This Comment points out the weaknesses of the options to purchase conservation easement.

This Comment points out the strengths and weaknesses of the options to purchase conservation easement.

This Comment points out the strengths and weaknesses of the options to purchase conservation easement.

Land conservation transactions have been the most active component of the conservation movement in the United States for the past three decades. Practitioners use traditional real estate tools to preserve habitat, scenery, and historically significant places. The prospect of climate change diminishes the value of most real estate tools currently used by proponents of land conservation transactions.

In 1975, 80 countries entered into the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Today, CITES covers 35,000 species. Though CITES is widely used, protected species continue to slide to extinction. Two main obstacles hinder its success: (1) fraudulent paperwork, where an individual attempts to pass an endangered or threatened species as a non-protected one in order to access a legal market; and (2) illicit poaching and trafficking.

In the South Pacific, midway between Hawaii and Australia, lies the beautiful island nation of Tuvalu, home to about 10,000 people. In about 40 years, Tuvalu will be uninhabitable, and in 70 years, at best, it is likely to be underwater. Due to rising sea levels caused by global warming, other low-lying island nations such as Kiribati, Fiji, Marshall Islands, Vanuatu, Micronesia, and Nauru are bound to suffer the same fate eventually. This raises pressing calls for remedies for sinking small island nations, in the forms of migration, compensation, and reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

EPA's recent call for regulatory reform suggestions offers a good opportunity for ending a long-standing regulatory overreach: EPA’s “once in, always in” policy for standards applicable to a major source of hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The policy asserts that if a facility ever had potential hazardous air pollutant emissions above levels that trigger a major source control standard, the facility must comply with that standard permanently, even where the facility has since reduced its potential emissions below the trigger levels.

To commemorate Earth Day, Paul Hastings LLP hosted a panel discussion on April 18, 2017, featuring three prominent attorneys with extensive and diverse experience in environmental counseling and litigation. The panelists reflected on the transition to the Trump Administration and what it might mean for long-standing issues of federalism, globalization, private environmental governance, and enforcement and compliance. Here, we present a transcript of the discussion, which has been edited for style, clarity, and space considerations.

For centuries, hybridization was a poorly understood process thought to be a threat to endangered species. With the advent of genomic technologies, those views are starting to change; hybridization is now recognized as vital for the formation and continued persistence of many species. However, our current system of protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) fails to take many of the modern nuances of evolutionary biology into consideration. Despite calls for an explicit “hybrid policy” since the early 1990s, the U.S.

Decarbonizing the U.S. energy system will require a program of building onshore wind, offshore wind, utility-scale solar, and associated transmission that will exceed what has been done before in the United States by many times, every year out to 2050. These facilities, together with rooftop photovoltaics and other distributed generation, are required to replace most fossil fuel generation and to help furnish the added electricity that will be needed as many uses currently employing fossil fuels (especially passenger transportation and space and water heating) are electrified.