By Michael B. Gerrard The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), signed into law by President Richard Nixon on January 1, 1970, was the first U.S. environmental statute of the modern era. It requires the preparation of environmental impact statements (EISs) for major federal actions that may have a significant impact […]
Environment & Land Use
217 posts
By Isabelle Aubrun, CCCL Intern (Brown University) In 2013, President Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force devised the Rebuild by Design Competition. Applicants were to design a “fundable and implementable” infrastructure project to mitigate the dangers of rising sea levels and increasingly frequent extreme weather events in New York and […]
By Alyssa Kutner, Summer Legal Intern President Barack Obama made an announcement on Wednesday, July 16th introducing a plan to improve the nation’s ability to adapt to climate change through investing in and planning a more climate-resilient infrastructure. Included in the announcement were new programs designed to increase the adaptive […]
By Diane Jung, Undergraduate Intern On June 19, 2014 both houses of the Rhode Island legislature passed the Resilient Rhode Island Act of 2014, which addresses climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience, and establishes greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets of 10% below 1990 levels by 2020, 45% by 2035, and 85% […]
By Alyssa Kutner, Summer Legal Intern There has been a lot of discussion and press around the EPA’s new Clean Power Plan, which is intended to reduce CO2 emissions from existing power plants by 30% from 2005 levels by 2030. The EPA proposed this plan on June 2nd under its Clean […]
By Ellii Cho, Summer Legal Intern The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA) requires federal agencies to prepare environmental impact statements (EISs) for all “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.”[1] This includes the issuance of federal permits. Even after an EIS is completed and […]
By Yeein Lee, Summer Legal Intern On Thursday May 29th, the eleventh biennial conference on key and emerging environmental issues in the EPA Region 2 area was held at Columbia Law School. This teeming conference consisted of four panels, each on separate yet correlated environmental topics around New York, New […]
Ethan I. Strell, CCCL Associate Director and Fellow On March 21, 2014, President Obama signed into law the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014 (2014 Act), whose stated purpose is to “delay the implementation of certain provisions of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Texas Hurricane Damage (photo credit: FEMA) […]