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As our planet faces more frequent and severe environmental threats due to climate change (including threats to biodiversity), environmental justice will be essential to ensure that the costs and burdens of combating these threats are shared equally, borne by all people worldwide in a fair and equitable manner. If the past is any indicator, however, environmental problems—and their "solutions"—disproportionately affect poor communities and communities of color, including Indigenous communities. Despite these past injustices, Indigenous lands, which make up only 20 percent of the Earth's territory, contain 80 percent of the world's remaining biodiversity—evidence that Indigenous peoples are among the most effective stewards of the environment. A primary reason for this remarkable statistic is the use and practice of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge; ecological wisdom which has been passed down for generations and has been shown to strengthen community resilience in response to the multiple stressors of global environmental change. While the United States government has been slow to acknowledge the value of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, it has recently begun to incorporate that knowledge into environmental policy in response to the worldwide climate crisis. Continuing the integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge into government environmental policy will ensure that such policies will be more effective at the federal, state, and local levels and more equitable in their application. Western scientists, government officials, and global leaders need to build trusting and co-equal relationships with Indigenous communities by actively listening to all cultures and respecting the many kinds of knowledge systems required to conserve the natural world and all living beings. This paper will address how incorporating Traditional Ecological Knowledge into U.S. policy would help safeguard the environment from further biodiversity loss and other ecological destruction, and advance environmental justice to ensure the fair treatment of all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coral reefs are experiencing severe decline, and urgent action is required at local and global scales to curb ecosystem loss. Establishing new regulations to protect corals, however, can be time consuming and costly, and it is therefore necessary to leverage existing legal instruments, such as policies originally designed to address terrestrial rather than marine activities, to prevent coral reef degradation. Focusing on the United States, but drawing on successful examples worldwide, we present actionable pathways to increase coral protections under legislation that was originally designed to advance clean freshwater, safe drinking water, and emergency management. We identify specific legal policies and procedures (e.g., industrial permit limits, nonpoint source management incentives, and floodplain restoration programs) that can curb coral reef pollution and can be extended to other countries with similar regulations in place. Coral reef practitioners should consider a broad array of currently underused, actionable, and intersecting environmental policies that can be applied to mitigate coral stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) specifies the use of biofuels in the United States and thereby guides nearly half of all global biofuel production, yet outcomes of this keystone climate and environmental regulation remain unclear. Here we combine econometric analyses, land use observations, and biophysical models to estimate the realized effects of the RFS in aggregate and down to the scale of individual agricultural fields across the United States. We find that the RFS increased corn prices by 30% and the prices of other crops by 20%, which, in turn, expanded US corn cultivation by 2.8 Mha (8.7%) and total cropland by 2.1 Mha (2.4%) in the years following policy enactment (2008 to 2016). These changes increased annual nationwide fertilizer use by 3 to 8%, increased water quality degradants by 3 to 5%, and caused enough domestic land use change emissions such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher. These tradeoffs must be weighed alongside the benefits of biofuels as decision-makers consider the future of renewable energy policies and the potential for fuels like corn ethanol to meet climate mitigation goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current wildfire crisis in the western United States shows no sign of abating. Repeated policy failures manifest in an enduring, multi-decade commitment to fire suppression combined with massive development in the wildland-urban interface and accelerating climate change have created the conditions for ever larger, more intense, and destructive wildfires. Many of these fires are happening on federal public lands, raising important questions about the federal government's approach to wildfires and its responsibility for the harms that they cause. While there is no easy fix to the crisis and while westerners will need to get used to living with more fire, more smoke, and more damage and destruction, there is widespread agreement that any long-term solution will require substantial and sustained investments in forest restoration and resilience, especially on federal public lands. To date, however, long-term funding for forest restoration and resilience has been lacking. This Symposium Article focuses on the issue of wildfire emissions from federal forests and the challenges that wildfire emissions, and forests generally, pose for climate policy. It starts from the observation that forests and land use may well turn out to be the hardest and most important part of the climate crisis, as illustrated by the increasing frequency of novel extreme wildfire events in the western United States and around the world This Article argues that the mainstream climate policy approach to forests and land use, which views them as near-term mitigation opportunities that are relatively fast, easy, and cheap, needs to be reevaluated Rather than looking for ways to leverage forests and land use as part of climate policy, this Article argues that we should be looking for ways to leverage climate policy to protect and restore forests and to enhance their resilience in the face of accelerating climate disruption. To that end, the Article proposes a new climate liability and funding mechanism that could facilitate longer-term investments in forest restoration and resilience. The proposal has three key elements. (1) a strict liability regime for all greenhouse gas emissions from unintentional fires on federal public lands; (2) a requirement that the federal government pay the social cost of carbon for these emissions: and (3) a special fund that would receive these payments and be dedicated to forest restoration, with a requirement that the funds be spent on actual on-the-ground restoration work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is complex during the best of times. It is commonly conceptualized as the quintessential global collective action problem: it affects those who do not contribute to it while the benefits of climate change mitigation measures are not restricted to those who pursue such measures. This conceptualization illustrates the high transaction costs involved in domestic policies as well as in international agreements addressing climate change, and it is of academic and practical interest. As such, this Article discusses the current challenges that climate change policies face, focusing on the linkages between the climate change policies of the Trump administration and the COVID-19 pandemic and on the effects of those linkages, both in the United States and globally. Specifically, this Article addresses the Trump administration's attacks on climate science and its deregulatory climate agenda, as well as the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. In addition, it discusses principles of international law and the challenges related to state liability for environmental harms in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. This Article also assesses how the United States' climate policies are likely to aggravate inequalities both domestically, as well as globally, in the aftermath of the pandemic. This Article offers several original contributions. First, it provides a unique assessment of how the deregulatory climate policies implemented nationally and internationally by the Trump administration have magnified the COVID-19 crisis. Second, the law and economics methodology used in this Article validates the claim that improving environmental quality is connected to optimizing early regulatory action. Third, this Article discusses the challenges of state liability for climate harms in the aftermath of the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and concurrent COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, this Article offers relevant insights for the literature on climate change that are likely to be applicable to critical future situations, whether they are health-related, a global economic crisis, or climate-related emergencies. Ultimately, this Article concludes that, in the aggregate, all such climate change policies have contributed to increased pollution, including elevated greenhouse gas emissions that have aggravated pre-pandemic inequalities embedded within the United States and among countries. Consequently, the domestic and international policy choices of the Trump administration are worsening the impact of the pandemic, particularly for those in more vulnerable positions, as well as indelibly poisoning the global commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the birth of air pollutant regulation and its transformation, which, formerly under state control, moved on to a regime based on market instruments. The author shows the gradual commercialization of the approach to air pollution problems, whose origins can be traced to the United States, summarized in three different historic moments: the Emission Trading Program (1982), the Average between Refineries (1985), and the Acid Rain Program (1995). These experiments, in a framework of the command and control environmental regulatory regime, led to the creation of the first atmospheric contaminant emissions market in world history and opened up the road to the new "cap and trade" environmental regulatory regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes some of the legal and policy approaches that have been taken to phase out and regulate perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances in the U.S. They include the Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) Stewardship Program, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), and the Stockholm Convention. Also mentioned are the Safe Drinking Water Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) health advisories, and congressional actions.

Under President Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was largely successful in at least temporarily achieving the administration's policy goals. It did so, in part, by significantly altering or distorting the processes used under prior Republican and Democratic EPA leadership to obtain consensus opinion of the scientific community on issues pertinent to EPA's science-based regulatory activities. In this article I explore the extent to which these changes reflect replacing the norms of science with norms more appropriate to the advocacy practices of law. Under the Biden Administration, we can anticipate restoration of the norms of science that previously guided the scientific consensus processes used by EPA. However, the lesson of the Trump administration is that these norms need buttressing by developing and strengthening laws that govern the selection of members of EPA's external scientific and technical advisory committees, their deliberative processes, and the literature reviewed by EPA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite significant air quality improvements over the past 30 years, haze-- a blend of pollutant particles that can travel for hundreds of miles--continues to affect the clarity of our nation's air. Under a provision of the Clean Air Act that aims to restore scenic vistas in national parks and wilderness areas, EPA developed a long-term program to achieve "natural visibility" in protected spaces by 2064. But in 2017, EPA modified its program to allow states to change their 2064 goal from "natural visibility" to "natural visibility" plus an "estimate" of internationally sourced haze. This Note explores various problems associated with EPA's new approach: it is inconsistent with the language of the Clean Air Act, it incentivizes states to overestimate cross-border haze, it disincentivizes cross-border collaboration, and it fosters environmental injustice. The Note proposes a two-part alternative approach that includes (1) changing how states account for international pollution in their state implementation plans, and (2) reaffirming state and federal duties to engage in cross-border haze reduction efforts. Though the literature has analyzed the progress of EPA's haze program and evaluated cross-border environmental efforts, this Note builds upon past work by exploring the impact of EPA's 2017 rule, which states will implement in their next round of plans due on July 31, 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consent decrees -- the unheralded workhorses of regulatory law -- play a critical role in environmental law. The bulk of major environmental disputes at the federal level are resolved through consent decrees lodged under judicial supervision, and key federal environmental statutes and policies directly require settling parties to use consent decrees to resolve their claims. These proposed decrees, however, typically receive only a restrained judicial review that does not yield a formal judicial opinion on the full merits of the agreement. Parties, in fact, will frequently insist that the decree will not involve an admission of liability or any conclusions of law. As a result, consent decrees operate as the dark matter of environmental law -- an unseen supporting medium that surrounds and supports the statutory and regulatory directives that function within it, but which leaves few marks of its own. These decrees play a similar role in several other legal fields, including antitrust, consumer protection, class actions, labor, and bankruptcy. Most of the public and scholarly scrutiny of consent decrees has focused on concerns about their potential effects on third parties and their constraints on future executive discretion or administrative action without proper democratic accountability or transparency. This Article reverses that perspective. It assumes that consent decrees can appropriately create and foster emerging legal principles, and it suggests strategies to identify these new legal holdings. This Article proposes three ways by which consent decrees substantially influence the development of environmental law and flag new emerging principles. First, consent decrees can serve as a platform to implement nascent regulatory policy prior to the formal promulgation of rules or regulations. In a sense, consent decrees in these circumstances provide a test bed for new environmental practices and expectations that later mature into full-fledged regulatory standards. This function of consent decrees tends to surface most visibly during coordinated enforcement initiatives involving industrial sectors at the federal level. Second, consent decrees can generate new law through deferential review by the courts that lodge them. When courts weigh a proposed consent decree to determine whether to accept it, they use a relaxed review standard that does not require the court to closely assess the merits or legal conclusions of the settlement. Such a review parallels, in many respects, the deferential judicial review of administrative agency action under the federal Administrative Procedure Act. This historical deferential review of agency action nonetheless has sketched the contours of numerous important principles of environmental law; relaxed judicial determinations of the legality and fairness of consent decrees may play a similar role. Last, and most controversial, consent decree judgments arguably can directly embody legal holdings that, at minimum, have persuasive value for subsequent court proceedings. These holdings, in certain circumstances, might even rise to the level of precedential rulings entitled to stare decisis in future actions. This final role of consent decrees in generating environmental law, however, requires careful consideration to avoid the risks of manipulation or erosion of judicial authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the court ruling in Wisconsin v. Environmental Protection Agency, which held that the deadline for upwind states to stop any substantial interference must align with the deadline for downwind states' compliance to the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). Topics covered include the ruling's implications for air quality regulation, and the good neighbor provision of the Clean Air Act (CAA).

An interview with Michael Green, Director of Climate XChange, a non-profit focused on carbon pricing advocacy, media, and research. Topics include his involvement in climate policy and environmental advocacy, definition of carbon pricing including some types of national or subnational variants, and comparison of carbon pricing policies of United States with other countries.

An interview with Adrianna Quintero, director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Energy Foundation. Topics include the disproportionate impact of harms caused by environment such as climate change on people of color, women and girls, and the poor, mitigation or reinforcement of environmental racism by environmental policy regime in the U.S., and efforts which should be taken by leaders to make people feel involved in the environmental movement.

Emissions of most pollutants that result in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) formation have been decreasing in the United States. However, this trend has not been uniform across all sectors or regions of the economy. We use integrated assessment models (IAMs) to compute marginal damages for PM2.5-related emissions for each county in the contiguous United States and match location-specific emissions with these marginal damages to compute economy-wide gross external damage (GED) due to premature mortality. We note 4 key findings: First, economy-wide, GED has decreased by more than 20% from 2008 to 2014. Second, while much of the air pollution policies have focused to date on the electricity sector, damages from farms are now larger than those from utilities. Indeed, farms have become the largest contributor to air pollution damages from PM2.5-related emissions. Third, 4 sectors, comprising less than 20% of the national gross domestic product (GDP), are responsible for ~75% of GED attributable to economic activities. Fourth, uncertainty in GED estimates tends to be high for sectors with predominantly ground-level emissions because these emissions are usually estimated and not measured. These findings suggest that policymakers should target further emissions reductions from such sectors, particularly in transportation and agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing awareness of sustainability issues in industrialized countries has resulted in an unprecedented rise in the number of environmental innovations produced worldwide. However, while this is a general tendency, the amount and importance of environmental innovations is far from consistent across industrialized countries. The influence of countries' policy network styles – referring to which and how interest groups participate in making public policy choices is a dimension that has been subject to growing interest and controversy. We propose that companies from pluralistic countries will generate more environmental innovations, but the importance of environmental innovations will be higher in neo-corporatist countries. Our analysis, based on a longitudinal analysis of 84,274 environmental patents from the United States, Japan, Germany, and the UK during the period 1976–2003, indicates support for our prediction that neo-corporatist countries tend to generate more important environmental innovations than pluralistic countries. Yet, our findings do not support our hypothesis suggesting that pluralistic countries are more likely to generate a higher number of environmental innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that push by U.S. President Donald Trump to a more industry-driven environmental protection policy to bring back more blue-collar jobs would only break the effective environmental regulations. Topics covered include the effectiveness of the current U.S. environmental regulations for vehicle emissions, the U.S. enforcement approach to the Volkswagen (VW) emissions-cheating scandal, and the aftermath of the scandal on the enforcement of vehicle-emissions regulations.

A speech delivered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy at New Mexico School of Law about the role of lawyers in protecting the environment is presented. It reports that McCarthy spoke of the need to protect the environment for future generations, and how that need was hampered by a communication gap between the experts and the general public.

This Comment examines the recently rejected motion to dismiss in League of Conservation Voters v. Trump and its potential to serve as a roadmap for environmental organizations seeking to challenge regulatory rollbacks by the Trump administration. In 2017, President Donald Trump issued an executive order reversing the designation of 128 million acres of ocean as protected from oil and gas leasing. The League of Conservation Voters, along with other environmental activists, sued to enjoin the rollback, and administration officials subsequently filed a motion to dismiss. This Comment focuses on the issue of Article III standing in the case, wherein the plaintiffs must allege (1) an injury in fact that is (2) fairly traceable to the challenged conduct and (3) that a favorable judicial decision will likely redress. Prior to League of Conservation Voters, case law had not established injury in fact on the basis of potential harm to public lands caused by government deregulation. Thus, the ruling that such an injury can be established--even over an area 128 million acres in size--reflects an opportunity for environmental activists attempting to stop rollbacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impact assessment (IA) has become one of the most prevalent environmental policy instruments today. Its introduction under the National Environmental Policy Act (US) in 1969 was revolutionary. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that such a widely used tool has received its share of criticism, including that it fails to meet some of its fundamental goals. Over the last fifty years, IA has broadened in scope and application and embraced new techniques. It has followed evolved, but has not changed fundamentally. We believe that IA must continue to change to meet the societal and environmental challenges of the 21st century. But will it be enough for IA to progress through incremental change (evolution), or is a complete overhaul of impact assessment (revolution) needed? We provide some ideas as to what ‘evolution’ and ‘revolution’ may look like, but rather then offering a definitive way forward now, we invite stakeholders to present their thoughts and suggestions at the IAIA19 Annual Conference in Brisbane, which carries the same theme as the title of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: As world's top two carbon emitters, driver analysis of China and the USA helped the governments to develop policies to cut or slow down carbon emission. Many studies identified the factors affecting carbon emission in China and the USA (emitting more than 40% of the global CO 2 emission), however, few studies considered stratified heterogeneity or the interactions of factors. Here, we adopted the modified Geographical Detector tool to investigate the main drivers of carbon emission from the perspective of stratified heterogeneity. The results of this analysis showed that human economic activities in China were the dominant effect of carbon emission changes, while energy intensity contributed toward controlling the carbon emission in China. Furthermore, population growth was the most significant driving force followed by energy intensity toward controlling the carbon emission of the USA. All these factors are mutually enhancing in changing carbon emissions, while oil share with energy intensity and coal share were more significantly enhanced in China's carbon emission than other interactions. The factors of human activities and energy mix posed a more powerful effect when they mutually enhanced each other to change carbon emission compared to other enhancing interactions. This work represents a pilot scheme for a carbon dioxide emission analysis from the categorical stratified heterogeneity based on statistical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although substantial attention has focused on efforts by the new Administration to block environmental policies, climate politics have been contentious in the US since well before the election of Donald Trump. In this paper, we extend previous work on empirical examinations of echo chambers in US climate politics using new data collected on the federal climate policy network in summer 2016. We test for the similarity and differences at two points in time in homophily and echo chambers using Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM) to compare new findings from 2016 to previous work on data from 2010. We show that echo chambers continue to play a significant role in the network of information exchange among policy elites working on the issue of climate change. In contrast to previous findings where echo chambers centered on a binding international commitment to emission reductions, we find that the pre-existing echo chambers have almost completely disappeared and new structures have formed around one of the main components of the Obama Administration’s national climate policy: the Clean Power Plan. These results provide empirical evidence that science communication and policymaking at the elite level shift in relation to the policy instruments under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argue that, in determining how to handle this relatively uncharted terrain, a normative approach should guide the courts on issues related to climate change. Topics discussed include conclusions of the scientific community on climate change; ways to examining whether climate change infringes the right to life, liberty, and security of the person; and evidentiary burden and justifiability.

The article focuses on the challenges associated with environmental legacy of former U.S. President Barack Obama by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. It mentions judicial deference of the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the case Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. on environmental regulation. It also mentions contours of arbitrary and capricious review as applied to regulatory change with Administrative Procedure Act.

In some coastal cities there is an urgent need to decide on adaptation investments given the long periods needed to complete the relevant infrastructures. However such decisions are usually made under significant uncertainty due to local climate change and socio-economic impacts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has developed four global scenarios according to different representative concentration pathways (RCPs); however, using these scenarios directly is equivalent to using incomplete information in the decision-making process because they do not provide information on what sea level rise behavior is most probable. In this study, I propose a model which assigns probabilities to IPCC scenarios with Local Sea Level Rise (LSLR) information. I obtain expected damage and risk measures for the world's 120 major coastal mega-cities at specific moments in time. That is, I consider uncertainty in both scenario selection and within each scenario. With this information it is possible to make adaptation investment decisions under uncertainty with a criterion of not exceeding certain risk levels in the future. The paper shows that in the year 2100 for the equal probability mixed scenario (25% RCP 2.6, 50% RCP 4.5 and 25 RCP 8.5) the expected damage is US$ 1,251,732 millions for New Orleans and US$ 1,196,517 millions for Guangzhou. The risk measurements show that in that year the damage in the 5% of worse cases will be US$ 2,800,756 millions for Guangzhou and US$ 1,832,466 millions for New Orleans. However, not all countries have sufficient resources to make the necessary adaptation investments, so we analyze expected damage and risk according to World Bank country income groups. The paper shows that the USA and China will need to make major adaptation investments in the future. The coastal LSLR risk in lower-income cities is also calculated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The standpoint of environmental justice has become integral to environmental law in the last thirty years. Environmental justice criticizes mainstream environmental law and advocacy institutions on three main fronts: for paying too little attention to the distributive effects of environmental policy; for emphasizing elite and professional advocacy over participation in decision making by affected communities; and for adhering to a woods-and-waters view of which problems count as "environmental" that disregards the importance of neighborhoods, workplaces, and cities. This Article highlights the existence of a "long environmental justice movement" that, like the long movements for racial equality and labor organizing, put questions of economic power and distribution, democracy, and workplaces and neighborhoods at the center of environmental politics for many decades before the watershed era of environmental law making, 1970-77. The mystery is why this long environmental justice movement did not have more effect on the mainstream environmental law that arose in that period. The Article shows that we can better understand the omissions of environmental justice concerns by appreciating that mainstream environmental law was the last major legal product of "the great exception" the decades of the mid-twentieth century when, unlike any other time in modern history, economic inequality was declining and robust growth was widely shared. The assumptions of that time, along with key contingent decisions by the Ford Foundation, labor unions, and other early funders produced an environmental law that, more than much of the preceding environmental politics, neglected questions of justice. To give both environmental law and environmental justice their due, we must both locate environmental law within our new historical understanding of patterns of economic inequality and recognize that environmental justice is a recovery and extension of an essential and neglected strand of politics and law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As climate change's momentum becomes increasingly more difficult to quell, environmentalists are litigating to stop oil pipeline expansion. Litigation over two recently completed oil pipelines--the Flanagan South and the Gulf Coast--illustrates the legal battle environmentalists face. Given the outcome of those cases, it may seem that environmentalists face insurmountable judicial precedent. But they are not out of options quite yet. Although no statute expressly requires the federal government to conduct environmental analysis of proposed domestic oil pipelines, two statutes--the Clean Water Act (CWA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)--generally work in tandem to require the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps or Corps) to complete an analysis when a proposed pipeline crosses regulated waters. However, the Army Corps recently has begun using a general permit called Nationwide Permit 12 (NWP 12) to streamline the approval process by avoiding individual review of pipelines. The Tenth and District of Columbia Circuits upheld the Army Corps's use of NWP 12 in approving the Flanagan South and Gulf Coast pipelines, rejecting arguments that such use violates the CWA and NEPA. Not only did environmentalists lose both decisions, but the Army Corps also subsequently tightened its analysis to avoid potential future liability. Despite these setbacks, this Note contends that the battle is not yet over. The Note argues that the Army Corps failed to comply with the CWA's plain meaning when it issued NWP 12, resulting in a limited opportunity for the public to participate. By limiting public comment, NWP 12 undermines the Corps's ability to take a hard look at the environmental consequences of proposed oil pipelines. If the agency cannot comply with the CWA's plain meaning, it can no longer use NWP 12 to avoid individual review of oil pipelines. Given recent judicial precedent, environmentalists face a difficult task. But hope remains. Under the framework first described in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., the circuit courts are improperly deferring to the Army Corps's interpretation of the CWA when the statute's meaning is clear. Judicial recognition and correction of this would be a victory for environmentalists, as it would increase federal environmental review of domestic oil pipelines and provide the public with a better opportunity to voice its concerns over the proliferation of oil pipelines in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses U.S. community involvement of citizen scientists in environmental cleanup and protection, under guidance of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). An overview of the citizens' roles in environmental cleanup of Superfund sites in the U.S., including assistant professor Mónica Ramírez-Andreotta's role in this regard, is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the United States, the food industry alone accounts for approximately 19% of the total energy consumed. The objective of this study is to forecast the food-related energy consumption and evaluate policy alternatives for reducing food related energy consumption in the medium and long term. Influential factors of energy consumption in the food industry include population growth rate, GDP, agriculture's share of GDP, food waste, technologies, and agricultural investment. Based on the life cycle of the food industry, five life stages were considered: agricultural production, industrial processing and packaging, transportation, wholesale and retail, and household. In this study, based on the causal relationships and feedback loops between these factors and the energy consumed for each life stage, a system dynamics (SD) model was designed to simulate the situation for the US food industry. Policy options of reducing waste percentage and improving industrial energy productivity are incorporated for building the energy use mitigation scenarios. By implementing the integrated mitigation scenarios, a 9.43% reduction in total food system energy consumption can be attained in 2030. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines laws aimed to protection of cultural and spiritual landscapes and materials in the U.S. Topics discussed include advocacy work of aboriginal traditional owners; he role of the courts in the protection of Indigenous cultural heritage; and ways to ways of overcoming the courts' ‘blindness' to country.

The article explores objectives of Task Force on Environmental Aspects of the New York State Constitution as convened by the Executive Committee of New York State Bar Association. It reports how the task force supported the amendment in constitutional laws concerning environment through the Constitutional Convention.

The article highlights laws in New York to amend Constitutional Environmental Rights through constitutional convention. Topics discussed include opportunities and challenges in enforcing existing subnational environmental provisions; constitutional convention for the State of New York; and ways in which Environmental protection (land, water, air, plants and animals) is a responsibility of all and if anyone causes damage to them.