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Just in time for Halloween, EPA has served up a trick for the public and a treat for polluters. Methane is an invisible gas that haunts the air we breathe, and EPA’s latest attempt to dismantle crucial pollution protections would make the biggest leaks even harder to see. Worse, by scrapping the Methane Super Emitter Program, it would leave no one to call when the ghost appears. And it is the product of a much broader industry campaign that the Trump administration has not merely tolerated but championed.

Washington has a gift for cloaking unpopular ideas in appealing names. One recent example is the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, or BAAJA, a sweeping “permitting reform” measure introduced this September by Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, Mike Lee, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Martin Heinrich. Once stripped of its deceptive branding, the bill is an out-and-out assault on the National Environmental Policy Act, the bedrock environmental law that has for more than 50 years required the federal government to look before it leaps.

They’re so cute! Earlier this month, thousands of baby redfish arrived by trailer at West Cove, on Louisiana’s southwestern coast. Volunteers then carried them in buckets to waiting boats, which motored them into nearby canals for release. That was the beginning of their lives in the wild. Until then, they had been growing in a hatchery. In all, about 150,000 young redfish (also known as red drum) were released in the Calcasieu Lake estuary, the Rigolets and waters near Grand Isle. Hatcheries give redfish a good head start. The rest depends on the habitat.

I don’t know how many times I have had the conversation with other environmental law professors about how difficult it seems to be to teach the subject. The usual talking point is that students come to environmental law anxious to save the world, but instead we tell them to save the PDF file of the latest National Ambient Air Quality Standard rulemaking, whose hundreds of pages they can then pore over in the next week. Oh, I try to still make it as interesting as I can by trying to ground it in something they may be familiar with, but I have also felt the responsibility to show them what the “real practice” of environmental law is like. Turns out I wasn’t the only one thinking more deeply about the environmental law teaching problem. Thanks to Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez, now we can all have a resource that solves the problem of grounding environmental law into lived experiences — things that really matter to students.

Last year, Governor Josh Stein created the North Carolina Artificial Intelligence (AI) Leadership Council to chart a roadmap on AI leadership and policy in the state. The roadmap report published by the council leaves many important areas unaddressed and falls significantly short on others, including harms like high bills, lost jobs, pollution, drought, mass surveillance, and more.

Teaching right now is no joke! This is especially true of teaching environmental law. Most of us teaching in this area have dedicated our professional lives to protecting the environment — the air, the water, the land, and of course the people who breathe that air, drink that water, and live on that land. Each day is more painful than the last as our work is dismantled in front of our eyes. Institutions that seemed solid bulwarks against tyranny are crumbling into dust. In this moment of crisis, fellow Member Scholar Carmen Gonzalez and I set out to write a book for our fellow professors struggling to find their feet — consider Teaching Environmental Law in Context a kind of love letter to the better world we are convinced we can build together with our students.

PJM, the regional transmission organization (RTO) responsible for grid operations in all or part of 13 Eastern U.S. states and Washington, DC, just asked the federal Department of Energy (DOE) to issue an emergency order under the Federal Power Act. In its request, PJM asked to allow for “large loads” (functionally, although not limited to, data centers located in the PJM footprint) to run emergency backup power generation between July 1 and July 2. This is in preparation for the extreme multi-day heatwave that is forecast for the eastern part of the country through the July 4 holiday weekend.

Across the country, legislators are figuring out how to regulate the worst harms from data centers. In North Carolina, the latest bill to do so is Senate Bill 730. Unfortunately, SB 730 is not a step forward in protecting North Carolinians from the harms of data centers. Rather, it is a step sideways, evading needed regulations.

The Trump administration recently repealed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 endangerment finding—the scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare that has anchored federal climate regulation for nearly two decades. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin called the finding “the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach.” Within weeks, a coalition of more than 20 states filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reverse the repeal. The legal battle that follows will help define American environmental policy for a generation. Brigham Daniels and I did not plan the timing of our new book, Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law, to coincide with this particular legal conflict. But we could not have chosen a more clarifying moment for its release. The endangerment finding repeal is not an aberration—it is a recognizable recurrence in a history that stretches back centuries. Law has always been the primary engine of both environmental exploitation and protection in the United States.