In order to manage California wilderness areas to preserve their natural and untrammeled character, as required by the Wilderness Act, federal land management agencies should adopt interpretations of the Act that allow prescribed burning and Indigenous cultural burning in areas where it existed pre-colonialism.

The Comment shows the importance of EJ and cumulative impact governance coming from municipalities by highlighting a specific case study that has worked: San Francisco.

Demand for data centers is increasing worldwide, raising questions about the electric grid, the transition to renewable energy, and distribution infrastructure. Northern Virginia is home to data centers that process nearly 70% of global digital traffic, leading officials to call for construction, at ratepayers’ expense, of new power plants and new transmission lines across four states, as well as the continued operation of coal-powered plants that had been scheduled to go offline.

This Article calls on the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to issue guidance clarifying that concurrent decommissioning is a “connected action” under the National Environmental Policy Act for relocation, managed retreat, and protect-in-place projects aimed at replacing infrastructure in environmentally threatened Alaska Native communities.

Little has been said on how the just transition to a decarbonized world relates to the human right, recently recognized by the United Nations General Assembly, to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. This Article explores this relationship and how to build a framework that guides current and future climate change endeavors. It argues that the human right’s substantive and procedural content must incorporate just transition claims, which would help resolve whether and how to advocate for specific climate measures.

Recent studies suggest natural gas is significantly more carbon-intensive than previously realized, with methane having at least 25 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. If the United States is to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals, it must curtail methane leakage between 30% and 90%, and leakage is anticipated to cost producers $2 billion each year in lost product. Absent regulations from the federal government and many states, nongovernmental organizations and the private sector are developing innovative solutions.

Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) and their accompanying renewable energy credits have been adopted by 38 states and the District of Columbia. This Article argues that they have outlived their usefulness, and proposes a transition to a “carbon reduction standard” (CRS) based on a statewide target for the average carbon emissions per megawatt hour of electricity generation. It describes in detail how a CRS would work, how it aligns with changing policy goals, and how it would take advantage of RPS lessons learned.

For more than half a century, the Chesapeake Bay and many of its tributaries have suffered from poor water quality. Compelled by an executive order and litigation, in 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the Chesapeake Bay total maximum daily load (Bay TMDL) to reduce pollution discharges and thereby restore Bay water quality; unfortunately, the Bay TMDL will fail to meet its 2025 objective.

Congress in the 2020s has authorized three new environmentally focused grant programs relating to western waters and appropriated $450 million in multi-year funding. The Bureau of Reclamation is responsible for creating and implementing these programs, giving it a new tool and resources for addressing stubborn environmental problems—some caused by the Bureau’s many dams.

Throughout the world, people struggle to gain access to stable sources of clean water. While there are increasingly innovative solutions being developed, many communities simply do not have access to efficient, centralized wastewater management systems, and as a result, face difficulty finding reliable sources of water for daily use. There is a great need to implement novel systems that can fill the gap, especially for isolated or “off-grid” communities.