In 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, the nations of the world agreed to implement an ambitious plan for ecologically sustainable human development. This book is a comprehensive review of U.S. efforts to achieve such development since Rio.
New legal initiatives to address climate change are gaining traction, but the history of environmental law in the United States teaches that every aspect of any new legal regime will be aggressively tested in the courts. The nascent efforts to control climate change are no exception and already face constitutional challenges in federal courts on multiple fronts. For example, industry argues both that the federal government lacks the authority to regulate greenhouse gases and that state regulations should be pre-empted by federal authority.
