A Loss for Trump — and for Coal
Trump Administration Loses Yet Another Environmental Case
Understandably, most of the attention at the beginning of the week was devoted to the rollout of the Trump Administration's token effort to regulate greenhouse gases, the ACE rule. But something else happened, too. On Tuesday, a D.C. Circuit ruling ignored objections from the Trump Administration and invalidated key parts of a rule dealing with coal-ash disposal as being too weak. That rule had originally come from the Obama Administration, and the court agreed with envi...
CONTINUE READINGEPA Makes a Pit Stop at the “Chevron” Station
EPA's latest proposed rollback relies heavily on the Chevron Doctrine.
The ACE rule, The Trump Administration’s proposed rule for carbon emissions in the carbon sector, purports to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants. Its real goal seems to be minimizing the burden on coal-fired plants. Legal Planet has already carried some excellent posts about the proposal’s policy flaws. I’d like instead to talk about its legal basis. In particular, I’d like to talk about how much the rule seems to rely on the Chevron doctrine, a judici...
CONTINUE READINGDoes California need “Trump insurance”?
State legislature nears decision time over SB 49, which could protect California against federal environmental rollbacks
This Sacramento Bee article is remarkable in describing how aggressively the Trump Administration is now going after California’s efforts to protect the state’s natural resources, including its water resources (see also this LA Times article). Interior Secretary Zinke is demanding that his agency look for ways to override California water law and force more water to be distributed to farmers, at the expense of the state’s rivers and fisheries. This follows on o...
CONTINUE READINGThe Clean Power Plan Replacement Comes With a Major Change to NSR (Part 1)
Important pre-construction environmental review for power plant modifications at risk
Last month, I discussed a proposal before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment to amend the Clean Air Act to weaken pre-construction review for modifications to equipment at large stationary sources. Since then, the Subcommittee voted H.R. 3128 out on a party line vote, and it’s currently waiting for the full House Energy & Commerce Committee to take it up. Now, EPA has baked a very similar proposal into their Clean Power Plan replacement. This...
CONTINUE READINGThe Costs, Benefits, and Health Impacts of EPA’s Proposed Replacement for the Clean Power Plan
EPA's New Proposed Rule Will Cost Billions of Dollars, Largely in Health Impacts and Avoidable Mortality
As my colleagues Cara Horowitz and Meredith Hankins, and others, including the New York Times, have reported, the Trump EPA today proposed a replacement rule for the Clean Power Plan, which was a plan to transform our electrical grid away from coal (with associated health and climate benefits). The essence of the new proposal is to replace the Clean Power Plan, which required a shift in grid power away from coal, to a new plan that looks, on a plant-by-plant basis, to ...
CONTINUE READINGOne State, Two States, Red States, Blue States: Federalism Hypocrisy in Trump’s EPA
Regulatory approaches for vehicles versus power plants show the Trump White House’s true motivation - and it’s not states’ rights.
As my colleague Cara Horowitz has already blogged, the Trump EPA is preparing to announce a Clean Power Plan replacement today, rolling back Obama-era efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. The plan is expected to largely shift the regulatory burden to states, essentially leaving it up to them to decide whether and how stringently to regulate. Draft talking points leaked to E&E News argue for broad deference to states, since they “...
CONTINUE READINGEPA to Propose Replacing Clean Power Plan with Something Much, Much Weaker
It may not be legal, and grid experts say it's certainly not good policy
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that EPA will soon release its proposal for replacing the Clean Power Plan, sharing some leaked details. Here's a quick reaction. As a reminder, the Clean Power Plan is the regulation enacted by EPA, under President Obama, to limit emissions of carbon dioxide from existing fossil-fuel-fired power plants. It was, and remains, the only significant federal regulation that directly limits carbon dioxide pollution from th...
CONTINUE READINGGreen Groups and Corporate Sustainability
Environmental NGOs sometimes partner with business, sometimes administer “tough love.”
Much of what environmental groups do involves the government: lobbying Congress, participating in rulemakings, and suing when all else fails. But there is also an interesting story to be told of how these groups relate to the corporate world. Sometimes they play the good cop, forming partnership with companies; sometimes the bad cop, trashing the company’s policies in the media. Environmental Defense Fund has been the leader among environmental organizations in part...
CONTINUE READINGThe Trump Administration Is On An Environmental Losing Streak
Courts Continue to Strike Down Anti-Environmental Actions
While the Trump Administration's assault on the environment is alarming, courts are continuing to hand the administration an impressive string of losses that mean that, at least in the short term, the assault is much less effective than the administration's claims of deregulating the economy would lead us all to believe. In just the last 8 days, the Administration has lost four high profile environmental cases, adding to a string of losses over the past 18 m...
CONTINUE READINGWhen No News Would Be Good News: The Ongoing Trials of Prop 65
California’s Proposition 65 law has been consistently making the news lately — but not for the reasons it should.
This summer, California’s unique-in-the-nation law governing human exposure to toxic chemicals, Proposition 65, has been consistently making Page 1 — but in ways that belie the adage that “all publicity is good publicity.” Most heavily reported, and acutely politically perilous to the law’s supporters, has been a state trial court ruling that coffee must bear a warning to potential consumers that it contains a cancer-causing chemical (acrylamide). The speci...
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