Ownership of Environmental Attributes in the Energy World

Since commercial drilling for oil and gas began in the United States in the nineteenth century, the idea that the first party to capture oil and gas owns them has played a role in determining who initially owns these resources. This article, which appears in the American Bar Association’s July/August 2022 issue of Trends, describes how the legal rule that helped to create the climate crisis by encouraging fossil fuel extraction could now help to limit global warming by helping us transition from fossil fuels to renewables.