This book addresses two questions. First, what progress did the United States make toward sustainable development between the 1992 (the date of the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, or Earth Summit) and 2002? Second, what should the United States do next, particularly in the next 5...

Few energy issues in recent decades have proven as contentious as shale gas. Supporters and opponents often speak in such strikingly divergent terms that they seem to be describing different activities. Typically, supporters point to the economic and security impacts of shale gas, and minimize...

This is the introduction to the first book systematically exploring the relationship between shale gas and sustainable development, Shale Gas and the Future of Energy: Law and Policy for Sustainability (Edward Elgar 2016). It describes the growing importance of unconventional shale gas and the...

The sudden and unexpected development of shale gas has the potential to accelerate or hinder the transition to sustainability, depending on how it is handled. Sustainable development is a useful evaluative framework for shale gas development. It would have us analyze its environmental, social,...

Sustainable development has its origins in the conservation and environmental movements in the United States and other countries, and in the laws that were adopted because of those movements. Lawyers in the public and private sectors drafted these laws and worked with clients to implement them....

The Pennsylvania Constitution contains a unique Environmental Rights Amendment (“ERA”) creating an individual right to “clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.” The ERA also includes a public trust element...

Nearly every U.S. state has environmental provisions in its constitution. These provisions cover a wide range of issues concerning the manner in which the environment and natural resources are to be governed (e.g., public funding, eminent domain, public trust, access to water, legislative...

This article provides a description and analysis of the dozen types of legal tools that are available to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. The “80 by 50” target and similarly aggressive carbon abatement goals are often referred to as “deep...

Within the community of people who are working to address climate change, there has thus been considerable soul searching about how to proceed more effectively. One suggestion is that climate and environmental scientists and the public should consider the use of non-violent civil disobedience to...

This Article argues that the questions that have guided U.S. energy policy for decades — about how to assure cheap, plentiful, and secure energy with basic environmental and public health protection — are no longer the only relevant questions, and uses shale gas to make that point. Shale gas...