environmental impact statements

• Jonathan Zasloff
• April 2, 2012

How CEQA Saved Mono Lake

Environmental lawyers and policy wonks know that the California Supreme Court’s famed decision in Nat’l Audubon Soc’y v. Superior Court, better known as the Mono Lake case, saved California’s second-largest lake from drying up.  And to some extent this is true: I am working on a full-length book about the case, and so far that story seems to check out.  …

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• Dan Farber
• May 5, 2010

Another Lesson from the BP Disaster: The Need for Better Risk Assessment

Apparently, the lease grant to BP was exempted from environmental review, according to the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin: The decision by the department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP’s lease at Deepwater Horizon a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 — and BP’s lobbying efforts just 11 …

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• Dan Farber
• April 18, 2009

Climate Change and Environmental Impact Statements

Government agencies are struggling with how to fit climate change into the process of environmental review.  At one level, this is a no-brainer.  Greenhouse gases contribute to climate change, and climate change is the biggest environmental impact of all.  But as always, the devil is in the details. 

• Dan Farber
• March 9, 2009

Rediscovering the Lost Promise of NEPA

NEPA — the National Environmental Policy Act — is the forgotten elderly relative of environmental law.  Its requirement of environmental impact statements is now frequently avoided by a clever workaround.  Rather than issuing an environmental impact statement, an agency adopts mitigation measures that are supposed to reduce the legal of environmental impacts below the trigger …

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