Regulation

Conn. v. AEP: Never Underestimate Congressional Power to Do Damage

Dan’s and Rick’s posts very helpfully summarize the impacts of the Court’s decision today.  (They were also probably written at the same time: great minds think alike).  But I’m a little more pessimistic than Dan is concerning Congressional action.  He suggests that the decision makes it more complex for Congress to repeal EPA jurisdiction since …

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Supreme Court Rejects States’ Climate Change Nuisance Lawsuit

The Supreme Court today issued its long-awaited decision in an important climate change case, American Electric Power v. Connecticut.  http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/10-174.pdf   As expected, the Court rejected a public nuisance lawsuit that a coalition of states and private land trusts had brought against the owners of Midwestern coal-fired power plants, challenging their massive greenhouse gas emissions on …

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Air Resources Board Releases New Environmental Assessment of Cap and Trade to Comply with Judge’s Order

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is covering all its bases in responding to a judge’s order that CARB violated  the California Enviornmental Quality Act (CEQA) in adopting its scoping plan to implement AB 32 (the state’s  climate change legislation).  As I reported last week,  CARB has  won an order from the appeals court allowing the state …

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Breaking News: AB 32 Cap and Trade Program Allowed to Proceed Pending Appeal

The 1st Appellate District of the California Court of Appeal has temporarily stayed (in other words lifted) the trial court’s injunction preventing the California Air Resources Board from implementing its cap and trade program for greenhouse gas emitters.  As Cara blogged previously, the trial court in Association of Irritated Residents v. ARB issued a writ of …

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Tough Political Choices On Climate Are Hardly Unique to U.S: The Case of Germany and Nuclear Power

German Chancellor Angela Merkel made headlines this week when she announced that the country would phase out its nuclear power plants by 2022.  The Fukishima nuclear crisis in Japan led Germany to review its reliance on nuclear power and the result of that review was Merkel’s decision to shut down the country’s existing plants. Here’s …

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Interior releases “regulatory look-back” plan

In January, President Obama issued an executive order calling on all federal agencies to promote retrospective analysis of rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them in accordance with what has been learned. Last week marked the deadline for agencies to submit preliminary plans for …

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TMDL Fight Brewing in Chesapeake Bay

On December 29, 2010, EPA finalized a plan to reduce nutrient pollution in Chesapeake Bay by implementing a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) budget using its Clean Water Act authority. That plan will require a 25% reduction in nitrogen, a 24% reduction in phosphorus and a 20% reduction in sediment throughout the watershed. This includes …

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Forest Offsets and Fuzzy Math in the Angeles National Forest

I previously posted that Sierra Club wants Governor Brown to re-examine forest offsets under California’s cap-and-trade program. One of the commenters to that post wondered if the plan to plant 10,000 acres of trees in the Angeles National Forest was an example of such an offset. Now I don’t know if that planting would count …

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Sierra Club asks Gov. Brown to re-examine AB 32 cap-and-trade

On May 9, Sierra Club requested that Governor Jerry Brown “re-evaluate” the cap-and-trade rule promulgated by the California Air Resources Board.  The Sacramento Bee has some initial reactions and you can read the original letter here.  As noted in our earlier posts, CARB’s cap-and-trade rule has come under judicial scrutiny and its status is somewhat …

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Scholastic, Inc. publishes pro-coal curriculum for fourth graders, apparently paid for by coal industry

Yesterday, I wrote about a satirical campaign in which anti-coal activists spoofed a Peabody Energy website in order to publicize the link between burning coal and childhood asthma.   The satirical campaign included fake child-oriented games and discounted asthma inhalers. But all satire aside, the coal industry really is marketing its product directly to children. The …

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