Under the US Endangered Species Act, regulators can confer a critical habitat designation on areas considered vital to the recovery of listed species—a move some say results in considerable economic consequences for landowners. However, an expert assessment of the impacts from 1992 to 2011 finds no significant effect on average.

This weekend, local, state, and national parks around the country are opening their beaches, offering discounted admission, and providing a host of special programs to attract the thousands of people looking to head outside for Memorial Day weekend. Of course, they’re also hoping to attract the associated revenue, as many parks attempt to address funding issues in the face of continuing budget cuts.

Typical Earth Day stories focus on the achievements of our country’s two signature environmental laws, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. But today, I’d like to give some love to the 50-year-old Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, which expires at the end of September unless Congress reauthorizes it.

In new research (described in an earlier blog post), we lay out a legal argument for how the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) might implement a carbon pricing policy, based on the social cost of carbon, on coal extraction on federal lands (with RFF coauthors Joel Darmstadter, Nathan Richardson, also of the University of South Carolina School of Law, and Katrina McLaughlin). As we mentioned previously, BLM has a mandate to manage public land in a way that provides for multiple uses.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper deserves some credit for creating the state’s Oil and Gas Task Force as a means of reducing the heat around the November ballot. In an effort to cool tensions among Colorado’s oil and gas industry, some local governments, and citizen groups, and as part of a deal to create the task force, a handful of controversial initiatives were withdrawn.

The landscape in the Arctic is changing, and in more ways than just ice cover. Over the last month, the Obama administration has made a number of significant announcements on Arctic policy.