For more than 40 years, the Environmental Forum has played a distinctive role in environmental law and policy: creating space for thoughtful debate, diverse viewpoints, and constructive engagement. Originally printed bimonthly, the Forum has evolved into a fully digital, biweekly format, with each edition delivering a single curated column or article directly to your inbox, also available below. Archives to the print editions are available exclusively to members. The views and opinions expressed in the Environmental Forum are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of ELI.
Nuclear power remains a major source of electricity worldwide, and it is growing. The United States remains the world’s largest producer as of 2024, having generated 781.9 terawatt-hours in one year alone. Meanwhile, other countries are expanding rapidly.
Animal agriculture accounts for a significant share of global greenhouse gas emissions—somewhere between 12% and 20%, according to recent estimates. And yet, the meat industry has, for the most part, escaped the reach of carbon tax and cap-and-trade regimes.
Nearly 30 years ago, I was invited to Moncton, New Brunswick, to make a presentation on watershed-scale management of the Great Lakes to a group of Canadian officials and fishermen. The ground fishery, mostly cod, had been shut down, and a lot of people were out of work. I was running Michigan’s Office of the Great Lakes at the time.
In February, the Donald Trump Administration fulfilled a months’ long promise to rescind EPA’s endangerment finding—the 2009 rule underpinning federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions—in what it dubbed “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”
For the past year, federal grantees have brought many cases contending that the federal government improperly terminated their grants. In August, the U.S. Supreme Court threw a curveball into the litigation of all those claims. Now, a new series of cases involving the Solar for All program has been fielding that curveball, exposing novel issues in the law.
States are facing a double whammy—rising disaster relief costs due to an increasing number of extreme weather events and limited or, in some cases, withdrawn insurance coverage for high-risk areas.
2025 was a challenging year for the global response to climate change.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was ratified by the United States and 197 other parties, has endured since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Climate negotiations under the Convention have ebbed and flowed for more than three decades but no signatory has previously walked away from the Convention and denounced climate change as a hoax.
“The question for the environmental law profession over the coming decades, in my view, is not what will you stop but what will you build?” This was the charge recently proffered by Ted Nordhaus, President of the Breakthrough Institute, to the future generation of environmental lawyers at Lewis and Clark Law School.
For more than 40 years, the Environmental Forum has played a distinctive role in environmental law and policy: creating space for thoughtful debate, diverse viewpoints, and constructive disagreement. From its earliest days, the Forum has never existed to tell readers what to think, but to illuminate what is worth thinking about.