On April 24, 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided the case of Delta Construction Company, et. al. v EPA, denying petitions requesting the court’s review of rules jointly issued by EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulating greenhouse gas emissions…
In late November of 2014, as part of President Obama’s comprehensive Climate Action Plan to create American jobs, develop domestic clean energy resources and cut carbon pollution, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, then Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) Acting Director Walter Cruickshank announced…
The Final Rule: Disposal of Coal Combustion Residuals from Electric Utilities was signed by EPA Administrator, Gina McCarthy, on December 19, 2014 and a pre-publication copy of the Final Rule was released several weeks ago, but the Final Rule is only now appearing in the Federal Register at 80 F.R.…
On April 10, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in a very important ruling, held that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Jurisdictional Determination (“JD”) that the property under review was a wetland that constitutes “waters of the United States” and thereby subject to the permitting…
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has denied a request for a preliminary injunction to stop the U.S. Department of Transportation from granting necessary permits to begin the reconstruction and repair of the Virginia Avenue Tunnel, a tunnel which for 111 years has facilitated rail transportation through…
Following two adverse rulings by the DC Circuit, issued in 2014 and reported at Sierra Club v. EPA, 755 F.3d 968 (D.C. Cir. 2014) and Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA, 755 F.3d 1010 (D.C. Cir. 2014), EPA has removed two exclusions from the list of regulatory exclusions located at…
Federal district courts are often confronted with the issue of whether “Narrative Water Quality Standards” are incorporated into National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES)permits and enforceable as permit conditions as they preside over citizen suits filed under the Clean Water Act (CWA). Two District Court’s recently weighed in on this…
The implementation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Highly Erodible Land Conservation and Wetland Conservation Compliance provisions (aka “Swampbuster”) program, designed to protect wetlands located on farming property, was the focus of a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. On April 1, 2015, the Court…
A state Court of Appeals sitting in Houston, Texas, on March 26, 2015, ruled that environmental indemnities, which were a component of an exchange of Louisiana oil and gas properties in 1994, could be enforced today by and against the corporate successors to the original companies that negotiated these provisions.…
On April 2, 2015, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided a complex Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) contribution cost recovery case in AmeriPride Services Inc. v. Texas Eastern Overseas Inc. (TEO), a dissolved Delaware corporation. The Ninth Circuit vacated this District Court’s rulings on several grounds.…