Last month GRESB announced that its management had purchased the business from its parent GBCI. GRESB was established in 2009 as the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark by three pension funds who wanted to assess and benchmark the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and other ...

Three weeks ago the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a regulation to finally resolve and codify the legal principal that an incidental bird take resulting from an otherwise lawful activity, for example a sparrows flies into a solar panel, is not prohibited under the ...

The City of Portland is proposing a carbon tax that would be the first of its kind anywhere in the country. Given the increased emphasis on climate change by the incoming Biden Administration the proposed ordinance should be on your required reading list. Carbon dioxide ...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released a draft National Recycling Strategy and is seeking public comment through December 4, 2020, with the goal of finalizing it in early 2021. Maybe not since Plato wrote about the value of reusing waste in the fourth century BC has ...

Many commercial real estate owners are questioning if they can be liable for damages when someone, whether an employee of a business tenant or someone else, claims to have contracted the Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19) at their building?

This post is about what we know today about how to occupy commercial and public buildings, from offices to schools, in order to prevent the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 (the now designation for what had been the novel coronavirus 2019). If in 1992, “it’s the ...

Last Friday the U.S. Department of Energy issued a final rule effective November 30, 2020, that will once again permit American households to purchase dishwashers that actually clean dishes, as they had done for most of the machine’s 130 year history. The October 30 final ...

Among the most misunderstood term in a Phase I environmental site assessment is the Historical Recognized Environmental Condition. The environmental professionals who perform these assessments by and large do not take heed of Eduardo Galeano’s quote, “History never really says goodbye. History says, ‘see you ...