Commensurate with its significant environmental problems, China’s environmental protection laws and court system have undergone profound changes in the past two years. In this Comment, the authors highlight the development and implementation of China’s environmental public interest litigation system, which shifts the legal paradigm from tort suits to recover damages incurred by pollution victims to cases that more closely resemble U.S. citizen suits.

The year 2016 witnessed the adoption or revision of several of China’s environmental laws by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, as well as some major judicial initiatives by the Supreme People’s Court. This Comment summarizes these developments.

Since at least 1987, when the World Commission on Environment and Development published Our Common Future, sustainability has become an increasingly central concept in redefining environmental stewardship—development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." The march toward realizing the ideal of more responsible stewardship of the earth’s natural resources continues to advance, notwithstanding dramatic changes in the political landscape.

On January 25, 2017, during his first week in office, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order calling for the “immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border” of the United States. Such a wall would span more than one thousand miles, across many different habitats and many different communities. Before a wall can be built, numerous questions must be answered: Which environmental laws apply? How might all this work?

Recent scientific research indicates fugitive methane emissions from abandoned oil and gas wells may contribute more to climate change than methane leakage from oil and gas production. Yet current orphaned well regulations fail to ensure that such wells are plugged in a timely fashion. This Article applies domestic comparative law to identify three promising alternative approaches to the current system of orphan well reclamation funds: cooperative federal grant programs, joint and several liability of potentially responsible parties, and carbon offsets credits.

Environmental justice communities are especially disadvantaged when it comes to direct community intervention in matters critical to their well-being. Opportunities may exist, however, to institutionalize resources for those communities’ benefit. In particular, environmental enforcement actions could prove a reliable and effective conduit to access resources and obtain environmental and public health benefits, tailored to communities’ self-identified needs.

Environmental justice has officially been a federal priority since 1994, when Pres. Bill Clinton signed Executive Order No. 12898 directing federal agencies to include consideration of health and environmental conditions in minority, tribal, and low-income communities into agency decisionmaking. In Pres.

With continued globalization of the food system and the increasing number of agricultural products traded on the world market, concerns regarding food safety standards in other countries led Congress to pass the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) to better guard against outbreaks of foodborne illnesses. As FDA finalized the FSMA rules just last year, food safety experts began to fear that those new regulations could be undone if Congress ratified the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This may seem a moot issue now that Pres. Donald J .

Carbon dioxide and other substances injected as part of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) have the potential to migrate beyond the confines of the injection project, creating the potential for trespass. In order for CCS to be viable, legal clarity on the issue of subsurface trespass is required. This Article argues that the challenge of subsurface trespass associated with CCS can be overcome by conceptualizing pore space rights in the storage complex as limited common property with rights of proportionate use.

Disasters and emergencies come in all shapes and sizes. Some are man-made while others are a result of natural events. The federal government has a system in place under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act that assists states in recovering from disasters and emergencies by providing federal relief in the form of funds and resources. However, this current system fails to appropriately address disasters that occur over a longer period of time.