Environmental Law Review Syndicate

By Eric DeBellis, Senior Executive Editor, Ecology Law Quarterly.

This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment.

The overwhelming majority of environmental enforcement actions settle out of court, but overlooking settlements as merely a mechanical means to save time and court costs is a mistake. An agency’s approach to settlement has tremendous environmental justice implications that go largely unnoticed.

In a traditional enforcement settlement model, the government claims the exclusive right to speak for the people. It brings an enforcement action against the defendant, and the two parties negotiate a penalty amount. The defendant signs a settlement agreement and pays the penalty to the Treasury. This is the “Speeding Ticket” settlement model. This model is expedient, but it excludes affected communities. The Speeding Ticket model remains the norm today, but several state and federal agencies have begun to explore an alternative tool: the supplemental environmental projects (SEP).

By Brenden Cline, Editor-in-Chief, Harvard Environmental Law Review.

This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. It is the original post, so please leave any comments or responses here!

[This] is a ‘rare case.’ It is and should be . . . . But every generation or so a case comes along when this Court needs to say enough is enough. — Chief Justice Roberts[1]

As my law school graduation nears, I’d like to advance a common-sense argument for the Clean Power Plan’s statutory authority that only a law student could make: the D.C. Circuit and Supreme Court should reject EPA’s and challengers’ strained readings of the duplicative amendments to Clean Air Act section 111(d) and instead follow the late Justice Scalia’s “irreconcilability canon” to give these amendments no effect. To date, just one brief filed in the torrent of Clean Power Plan litigation mentions the irreconcilability canon in passing.[2] I think this interpretive tool warrants more attention.

So quit the jiggery-pokery, put down the applesauce, and take your head out of a bag. Justice Scalia may no longer be with us, but his immortal words endure.

By Myles Osborne, General Member, Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law.

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In late October 2015, the Southern California Gas Company’s Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Storage Facility began spewing natural gas into the air over the San Fernando Valley at a rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. Composed primarily of methane, a “short-lived” climate pollutant with twenty-five times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide, the leak effectively doubled the methane emissions rate for the Los Angeles Basin. With substantial environmental costs and several botched attempts at containment, the leak did not escape comparisons to 2010’s disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill as stinking clouds of methane entered the atmosphere, displacing families and businesses in the nearby community of Porter Ranch.

By Stacy Shelton, Staff Editor, Vermont Journal of Environmental Law. 

This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment.

With millions of gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from a blown-out well in the summer of 2010, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its partners settled on a Hail Mary plan to save a generation of sea turtles: Translocation. Using specially outfitted FedEx trucks, federal and state biologists moved about 25,000 turtle eggs from Gulf of Mexico beaches to the Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, away from the oil’s path. About half the eggs hatched, and the hatchlings were released into the Atlantic Ocean. In their calculation, the biologists had weighed the risks of reduced hatchling success and interfering with their ability to imprint on natal beaches by moving the turtles against the probability the hatchlings would swim into the oil and certain death if they remained in place.

Today, climate change has biologists working out similar but exponentially more complicated calculations in deciding whether to move species. Instead of simple translocation–which is the human-assisted movement of a species within its historic range—biologists are considering whether the ecological disruptions due to rising temperatures will necessitate moving species outside their historic range as their native habitats become inhospitable. Such assisted movement has been termed “managed relocation,” defined by scientists as the intentional act of moving a species outside its historic range in response to climate change. Similar terms for managed relocation are “assisted migration” and “assisted colonization.” The focus of this paper is on managed relocation and the legal, scientific, and political issues it raises.

By Jennifer Golinsky, Executive Editor, UCLA Journal of Environmental Law & Policy.

This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment.

The Clean Power Plan (“CPP”), announced and promulgated in late 2015 by the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and backed by President Barack Obama, seeks to develop a comprehensive regulatory scheme over the nation’s power plants in an effort to promote cleaner energy development and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On February 10, 2016, the Supreme Court granted a petition to stay the Clean Power Plan until a legal challenge against it can proceed on the merits. This post 1) provides a short overview of the CPP, 2) explores the history of CPP litigation and the Supreme Court’s recent decision to stay, 3) predicts the future outlook of the CPP, and 4) provides an alternate arrangement by which the EPA could conceivably seek to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in the event that the CPP is struck down.