Volume 47 (2020)

The United States is drastically behind the rest of the world when it comes to offshore wind energy. With only one offshore wind farm in operation, developers have cited regulatory burdens and excessive litigation as two of the primary constraints on the industry. Currently, these developers must go through several ...

After Gundy v. United States, the Supreme Court is poised to dramatically roll back the power of administrative agencies through a reinvigoration of the nondelegation doctrine. This will substantially restrict the ability of agencies, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency, to promulgate environmental regulations and will render large swaths of the ...

To steer a ship, sailors cannot direct the wind, but they can adjust the sails. Likewise, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot direct where air pollution drifts, but it can adjust the rules for combating interstate air pollution between states. The “good neighbor provision” of the Clean Air Act (CAA) ...

Climate change is making water a scarcer resource. Warming temperatures, urban growth, and agricultural demand are pushing water resources to their limits. Increasingly, rival states compete over water allocation from limited sources throughout the country, such as the Rio Grande. These fights often extend to the courtroom. Since drafting the ...

Since President Trump took office in 2017, the Bureau of Land Management and other executive agencies have pursued expansive and aggressive development of fossil fuel resources on public lands. This development will add to the United States’ already large contribution to climate change. Unfortunately, those seeking to convince the U.S. ...

This In Brief begins with a short discussion of two major legislative acts to change tax law: the 2017 TCJA and the 2018 BBA. It then discusses the production tax credit (PTC) and the investment tax credit (ITC), the two energy tax provisions that the BBA changed and eliminated, respectively. ...

The United States’ energy sector is the country’s “principal . . . contribution to climate change.” The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) “regulates significant swaths of the U.S. energy industry, including the wholesale sale and transmission of electricity,” the permitting of several types of energy infrastructure projects, and the transportation ...

Newcomers to California could be forgiven for thinking they have crossed into treacherous terrain. By virtue of the state’s Proposition 65 right-to-know law, store shelves and public garages everywhere announce, “WARNING: This [product/food/facility] contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer [or reproductive harm].” The proliferation of ...

Despite international recognition of the greater vulnerability of persons with disabilities to climate change, disability issues have received little attention from practitioners, policy makers, and scholars in this field. As countries move forward with measures to combat climate change and adapt to its impacts, it is critical to understand how ...

Complaints about excessive economic burdens associated with regulation abound in contemporary political and legal rhetoric. In recent years, perhaps nowhere have these complaints been heard as loudly as in the context of U.S. regulations targeting the use of coal to supply power to the nation’s electricity system, as production levels ...

According to most estimates, more than one hundred million people will be permanently displaced by climate change by 2050. Among the people most at risk of displacement are American Indians. If the government does nothing, or simply does not do enough, hundreds of Indian communities across the United States will ...

Through building waves of legal scholarship and litigation, a group of legal academics and practitioners is advancing a theory of the public trust doctrine styled as the “atmospheric trust.” The atmospheric trust would require the federal and state governments to regulate public and private actors to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ...