Richard J. Lazarus — The Making of Environmental Law

184 published claims from this book.

• 1970s Congress wrote ever-tighter statutory deadlines to curb presidential and EPA discretion.
• 1970s population-bomb forecasts predicted imminent American water and food rationing
• 1970s resource laws shifted federal oversight of western public lands toward conservation.
• 1990s Supreme Court decisions systematically raised barriers to citizen environmental standing
• A mere duty to warn can outperform formal emission limits through market pressure
• Agency flexibility reforms drew critique as untransparent, unenforceable, and unauthorized.
• Air pollutant emissions fell 25 percent while the economy grew 160 percent since 1970
• Air, water, and living species all function as common pools spanning space and time
• Americans strongly want environmental laws but resist paying near-term costs for them
• Anti-environmental Republicans rose to congressional leadership only in the 1990s as veterans.
• Anti-regulation rhetoric backfired by confirming public fears of industry regulatory capture
• Apollo photographs of Earth paradoxically made the planet seem fragile and vulnerable.
• Appropriations committees gained power only as authorization committees faltered.
• Benjamin Chavis coined the term environmental racism in 1987
• Better ecological knowledge drove 1960s urgency over species extinction
• Bipartisan competition and industry preference for uniformity drove 1970s federal environmental law.
• Both property and tort theories of environmental authority have unavoidable limits
• Both sides treat environmental regulation as an absolute-rights matter, precluding economic compromise
• Bright-line environmental rules would over-regulate harmless acts while missing real harms.
• Bush declined to sign the Biodiversity Convention at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit
• Business funded a two-decade intellectual pipeline to change environmental law
• Business opposition to environmental law built its own foundation-backed intellectual apparatus
• Business-funded ideas took about twenty years to become law
• By 2000 the two parties held opposite substantive visions of environmental law
• By the 1970s public distrust of industry had displaced the General Motors maxim.
• By the 1990s humans had transformed two-fifths of the land surface.
• By the mid-1990s consensus environmental legislation had become politically impossible.
• Career-staff leaks and congressional oversight forced Reagan’s anti-environment appointees to resign
• Career-staff leaks and judicial review check political appointees who ignore disclosed impacts
• Carson explicitly linked nuclear fallout and pesticides as interrelated environmental erosion.
• CERCLA liability reached nearly every waste generator including governments and universities
• CERCLA’s retroactive strict liability rewired how real estate deals treat land
• Clinton agencies made major environmental policy without new statutes.
• Clinton’s 1994 executive order made environmental justice part of federal agency missions
• Clinton’s agencies deliberately prolonged congressional paralysis to avoid hostile legislation.
• Clinton’s executive branch defeated 1990s rollbacks by mobilizing public hostility, reversing 1970s roles
• Commentators once predicted environmental regulation could only be achieved by authoritarian states.
• Congress chose national uniformity against uniform-economics criticism to defeat the race to the bottom.
• Congress silently underfunded laws it had itself written strongly.
• Congressional oversight of the executive thrives because hearings offer media exposure
• Congressional stalemate shifted environmental lawmaking power to appropriations riders.
• Consumers pay premiums for certified environmentally friendly goods.
• Corporate donations to PBS rose sevenfold in six years partly for image purposes
• Corporate pressure removed environmentalist editorial-page editors
• Corporations spent $240 million on environmental advocacy advertising in two years
• Criminalization attached moral stigma to environmental violations within regulated firms.
• Decades of ideas yielded nothing until backed by an executive proxy
• Decentralized regulation rationally pushes states to export pollution across borders
• Default standards flipped industry incentives to favor prompt EPA rulemaking
• Delayed environmental harms create regulatory cost-asymmetry and uncertainty
• Diminishing resource bases make constant demands exponentially harmful
• Dispersive pollution alone lets states export harm without degrading their own environment.
• Dread of future environmental risk itself causes physical and economic harm
• Ecological injury’s spatial and temporal scales are ill-suited to how law is made.
• Ecological reasoning led courts to deny landowners absolute rights over land
• Ecological systems flip catastrophically once crossed thresholds are reached.
• Ecology abandoned stability theories for models of complex change.
• Ecosystem structure guarantees that environmental costs and benefits never fall on the same people
• Ecotourism and recreation businesses formed new economic allies for environmental law.
• Environmental degradation was formally reframed as a U.S. national security issue in the 1990s.
• Environmental groups grew to millions of members during the 1970s
• Environmental law includes natural resources law far broader than 1970s pollution regimes
• Environmental law rests on police power over private activity, not government property ownership.
• Environmental law survived the loss of presidential support through Congress, courts, and advocacy groups.
• Environmental law thrives in democracies because they enable information disclosure
• Environmental law triggered the replacement of transmission-belt with surrogate-political-process administrative law
• Environmental law’s benefits lag far behind its politics because ecological problems resist quick fixes.
• Environmental law’s settlement into ordinary life also dulled its effectiveness.
• Environmental law’s structure conflicts with criminal law’s core assumptions
• Environmental law’s sudden 1970s eruption masked decades of slowly building public concern.
• Environmental lawmaking conflict is a necessary feature, not a failing.
• Environmental lawmaking polarized completely along party lines by the 1990s.
• Environmental policymaking systematically discounts distant-future and foreign benefits against present domestic costs
• Environmental protection stayed bipartisan across presidents of both parties through the 1980s.
• Environmental protection structurally requires present sacrifice for unverifiable future gain
• Environmental regulation created a massive pollution-control industry dependent on continued enforcement.
• Environmental regulation underdetermines agency standard-setting because ambient pollution science is inherently complex.
• Environmental standard-setting is institutionally unsuited to the legislative arena
• Environmental statutes are radical redistributive acts passed through deliberately conservative institutions
• Environmental statutes regulate commerce without pursuing commercial aims.
• Environmental-justice demands originated partly as critique of mainstream environmental groups
• Environmental-law staffing grew eightfold to twelvefold across federal agencies during the 1980s
• Environmentalism transformed the content of a dozen unrelated fields of American law
• Environmentalists assumed pollution laws would help the poor but never verified it
• Exempting old polluters from new-source rules prolongs their dirtier operation
• Extraterritorial production pollutes the US through imported goods.
• Fast decision technology has squeezed out the reflection time sound judgment needs
• Fear of humanity’s own extinction drove the Endangered Species Act’s stringency
• Federal environmental dominance flowed from state-capture and race-to-the-bottom fears plus lobbying economies of scale.
• Federal environmental law rests awkwardly on a commerce rationale foreign to its aims
• Federal pollution law rests on Commerce Clause because courts cannot handle modern nuisance cases
• Federalist Society federalism opposes the deliberately national structure of pollution statutes
• Federally required self-monitoring reports became the linchpin of citizen-suit enforcement
• Fragmented U.S. lawmaking institutions structurally favor slow incremental change over sweeping reform
• Funding takings compensation out of agency budgets coerces agencies to self-curb enforcement
• Geochemical cycles cause ecological harm at one place to spill over to others.
• Global commons became threatened only once many nations industrialized
• Government can reduce ecological cause-effect ignorance to steer consumer choices.
• Grassroots environmentalism grew through local groups led by women and minorities
• Growing awareness of irreversible environmental harms transformed law’s treatment of time
• Historic emitters must bear climate burdens regardless of current emissions
• Human sulfur emissions now rival natural sulfur fluxes globally and dominate them locally.
• Humanity’s demands exceeded the biosphere’s regenerative capacity by 1999.
• Information disclosure changes agency behavior through good-faith career staff
• Interior’s power rests on federal ownership of nearly a third of the nation’s lands
• International environmental treaties quadrupled from 52 in 1970 to 215 by 1999
• International trade law is far more institutionally organized than environmental law
• Large corporate buyers can impose government-like environmental standards without legislation.
• Local governments close to the environment hold expertise and accountability advantages
• Lucas made deprivation of all economic value a per se taking absent background principles
• Mainstream environmental groups legitimize pollution by litigating marginal measures
• Media-by-media statutes let pollution migrate to the least-regulated pathway.
• Microbial ecology and nanotechnology expanded spatial horizons inward.
• Moderate Republican committee chairs blocked Reagan’s environmental rollbacks in the 1980s.
• Most world fisheries and major fish species were declining by 2000.
• Much of the business community stopped opposing strict environmental law by the mid-1990s.
• Municipal smoke-abatement and zoning laws targeted pollution spillovers a century before 1970.
• Nature’s lack of a fixed baseline complicates legal sorting of human from natural change.
• Nearly all 1995 Contract with America environmental rollbacks failed to become law
• NEPA became the most widely exported American environmental law worldwide
• NEPA works by forcing government disclosure that citizens could never fund themselves
• NEPA’s procedural disclosure mandate produced real environmental protection despite its critics
• Nineteenth-century federal law gave away vast public lands to promote private resource exploitation
• Nuclear-weapons dread turned the planet’s finite life span into urgent policy concern
• Nuisance law’s vagueness drove environmental law toward detailed statutory standards
• Party voting on environmental bills moved together in the 1970s but not the 1990s.
• Past environmental-group counterattacks worked because they had an opposing government branch to rally against
• Permit-based monitoring reports made Clean Water Act citizen suits almost unbeatable.
• Persistent pollutants postpone their harm to future generations.
• Persistent, bioaccumulating pollutants made non-biodegradability a public concern
• Pollution control captures harm at one site only to relocate it onto minority communities
• Pollution control costs can be reframed as immediate health harms clashing with future benefits
• Pollution control costs rise steeply as reductions increase
• Post-1970s business philanthropy deliberately funded think tanks and intellectuals to reverse environmental regulation.
• Postwar vaccine-driven disease declines turned public fear toward pollution-linked cancers.
• Procedural inclusion by itself increases acceptance of adverse environmental decisions
• Property law’s boundary-invasion frame cannot address external pollution threats to federal lands
• Public nuisance is unreasonable interference with a common public right
• Rates of population growth and ecological transformation are themselves exponential.
• Rationally superior cross-media reform failed for lack of political support.
• Reagan’s election coincided with the passage of two laws he opposed
• Reagan’s environmental attacks tripled green-group membership and quintupled donations
• Regulated industries shifted campaign money toward Republicans as environmental law polarized.
• Regulatory process capture by developers predates formal public participation
• Regulatory science on dioxin reversed course twice over two decades.
• Republican D.C. Circuit judges denied environmental plaintiffs standing four times as often as Democrats
• Republican-appointed D.C. Circuit judges favor laxer regulation and Democratic appointees stricter regulation
• Republicans learned to pursue environmental deregulation quietly to avoid public backlash
• Scalia openly embraced bureaucratic delay as a tool to thwart environmental law
• SEC environmental-risk disclosure requirements remain largely unenforced and underutilized
• Service industries carry large hidden environmental costs through their supply chains.
• Shifting scientific uncertainty burden onto regulated parties makes environmental rules self-enforcing
• Signed January 1 1970, NEPA created the Council on Environmental Quality
• Sovereignty resistance blocks international environmental coordination just as it blocks federal
• Standardized national time emerged only after instantaneous communications collapsed spatial distance.
• State SEPAs extended NEPA’s reach to private activity and added substantive mandates
• States stepped in to fill the federal environmental-regulatory void after Kyoto withdrawal
• Strict 1970s waste-disposal laws perversely multiplied abandoned hazardous-waste sites
• Strict environmental laws coexisted with a thriving US economy
• Strict joint-and-several liability made most Superfund sites effectively indivisible
• Technology-based controls starved the environmental data base needed to evaluate them
• Televised 1969 environmental disasters shifted public demand toward preventive regulation.
• The 1990 Clean Air Act amendments copied the Clean Water Act’s permit regime.
• The 1990s produced almost no major new federal environmental statutes.
• The 1995 Contract with America reforms would have rivaled the original environmental-law revolution
• The 1995 Contract with America targeted environmental law on four specific fronts
• The 1995 Timber Salvage Rider suspended environmental laws to force timber harvesting.
• The Constitution contains no textual support for environmental protection’s core aims
• The dormant Commerce Clause bars states from protecting ecosystems against out-of-state harms
• The EPA was structurally caught between irreconcilable demands from both directions.
• The same scientific complexity that drove Congress to technology-based rules blocked water-quality enforcement.
• The Supreme Court overruled Congress’s judgment about which ecological injuries count
• The term environmental law predates its formal 1969 coining
• Three institutional changes caused the 1990s environmental-lawmaking collapse.
• Tough new-source pollution rules can backfire by prolonging dirty existing plants.
• Tradeable emissions policies stayed dormant for decades due to moral and practical objections
• Tradeable emissions rights could cut pollution at lower cost than command-and-control rules
• Transboundary environmental problems defeat decentralized local control
• Tribes gained power to set water standards reaching beyond reservation borders
• Twenty-five years of agency practice shaped how the Court read plain statutory meaning.
• U.S. environmental law has survived every political assault and grown stronger after each
• Up to a hundred congressional subcommittees shared jurisdiction over the EPA in the 1970s.
• War and national crisis have both fueled and sapped the environmental movement’s political force
• Well-intentioned ecological interventions can backfire through unforeseen food chains.