citizen suits
What Happened to EPA Enforcement?
Enforcement efforts peaked long ago and have been in long-term decline. Trump will accelerate that.
There has been a long-term decline in EPA enforcement since the late Bush Administration. The numbers raise three questions: What’s behind the long-term trend? Why has pollution generally continued to decline despite weaker enforcement? And how bad will things be under Trump II? As to the third question, Trump has already made it clear that we can expect environmental enforcement to crash and burn in the next four years.
CONTINUE READINGCoastal Communities Demand EPA Update Decades-Old Oil Spill Regulations
Written in Collaboration with Camila Gonzalez*
Coastal communities are bracing themselves. Thirty years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, and almost nine years after the BP Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, they are facing the threat of another catastrophic oil spill. The Trump Administration is paving the way. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will …
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CONTINUE READING200 Days & Counting: Enforcing Environmental Laws
Don’t expect the Administration to take the lead in enforcement. Others will need to step up.
As the Bush Administration learned, it can be difficult to pass new legislation or enact new regulations. But another way of gutting environmental rules is much easier: just stop enforcing them. An agency’s enforcement decisions receive essentially no judicial review and precious little publicity. Cuts in enforcement budgets receive even less public notice and are …
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CONTINUE READINGStatutory Standing After the Spokeo Decision
A non-environmental case opens the door to new arguments about standing.
One of the recurring questions in standing law is the extent to which Congress can change the application of the standing doctrine. A recent Supreme Court opinion in a non-environmental case sheds some light – not a lot, but some – on this recurring question. The Court has made it clear that there is a …
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CONTINUE READINGOf sewage spills and citizen suits
New Berkeley Law report examines citizen actions addressing sanitary sewer overflows in California
(This post is co-authored with Nell Green Nylen and Michael Kiparsky.) Every day, Californians produce millions of gallons of wastewater. We tend to avoid thinking about what flows down our drains, but how we deal with sewage is a critically important aspect of public and environmental health. Most communities in California rely on an extensive …
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CONTINUE READINGOur Air is a Lot Cleaner and Prospects for Climate Action a Lot Brighter Thanks to Citizen Suits
Climate change, ozone and mercury rules all the result of citizen suits
Three sets of Obama Administration’s environmental rules are in the news these days: those on climate change, mercury and ozone. The President is being praised among environmentalists for his ambitious actions and lambasted by some business and Republican leaders for engaging in a “war on coal.” Yet lost among the clamor is one key …
CONTINUE READINGThe Federal Government Shutdown and Environmental Enforcement
No government employees means less environmental enforcement
There’s lots of news coverage about the federal government shutdown. Here’s an environmental angle to the impact of the shutdown. Most of the employees for the various environmental agencies are “non-essential” personnel – including many of the enforcement personnel. Here’s a local example from the Bay Area. It seems a bunch of folks are taking …
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CONTINUE READINGReforming Prop 65
With all the attention being paid to proposals to reform the California Environmental Quality Act in the state legislature, there is another landmark California environmental law that the legislature and Governor Brown are thinking of changing. In 1986, the voters of California enacted Proposition 65. The law requires notification to consumers and the public about …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat to expect in the logging roads case
Cross-posted at CPRBlog. This coming Monday, Dec. 3, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in the logging roads case. The case involves two consolidated petitions, Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center and Georgia Pacific v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center , both challenging the same decision of the Ninth Circuit, Northwest Environmental Defense Center …
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CONTINUE READINGOn “pretextual” listings of species for protection under the Endangered Species Act
The folks over at Pacific Legal Foundation’s (PLF) blog have been nice enough to post about an article that I co-authored with Berry Brosi at Emory University (paywall protected, unfortunately!). The article investigates the role that citizen petitions and citizen suits play in the process of listing species for protection under the Endangered Species Act …
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