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In his first speech upon assuming his duties as EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt informed the agency’s employees that “regulators exist to give certainty to those that they regulate.” No, Mr. Pruitt, they do not. Regulators and the regulations they are responsible for adopting and enforcing exist to protect the public interest. In particular, they exist […]

Imagine you come across a colleague sitting at his desk amid piles of yellowed papers. When you ask what he is working on, he says it’s his annual family budget. “What’s with all the old papers?” you might ask. “Oh,” he replies, “I always work my new budget off my receipts and bills from 1983, […]

Rep. Ryan Zinke, a congressman from Montana and Donald Trump’s pick for the next Secretary of the Interior, said some encouraging things in his Senate hearing on January 18. First, he acknowledged that the climate is changing and that “man has had an influence,” disavowing Trump’s notorious statement that climate change is a hoax. Second, […]

The most important lessons can be the hardest to learn. Sometimes they even take a crisis. We can hope that the sorry saga of Flint, Michigan’s lead-poisoned water will be such a teachable moment for at least some of the anti-government crowd, finally driving home the point that government has a vital role in protecting […]

Originally published by the George Washington Law Review The Supreme Court held in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co.1 that a determination by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (“Corps”) that the owners of land used for peat mining were obliged to apply to the Corps for a permit under the Clean […]

Yesterday, I joined four other witnesses in testifying about the Endangered Species Act (ESA) at a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing. Most of the witnesses and House members who attended focused on a variety of complaints about the ESA’s provisions governing listing and delisting of species and called for changes to the law […]

The following post is based on an article by Professor Glicksman on the George Washington Law Review website.1 In Michigan v. Environmental Protection Agency,2 Justice Scalia, for a 5-4 majority, held that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s failure to consider cost at the initial stage of deciding whether to regulate emissions of hazardous air pollutants […]

As climate scientists have been telling us for years, and as all but the most obstinate climate deniers acknowledge, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels are contributing to climatic changes.  These changes have taken the form of melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, changes in wind and ocean current patterns, and […]

Co-authored with David L. Markell. Enforcement is widely acknowledged to be an indispensable feature of effective governance in the world of environmental protection and elsewhere. Unfortunately, criticisms of the U.S. government’s efforts to enforce the environmental laws began almost with the inception of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) more than forty years ago – and they […]