Today in California, urban infill development proliferates. A welcome alternative to decades of greenfield expansion, this infill boom is the culmination of regulatory incentives like SB 375, economic growth in urban areas, as well as increasing awareness of the climate evils of vehicle emissions (quantified in vehicle miles traveled, or ...

Hydraulic fracturing, an oil and gas drilling technique commonly referred to as “fracking,” has experienced a profound expansion in the United States since the dawn of the twenty-first century. Providing an influx of cheap oil and gas and new job opportunities, the boom has worked wonders for the American economy. ...

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is one of our nation’s oldest environmental statutes. It was passed decades before the major environmental law renaissance of the 1970s, and is lesser known than the more contemporary wildlife protection statutes that dominate headlines and political debate, such as the Endangered Species Act.

In 2016, the United States Supreme Court decided Sturgeon v. Frost, which posed the question of whether the federal government may regulate activities on nonfederal lands within the hundred million acres of land designated for preservation under a 1980 federal statute, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). The ...

When honey bee populations began to drastically decline in 2006 from what came to be known as Colony Collapse Disorder, the response from the United States Department of Agriculture was swift. As research emerged on the causes, pesticides—specifically a new and widely used class of pesticides called neonicotinoids—quickly emerged as ...

In North Dakota v. Heydinger, two Eighth Circuit judges disagreed about the constitutionality of a Minnesota statute regulating the electricity imported into the state. Their disagreement stemmed from the judges’ conflicting understandings of the behavior of electrons.

The U.S. electrical grid is a modern marvel, consisting of nearly 3500 utility organizations, 450,000 miles of transmission lines, and six million miles of distribution cable that span across and crisscross the country to serve over 334 million people (and growing) whose total electricity demand exceeds 830 gigawatts. But the ...

Energy information and technology has reached a point where the operator of a twenty-first-century grid can balance supply and demand based on value, not cost. Better data, more distributed and dynamic resources, and improvements in supporting infrastructure represent an opportunity for an electric system to operate more reliably with less ...