Dispersants have been a critical oil spill response tool for decades, used in at least 66 documented spill responses worldwide, and 25 spills in or near U.S. waters. Oil dispersants can reduce the coastal impact from a spill, hasten the post-spill recovery process for affected waters and shores, and reduce the need to resort to other, more damaging response methods. For most of their history, dispersants have held a low profile in the public consciousness. Dispersants remained technical footnotes to the spills themselves--until the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Editor's Summary: On December 11, 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed into law CERCLA, commonly referred to as Superfund, creating a federal program to clean up our nation's most polluted hazardous waste sites. Today, every state and nearly every territory of the United States has at least one Superfund site within its borders. In this Article, John Quarles and Michael Steinberg examine the first 25 years of the Superfund program. In so doing, they provide insight as to where this program may lead in the future.

I. John Wesley Powell's Blueprint for a Dryland Democracy

Lenders, bondholders, and other holders of interests in commercial and industrial real estate, beware the decision to foreclose on properties contaminated by hazardous substances. The "long claws" of environmental laws can threaten real estate lenders and securitized bondholders alike. The laws and policies governing the meaning of what constitutes "ownership" or "operation" for the purpose of environmental liability must be carefully understood, as foreclosure may alleviate troubled loan portfolios but, in turn, may lead to a broader set of troubles.

Editor's Summary: Despite the multitude of benefits offered by wind energy systems as compared to more traditional energy production methods, proposed wind developments in the United States often face an upwelling of community opposition. Because the siting of wind energy systems in most states is governed primarily at the local level, with little to no state intervention or guidance, the result is a repetition of the same debate, likely involving the same potentially exaggerated concerns, played out in different communities across the nation.

Even before the Deepwater Horizon platform exploded on April 20, 2010, sending as-yet-untotalled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, no one, I suspect, thought of the Gulf as a pristine ocean wilderness. And indeed, as the site of significant offshore oil and gas production, a "dead zone" the size of New Jersey, and, at least until recently, highly lucrative commercial and sport fisheries, it's not.

Editors' Summary

Jim McElfish: We at ELI are particularly fond of NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act]. Our Articles of Incorporation were coincidentally filed on the day that NEPA passed the U.S. Senate in December 1969, so our history as an organization is coextensive with our initial environmental policy. It's an association that we think continues to be important.

Editors' Summary: The argument against crafting federal regulations for problems stemming from development in disaster-prone areas (nation-on-edge problems) assumes that these types of problems are essentially local problems requiring unique local solutions. In this Article, Jeffrey G. Miller challenges this assumption, reasoning that a flexible framework of federal regulations would indeed be effective at remedying these problems. He suggests that such a framework could be modeled after the Clean Water Act's (CWA's) point source pollution control regime.

The Clean Water Act (CWA) is designed to "protect and maintain" the "chemical, physical[,] and biological integrity" of the nation's waters. How to get there? Three steps. First, establish water quality standards (standards) to make sure each state water body is safe and clean enough to use for its common purpose, such as drinking, fishing, swimming, and boating. Second, require point sources to implement categorical engineering solutions to reduce pollutants in effluent discharge.