Editors' Summary: Estimates of hazardous waste cleanup costs now reach $500 billion nationwide, or $2,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. And historically, estimates of cleanup costs have nearly always gone up. As the magnitude of the problem has become clearer, governments and private plaintiffs have searched for more deep pockets to pay for cleanups.

Editors' Summary: In June, the Supreme Court handed the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Act enforcement program a significant victory. The Court held that EPA is not required to act on a proposed SIP revision within four months and is not barred from enforcing the existing SIP if it does not act on the proposal within a reasonable time. This Comment describes the "four-month rule" for revisions and the enforcement bar that created the split in the circuits, and it analyzes the opinion.

My subject is the corporate compliance system. It is hard to think of this as separable fromgovernment and the public, but I will focus on the corporate end, highlighting what is working, what isn't working, and why.

PATRICK PARENTEAU: I would like to organize this discussion a little differently, by opening the floor to questins for the panel, and then permitting panelists to make longer follow-up remarks.

Resource extraction on a large scale has recently begun in some national parks, dwarfing the modest diggings and pickings of old-time gold bugs and causing consternation in Congress. As a result, a rash of measures have been introduced which would curtail, regulate or ban mining operations within the boundaries of the National Parks.

"The public interest requires doing today those things that men of intelligence and good will would wish, five or ten years hence, had been done," declared Edmund Burke nearly two centuries ago. At the turn of this decade, in pursuit of the public interest, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act¹—a comprehensive national policy for restoring, protecting, and enhancing the quality of our environment.

On January 3, 1975, the Deepwater Ports Act of 1974¹ was signed into law, and the United States thereby prepared to join the sizeable fraternity of nations already using this type of facility. Congressional consideration of deepwater ports—offshore tanker moorings at which oil is unloaded and piped ashore—led House and Senate committees through a tangle of vexing issues, including supertanker design, conflicting local and national interests, international law, antitrust implications, and the ubiquitous clash between energy needs and environmental considerations.

On February 5, 1974, a Consent Judgment in the case of Conservation Council of North Carolina v. Froehlke,¹ signed by District Court Judge Eugene A. Gordon, was docketed in the United States District Court of North Carolina, thereby concluding a principal phase of litigation in the B. Everett Jordan Dam (formerly New Hope Dam) project controversy.

At the molecular level, it has always been a chemical world. But since the 1930s, when the chemical industry began its phenomenal 15 percent annual growth, it has become a synthetic chemical world.

In an action reminiscent of his predecessor's handling of the DDT cancellation case,¹ EPA Administrator Russell Train recently declined to follow an administrative law judge's recommendation and suspended registrations for the major uses of the pesticides chlordane and heptachlor.² The ruling is expected to result in a drop of 70 and 85 percent, respectively, in the use of the chemicals.