A Holistic Look at Minimizing Adverse Environmental Impact Under Section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act

Section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act (CWA) requires that “the location, design, construction, and capacity of cooling water intake structures reflect the best technology available for minimizing adverse environmental impact.” As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) develops new regulations to implement Section 316(b), much of the debate has centered on adverse impingement and entrainment impacts of cooling-water intake structures. Depending on the specific location and intake layout, once-through cooling systems withdrawing many millions of gallons of water per day can, to a varying degree, harm fish and other aquatic organisms in the water bodies from which the cooling water is withdrawn. Therefore, opponents of once-through cooling systems have encouraged the EPA to require wet or dry cooling tower systems as the best technology available (BTA), without considering site-specific conditions

Passive cooling strategies to optimise sustainability and environmental ergonomics in Mediterranean schools based on a critical review

This article identifies and compares the passive cooling strategies used and their relationship to optimising sustainability and environmental ergonomics based on 47 case studies. The analysis of the schools has resulted in the identification of 20 passive strategies, eight parameters related to sustainability and six related to environmental ergonomics. The results show that the most used passive strategies are natural ventilation, green roofs, low thermal transmittance windows and solar shading. In contrast, the least used strategies are ventilated façades and evaporative cooling systems. In terms of sustainability, energy efficiency is present in most case studies; in contrast, the circular economy is hardly considered in schools. In terms of environmental ergonomics, thermal comfort is present in most case studies, while acoustic comfort is not assessed. Furthermore, the results show an absence of optimisation of acoustic and visual comfort, climate change adaptation measures and involvement of the educational community. This work provides a detailed understanding of the status quo for researchers, practitioners and policymakers and predicts the dynamic directions of the field. It highlights the need to incorporate passive design protocols explicitly applied to schools to achieve a sustainable and climate-resilient educational building stock within the principles of the circular economy.Spanish Ministry of Universities - European UnionUniversity of GranadaAndalusian Government POST-DOC_21_00575 FEDER-US-15547Eco-efficiency in educational centres: Innovation, Rehabilitation and regeneration" within ERDF US.20-0

The Bounds of Energy Law

U.S. energy law was born of fossil fuels. Consequently, our energy law has long centered on the material and legal puzzles that bringing fossil fuels to market presents. Eliminating these same carbon-producing energy sources, however, has emerged as perhaps the most pressing material transformation needed in the twenty-first century—and one that energy law scholarship has rightfully embraced. Yet in our admirable quest to aid in this transformation, energy law scholars are largely writing into the field bequeathed to us, proposing changes that tweak, but do not fundamentally challenge, last century’s tools for managing the extraction, transport, and delivery of fossil fuels and electrons. The result, as this Article illustrates, is that we are coming up short in achieving the scale and scope of transformation necessary for planetary stability. The aim of this Article is to push U.S. energy law scholars to expand the bounds of the field in three directions. First, to achieve durable policies that transform the energy system, this Article argues that we must orient more attention to institutions, politics, and power—rather than just substantive solutions—to revive the best of the early-twentieth-century Progressive scholarly tradition. Second, as conversations around the Green New Deal and the relationship of Black Lives Matter to the energy system highlight, there is both a political and moral imperative to shed our disciplinary obsession with economic efficiency and integrate considerations of overlapping societal priorities—most pointedly, racism and inequality—into energy law and policy. Finally, we should expand our idea of what counts as “energy law” beyond the delivery of fossil fuels and electrons, to include a broader and deeper analysis of how energy is embedded and consumed within the economy and society. That means tracing and regulating the flow of energy beyond the point of delivery by examining means of reducing or eliminating fossil fuel consumption across aviation, shipping, automobility, housing, and agriculture. It also means turning our attention to how the law can help build modes of life that better align with a no-carbon future—a new line of inquiry that the Article calls “structural energy conservation.