In her Making Sustainability Disclosures Sustainable article, Prof. Jill E. Fisch proposes creating a Sustainability Discussion and Analysis (SD&A) section to expressly obligate reporting companies to disclose their three most significant sustainability issues in annual reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Professor Fisch posits that the proposed SD&A, as a workable first step in mandating sustainability disclosures, would provide comparability and reliability to reports that are currently difficult to compare and which may vary in reliability.

The extent to which corporations should incorporate sustainability objectives into their operational decisionmaking is highly contested, as is the relationship between societal impact and economic value. At the same time, issuers are incorporating sustainability considerations into their business operations in response both to investor demands and to the claim that sustainable business practices lead to improved economic performance.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is a little-known and too-often ignored federal authority with the power to block or rapidly accelerate the transition to a clean energy future, and is thus indispensable to addressing climate change. Institute for Policy Integrity scholars Bethany A. Davis Noll and Burcin Unel are to be applauded for bringing into focus a regulatory space that is essential to efforts to decarbonize the power sector.

Electricity generation in the United States is one of the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions, which cause severe climate change-related harms. Despite the severity of those harms, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which regulates the interstate transmission and wholesale electricity markets, has avoided addressing the issue. FERC has historically shied away from environmental considerations in ratemaking.

This article highlights the results of the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) article selection process and reports on the environmental legal scholarship for the 2018-2019 academic year, including the number of environmental law articles published in general law reviews versus environmental law journals, and the topics covered in the articles.

This Article argues that growing private efforts to address climate change collectively take on the attributes and functions of a governance system that could be vital to societal decarbonization. Instead of evaluating specific initiatives or actions of particular businesses, it explores the entire field of private climate action and offers new ways of thinking about the path ahead.

This Article develops a new normative account of the function of financial assurance requirements (FARs) for end-of-life obligations in the energy sector. These obligations cover restoration of the site to its original condition or to a level that could accommodate another productive use once the energy project ends. FARs necessitate that operators evidence ability to pay for this.

It is now scientifically proven that climate change is causing disruptions to the world at large. These slow-motion consequences threaten most coastal areas around the world, especially the Pacific Island nations.  Scientists predict that climate change will cause the forced displacement of people; desertification; protracted destructive wildfires; sea-level rise; ocean acidification; extreme weather events; and severe drought, which then impacts the supply of food.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Weyerhaeuser Co. v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service raises important questions about the scope of the Endangered Species Act’s (ESA’s) protections for critical habitat. Foremost among them is a question one might think was long settled: what is “habitat”? In a short ruling, the Weyerhaeuser Court opined that “critical habitat” must first be “habitat,” but it did not attempt to define exactly what habitat is or how much deference the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should get on what is both a biological and policy question.

This Article, adapted from Chapter 16 of What Can Animal Law Learn From Environmental Law?, 2d Edition (ELI Press, forthcoming 2020), explores existing and potential wildlife conservation policies that could play a vital role in mitigating global climate change. It describes how climate change is impacting wildlife and biodiversity around the globe and reviews the history and current state of U.S. policy, including how the federal government currently manages climate change issues under the ESA.