Water
An Invitation to Review the Supreme Court’s Environmental Record
This has been a blockbuster year in the U.S. Supreme Court for environmental law and policy. In the Term that concludes this month, the justices have decided five major environmental cases, involving many of the nation’s most important environmental laws. Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE), one of the sponsors of …
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CONTINUE READINGClean Water Restoration Act clears committee
The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has voted 12-7 to send the Clean Water Restoration Act, S 787, to the full chamber. The bill would reverse the limitations imposed on the scope of the Clean Water Act by the Supreme Court in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States Army …
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CONTINUE READINGCoeur Alaska and mountaintop removal mining
As Dan noted below, yesterday the Supreme Court decided its final environmental case of the year, Coeur Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. While Coeur Alaska was not a mountaintop removal case, it does have ramifications for the argument about whether the Clean Water Act allows mountaintop removal coal mining. The central issue in Coeur …
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CONTINUE READINGNews Flash: Supreme Court Decides Coeur Alaska
In an opinion by Justice Kennedy, the Supreme Court decided two issues in this case, over a dissent by Justice Ginsburg. The first was whether the Clean Air Act gives authority to the United States Army Corps of Engineers, or instead to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to issue a permit for the discharge of …
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CONTINUE READINGNational Cotton Council ruling stayed
In National Cotton Council v. EPA, the Sixth Circuit in January overturned an EPA rule exempting pesticides applied in accordance with the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) from the Clean Water Act’s permitting requirements. On EPA’s request, the court has now stayed the effect of that ruling until April 9, 2011, giving the …
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CONTINUE READINGCongress Looks at Pharmaceuticals in the Water. Here’s What They Should Do.
Cross posted with permission from CPRBlog This week, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Natural Resources held a hearing on the problem of waste pharmaceuticals ending up in the nation’s waterways. The issue sounds trivial – does Congress really need to spend its time worrying about people with a few left-over prescription pills flushing …
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CONTINUE READINGExecutive Branch Agreement on Mountaintop Removal: A Positive Step, but Only a Step
Cross-posted with permission from CPRBlog. Over the past few months, the Obama Administration has sent mixed signals on mountaintop mining, the practice of blowing the tops off mountains containing coal and piling the left-over rubble in valleys and streambeds. Early on, things seemed to be going well for the environment. First, EPA objected to the …
CONTINUE READING11th Circuit stirs the NPDES pot
Cross posted at CPRBlog. In a decision that shows the power of Chevron deference, Friends of the Everglades v. South Florida Water Management District, the 11th Circuit has upheld EPA’s water transfers rule, which provides that the act of moving water from one waterway to another does not require a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System …
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CONTINUE READINGCoeur Alaska–A Shifting Legal Position by the Obama Administration?
As the U.S. Supreme Court Term winds down, only one environmental case on the Court’s docket remains undecided: Coeur Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, No. 07-984. That case, which involves the relationship between the Clean Water Act’s water pollution control (NPDES) and its wetlands dredge-and-fill programs, arises in the context of a proposed gold …
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CONTINUE READINGThe other fish drops on the Delta
NMFS has issued its long-awaited revised biological opinion on the effects of operation of the Central Valley and State Water Projects on species under its supervision. The entire opinion is available here, and the NMFS press release is here. The opinion concludes that current project operations jeopardize the survival of “winter and spring-run Chinook salmon, …
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