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GreenLaw – Latest Articles
Not Again — Another Coal Ash Pond Ruptures While EPA Dithers
Three years ago, the rupture of a coal ash pond in Kingston, Tennessee sent 5.4 million cubic yards of a toxic slurry into neighborhoods and the Emory River. That spill focused attention on EPA's persistent failure to come up with regulations governing disposal of...
Third Circuit Issues Two Important Environmental Decisions in October
by Daniel E. Estrin Supervising Attorney, Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic, Inc. Adjunct Professor of Law, Pace Law School The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit last month issued two well-reasoned and important opinions regarding the enforcement and...
A National Strategy for Creating an Energy Conservation District Program to Reduce Energy Use and Mitigate Climate Change
Federal and state policies should encourage localities that contain neighborhoods with the potential for district energy systems and transit oriented development to rezone these areas as Energy Conservation Districts calibrated to achieve multiple objectives of...
Climate Response: A Moral Issue or an Economic Issue?
Last month I presented a paper at the Vermont Law School Environmental Scholarship symposium, and the paper relied in some part on the idea that the most achievable (if modest) means of incorporating climate externalities into societal decisionmaking would be some...
What (if anything) Does Occupy Wall Street Mean for the Future of Environmental Law?
The Occupy Wall Street protests have been characterized by their lack of a set of specific policy demands, so it may be that a short answer to the question "What does Occupy Wall Street mean for the future of environmental law?" is "not much." As a left-leaning,...
Oil Still Bleeding into Gulf of Mexico
While the Deepwater Horizon spill has been out of the headlines for a year, oil continues to bleed into the Gulf of Mexico from many other drill rigs. Waterkeeper Alliance and several Gulf Coast Waterkeeper organizations have just given notice of their intent to sue...
EPA Region I Endorses Closed-Cycle Cooling for Another Power Plant
Clean Water Act § 316(b) requires facilities that discharge waste heat (primarily thermal electric steam generating power plants) to use the "Best Technology Available" (BTA) for minimizing or avoiding adverse environmental impact. The primary impact of these...
Perfect Storms and Human Settlements
by John R. Nolon The news coverage of the damage wrought by tropical storms Irene and Lee describes the perfect storm caused by a rapidly changing physical, financial, and political environment. Recent flooding is only the latest convincing evidence for us laymen that...
Upside-Down Water Quality Federalism
One of the bedrock principles of environmental federalism is that States may always choose to impose stricter, more protective standards than the federal agency might choose for the same activity. One of the key means by which environmental federalism is implemented...
New Scholarship on the Guarani Aquifer
David Cassuto BAILE (the Brazil-American Institute for Law & Environment) has been focusing on transboundary groundwater of late. Prof. Romulo Sampaio and I attended a UNESCO/ISARM conference on the subject in Paris last December, where we presented a paper on...