As climate vengeance strikes communities with greater frequency and horrifying intensity, citizens across the planet now bear witness to the lethal consequences of humanity’s industrialized path. Yet environmental law, society’s major instrument to impart ecological responsibility, does little to bring human actions into compliance with Nature’s laws – the laws that really count. In fact, environmental regulation hastens this course of disaster. This book began by explaining how that could possibly be.

Arising primarily from statutes passed in the 1970s, the field of environmental law stands as a failed legal experiment. The administrative state vests agencies with breathtaking power that came justified by one simple assumption: officials will deploy public resources and invoke their technical expertise on behalf of the public interest. Instead, too many environmental agencies today use their power to carry out profit agendas set by corporations and singular interests. As Part I of this book explained, environmental agencies have fallen captive to the industries they regulate. Consequently, they use the laws’ permit provisions to legalize the very damage the statutes were designed to prevent. Nearly across the board, environmental statutory processes do not prohibit harm: they permit it.