The Supreme Court handed the Obama administration a victory on Tuesday, April 29, 2014, when it injected new life into an Environmental Protection Agency rule targeting air pollution that drifts across state borders. EPA struggled for many years to carry out a Clean Air Act directive to protect downwind states from pollution generated in other states (the "Good Neighbor Provision"). In 2011, EPA enacted a set of rules regulating pollutants generated from coal-fired plants that drift across state lines (the "Transport Rule"). The Transport Rule established a program for ...
On April 22, Judson Turner, director of Georgia's Environmental Protection Division, issued a memorandum that changes how the agency and local government development authorities are to measure vegetated buffer requirements along coastal marshland. The Georgia Erosion and Sedimentation Control Act requires a 25 foot vegetated buffer adjacent to waters of the state, in which no development or impervious surfaces may be located. Since at least 2004, EPD has by policy measured the buffer along marshes from the jurisdictional line set by the Coastal Marshland Protection Act. With ...
This past Monday (March 31), Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented its report: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Copies of the two-volume report can be viewed at the IPCC. The IPCC acts under the auspices of the United Nations and is composed of over 800 scientists and researchers from around the world who evaluate climate change data. This the IPCC's fifth such assessment since beginning in the 1990s, and it marks a significant shift from an effort to prevent or substantially limit climate change to a focus on ...
In a news release dated March 25th 2014, EPA and the Army Corps outlined a new proposed joint rule to clarify the scope and definition of the "waters of the United States" under the Clean Water Act in an attempt to address issues raised in two separate Supreme Court cases decided in 2001 and 2006. The proposed rule clarifies what upstream waters, including natural and artificial wetlands, tributaries and other types of waters are regulated due to their relationship with downstream waters and watersheds. As the news release provides, the proposed rule clarifies that the following are ...
On March 25, the US Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a proposed rule to clarify Clean Water Act jurisdiction over streams and wetlands by re-defining "Waters of the United States" in light of a series of Supreme Court decisions wrestling with the issue of whether a particular water body (e.g., "isolated wetlands," man-made ditches and the like) were subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act. The proposed rule seeks to clarify regulation over upstream waters and to increase efficiency in determining coverage of the Clean Water Act ...
We have periodically updated the status of EPA's long-running effort to decide whether and how to regulate coal ash generated primarily from electric power generation. Recent events have put EPA on a course to make a final decision and may also signal the substance of that decision. As noted previously, in 2010 EPA sought public comment on alternative proposals to regulate coal ash, one being regulation as a hazardous waste under Subtitle C of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act ("RCRA") and the other would regulate the material as a solid, but not hazardous, waste under ...
On January 7, federal agencies, including EPA, published in the Federal Register the Agency's proposed regulatory agendas for 2014. EPA's agenda was generally consistent with the unified agenda published prior to Thanksgiving. EPA's agenda will propose final or substantial action on a range of issues including climate change, reforming certain chemical regulations, and updating water regulations. Many of these have long been in the regulatory pipeline. For example, EPA's rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions for new fossil fuel-fired power plants will apparently finally go ...
Property owners in the town of Roxana, Illinois, a small village on the Mississippi River across from St. Louis, filed suit against Shell Oil Company and ConocoPhillips. The property owners alleged that a refinery owned by Shell and later ConocoPhillips leaked benzene and other petroleum-based contaminants into the groundwater under their homes. The property owners sought the lost value in their homes as a result of the groundwater contamination. The Illinois District Court Judge certified the property owners as a class under Rule 23, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. On appeal ...
On January 14, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that Heather McTeer Toney has been appointed by President Obama as regional administrator for EPA's regional office in Atlanta. Ms. McTeer Toney was the first African-American and first female to serve as the Mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, holding that post from 2004-2012. Thereafter, she served as the Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Student Learning at Mississippi Valley State University, and as the principal attorney at Heather McTeer, PLLC. For more information on environmental law ...
As stated in the Federal Register, effective December 30, 2013, the "All Appropriate Inquiry Rule," found at 40 CFR Part 312.11 was amended to add as paragraph (c)- a reference to ASTM International's E1527-13 "Standard Practice for Environmental Site Assessments: Phase I Environmental Site Assessment Process." ASTM E1527-13 was included to "make clear that persons conducting all appropriate inquires may use the procedures included in this standard to comply with the All Appropriate Inquires Rule." Now both ASTM E1527-05 and E1527-13 have been found by the EPA to comply ...
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