Editors' Summary

Editors' Summary

I. International Activities

During 2009, China's primary work on environmental law concerned international law on climate change before and during the United Nations (U.N.) Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen (Copenhagen Conference).

Editors' Summary

Editors' Summary:

Section 115 of the CAA, addressing international air pollution, has been widely dismissed as a viable avenue for mitigation of GHGs because of a misplaced assumption that NAAQS must be established for GHGs before §115 authority can be exercised for GHGs. This Article explores the statutory language and legislative history of §115 to refute this conventional view, and argues that §115 can play a role in facilitating the establishment of a cap-and-trade program for GHGs without the establishment of NAAQS for GHGs.

Editors' Summary

Editors' Summary

In Summers v. Earth Island Institute, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia rejected the concept of organizational standing based upon the statistical probability that some members of a plaintiff organization will likely be harmed in the near future by the defendant's future actions.

Editors' Summary: The environmental movement is just beginning to grapple with the problem of climate change and is doing so in a historical vacuum. Environmentalists would benefit from studying the last major social movement aimed at making the basic economic underpinnings of a society morally visible: British anti-slavery. That movement, too, dealt with an international economic system causing enormous human suffering; its leaders succeeded in convincing Britain to abandon the slave trade at considerable national cost.