The Cap-and-Trade Program is a crucial aspect of California’s climate agenda and one of the foremost carbon emissions reduction efforts in the world. But flaws in the design of the Program’s compliance instruments diminish its overall effectiveness by limiting the amount of net emissions reductions achieved. This In Brief argues ...

Congress enacted the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to ensure species are protected and habitats are preserved. In 2008, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the Service) sought permits for an experimental removal of Barred Owls, an invasive species protected under the MBTA that ...

Habitat loss and degradation are the leading causes of species endangerment in North America. Increasingly, climate change is becoming a significant factor in species endangerment as it disrupts migration routes, changes animal behavior, and shifts species’ ranges. In the coming decades, habitat loss and climate change will threaten more than ...

In 2019, the Supreme Court decided Sturgeon v. Frost for the second time. Sturgeon arose because of a 1980 federal statute, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, that limited the executive branch’s jurisdiction over public land in Alaska to lands to which the federal government holds title. This is ...

Who owns the shore of Indiana’s section of Lake Michigan when it is not covered in water—a private landowner or the public? In February 2018, the Indiana Supreme Court held that the state of Indiana retains exclusive title up to the natural ordinary high water mark (OHWM) of Lake Michigan. ...

Beginning in the 1980s, conservation groups began campaigning for the federal government to list the fluvial Arctic grayling—a relative of the salmon that lives only in the cold waters of North America—as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. In 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to ...

For the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a roughly six-hundred-mile natural gas pipeline stretching from West Virginia to North Carolina, a right-of-way to intersect the Appalachian Trail was essential. Although the proposed pipeline crossed below the trail by about six-hundred feet, it would require clearing of trees and plants along its length, ...

The plaintiffs in Pakootas v. Teck Cominco faced a particularly challenging legal problem: not only was a large corporation polluting their local environment, but the corporation was located in Canada, while the plaintiffs lived in the United States. Although a variety of environmental agreements have been struck between the United ...