CWA 404

NEPA, emergencies and executive power

Once more we need to ask, can Trump do what he claims to be doing?

Late Thursday, the White House issued another in a seemingly endless series of administrative orders. Under the typically overblown title “EO on Accelerating the Nation’s Economic Recovery from the COVID-19 Emergency by Expediting Infrastructure Investments and Other Activities,” it was touted by the President’s team as a way to speed infrastructure permitting and another step …

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EPA’s bad week continues — mountaintop removal veto overturned

Cross-posted at CPRBlog. Regular readers of this blog know that on January 13, 2011, EPA vetoed a Clean Water Act section 404 permit issued by the Corp of Engineers for valley fill at the Spruce No. 1 mountaintop removal mine project in West Virginia. This was only the 13th time EPA had used its veto …

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Briefly noted: four recent federal appellate decisions

Here are links to and brief descriptions of four interesting recent decisions from federal appellate courts: Wilderness Society v. Kane County, 10th Cir., en banc, 1/11/2011. This decision is the latest in a long-running dispute over the extent to which Kane County in southern Utah can authorize the use of off-road vehicles on federal lands. …

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Corps proposes to require individual permits for mountaintop removal mining

Last month, the Obama administration announced an interagency agreement to develop a coordinated policy on mountaintop removal mining. Now the Army Corps of Engineers has taken the first step toward implementing that promise. The Corps has been permitting mountaintop mining through Nationwide Permit 21, a process that provides little opportunity for public input and environmental …

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