Following Election Day and the shift in Senate control, it may be worth a look ahead at environmental issues that are likely to be confronted in 2015.  While the administration of President Obama has already been very active in the ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law George S. Van Nest

New Yorkers will soon be required by law to prepare for the negative impacts of climate change. Convinced that the earth’s climate is warming, and that the sea is rising and extreme weather events are becoming more common as a ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law Ronald G. Hull

The Brownfield Cleanup Program was enacted in 2003 to foster private development of former brownfield parcels. The program was amended in June 2008 to cap tax credits, and those tax credits are scheduled to expire in December 2015. Unfortunately, significant ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law George S. Van Nest

Over the past decade, concerns about climate change and fracking have dominated public discussion about the environment, tending to overshadow the basic issues which sparked the environmentalist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the quality of our lakes, ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law Ronald G. Hull

Prospective purchasers and lessees of commercial real estate, as well as their lenders, generally recognize that they should investigate the environmental condition of property they seek to handle. The development and acceptance of a standard commercial practice for carrying out ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law

While cellphones are now ubiquitous, controversy over the siting of facilities which enable their use has not ceased. Federal law expressly preserves the right of municipalities to regulate the siting of facilities, but this right is subject to express limitations. ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law

Does economic development only come at a cost to the environment? This old question has dominated environmental news of late, but most of the attention has focused on the acrimonious and technologically mysterious subject of hydrofracking. Garnering less public attention ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law Ronald G. Hull

The New York State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQR) was adopted in 1976 and requires that state and local agencies evaluate potential environmental impacts of projects prior to granting approval. Since enactment, it has served as the principal environmental planning ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law George S. Van Nest

The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) developed the initial Phase I Environmental Site Assessment (ESA) standard in 1993 to address the scope of environmental due diligence required prior to acquisition of real estate in light of environmental liability ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law George S. Van Nest

Discussions about energy in New York have remained intensely and divisively focused on the extraction of reserves of natural gas from the Marcellus shale. Even as the Department of Environmental Conservation’s latest procedural deadline nears, polls show New Yorkers evenly ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law Ronald G. Hull

Picture claimants living near an old factory which used large quantities of solvents, including trichloroethylene, classified as a human carcinogen. Over the years, TCE seeped into the ground and groundwater, forming an underground solvent pool, from which the vapors have ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is working on a new Self-Audit Policy to encourage environmental compliance. The draft policy is being finalized and is expected to be issued in the near future. The policy would apply to ...

Tagged with: Environmental Law George S. Van Nest