Guest Blogger Justin Pidot: Two Years after Gold King Disaster, Trump Would Slash Funding for Abandoned Mines Cleanup

Congress Should Ensure that Money Is Available to Address Pollution on Public Lands

In recent legal battles, the State of Utah has rarely sided with the environment.  It is a significant moment, therefore, when Utah files a lawsuit aimed to force polluters to pay for contamination they have caused, as it did last week when it sued mine owners and contractors for the EPA related to the Gold King Mine spill that fouled the Animus River in 2015.  As this example suggests, addressing the threats posed by hazardous contamination at the tens of thousands of...

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200 Days and Counting: Legislation

What are the prospects for major environmental legislation in the near future?

From the perspective of environmental law, one of the most important questions is whether full Republican control of Congress and the White House would lead to fundamental changes to significant environmental laws.  These are the kinds of changes that would be most important over the long-run, from a legal perspective.  Laws are hard to pass in our system, and thus any changes made by the GOP now might not be undone for a long time, if ever.   However, while...

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When are markets appropriate tools for sustainably managing groundwater?

New report from Berkeley Law’s CLEE outlines critical considerations for local groundwater markets under SGMA

Locals implementing California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) are rapidly turning from questions about who will manage groundwater and how they should approach institutional design to next-level questions: What does sustainability mean for a particular basin, and how will local managers achieve it? One of many potential management tools is a local groundwater market. SGMA opens the door for local markets but does not provide guidance about when...

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200 Days and Counting: Intro

The start of a series on the future of environmental law after 200 days of the Trump Administration

As of August 6, President Trump has been in office for 200 days.  When he was elected and inaugurated, there was a great deal of concern about what his Presidency might mean for environmental law.  We’ve now gone about 1/8 through his first-term, so we have a little better sense of what the future might have in store. Over the next several days, Dan Farber and I will do a review of what has happened so far and what the next three and ½ years are likely to produce...

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Public Lands Watch: Proposed repeal of BLM fracking rule

BLM Proposes to Rescind 2015 Rule on Hydraulic Fracturing

On July 25, 2017 the Bureau of Land Management published in the Federal Register a proposed rule that would rescind the Obama Administration’s 2015 Rule titled “Oil and Gas; Hydraulic Fracturing on Federal and Indian Lands.” This proposal has been anticipated since the Interior Department announced in March earlier this year that the Department intended to review and rescind the 2015 Rule. As background, the BLM began preparing the rule in 2010 to address growin...

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Public Lands Watch: HR 218

Bill would authorize road through wilderness in Alaska national wildlife refuge

On July 20th the House passed H.R. 218 (248-179). The bill was then sent to the Senate where it was referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The King Cove Road Land Exchange Act would transfer 206 acres of federal land—including 131 acres in the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge—to the state of Alaska in order to build a road through the refuge. An 11-mile single-lane gravel road would connect the King Cove community with the Cold Bay airport so t...

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New Study: California Climate Policies Bringing Over $9 Billion And 41,000 Jobs To Southern California’s Inland Empire

Report commissioned by Next 10 and written by Berkeley Law’s CLEE and UC Berkeley’s labor center

With the legislature just passing a landmark extension of cap-and-trade through 2030 by a supermajority vote, attention now turns to implementing the state's major climate programs to achieve the ambitious climate goals for that year and beyond. Critics frequently argue that efforts to fight climate change hurt the economy and cost jobs.  Yet as I blogged about a few weeks ago, research on California's San Joaquin Valley and then-forthcoming from the Inland Empire sh...

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National Monuments: a Rebuttal to Commentators who Support Trump’s Actions to Undo Public Lands Protections

This post is co-authored with Sean Hecht. For the past three months, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke has been reviewing some of the national monuments designated under the Antiquities Act by Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton. Since the end of last year, we and others at Legal Planet have been writing on the scope of presidential authority with regard to national monuments, frequently in response to commentators who have argued that President Trump can legally e...

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Rick Perry At the Helm of the Department of . . . What Was That One Again?

Compared to other members of the Trump Administration, he's actually not that bad.

Expectations for Perry were about as low as you can get. He advocated closing the Department of Energy but then forgot the name during a televised debate. He was appointed by Trump, whose fondness for fossil fuels knows no limits, and at the time Perry was selected had little idea of what DOE actually does. He’s also from Texas, where oil is king. But actually, he’s caused relatively little harm. Michael Lewis has written a recent piece about DOE describing  Perry a...

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California Supreme Court Issues Split Decision in CEQA Preemption Case

Justices Find CEQA's Application to Public Railroad Projects Not Fully Preempted

The California Supreme Court has ruled in an important case that the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is not fully preempted when it comes to publicly-owned railroad projects in the Golden State.  Friends of the Eel River v. North Coast Railroad Authority.  In that decision, the justices forged a middle ground between the more extreme arguments advanced by the litigants-- producing a judicial compromise that is unlikely to satisfy fully either side.  The Fr...

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