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...

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 Scandinavian region – Denmark, Norway and Sweden – is a world-leading example of a rapid energy transition as a result of high rates of electrification. These three countries, along with Finland and Iceland, aim to be mostly ‘fossil free’ by 2050; Denmark, Sweden and Norway have some of...

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....

Based on the Publications of the IPCC Working Groups I to III the question of the influence of the entropy increase since the industrialization around 1750 on the current climate development is answered both in general terms as well as through a first quantitative approach. It is shown that the...

The International Energy Association has observed that nearly all countries now offer or are planning feed-in tariffs (FiTs) for solar PV but debate has shifted from ‘if or how to implement a FiT’ to ‘how to move to a self-sustaining market post FiT’. The aim of this paper is to explain...

Sustainable development is a framework for furthering development (particularly economic and social development) and environmental protection or restoration at the same time. It is a response to the problems of furthering development without sufficient attention to the environmental...

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...