feature of the PSD program, for the first time subjecting greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources to federally mandated pollution control standards. This Article is the fifth in a series on the CAA’s complex PSD program.

The use of environmental tort claims to compensate pollution victims or to protect the environment and human health is still in an early stage of development in China. Nevertheless, tort cases play an outsized role in China’s environmental law system. From 2004 to 2009, China’s courts heard more environmental pollutionrelated tort cases than pollution-related administrative and criminal cases combined. Since 1998, the number of environmental lawsuits filed with the courts increased at an annual average of 25%.