Your Guide to Emerging Issues in Environmental Regulation and Litigation.
On Thursday, March 18, 2021, Congressional members who drafted the Environmental Justice for All Act (EJAA) reintroduced the bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, co-chair and co-founder of the Senate’s first environmental justice caucus, is co-sponsoring a parallel bill moving through the Senate. Similar to environmental justice legislation recently …
In the United States, New Jersey has quickly become a leader in tackling environmental justice issues. Earlier this year, the state, which boasts 130 miles of shoreline, became the first to require builders to take climate change and rising sea levels into account to obtain government project bids. The Garden State also pledged it would …
The U.S. Department of Justice filed lawsuits against New York and several other states, challenging their newly enacted state Superfund laws (Superfund lawsuits). The laws aim to address the environmental damages attributed to climate change by requiring fossil fuel companies to contribute to state-managed funds designated for climate adaptation and cleanup efforts. The lawsuits raise …
There has been a recent push across the country placing “green amendments” at the forefront of the fight to combat climate change and promote environmental justice. Analogous to the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech or freedom of religion, a green amendment is an amendment to a state Constitution’s Bill …
Last week, a coalition of environmental groups filed suit in the Southern District of New York following the Trump Administration’s proposal to update the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—the federal law that requires certain environmental reviews prior to the approval of major infrastructure projects. The lawsuit, Environmental Justice Health Alliance et al. v. Council on Environmental Quality et al., Civil Action No. 20-cv-6143, …
Three environmental organizations submitted a notice of intent to file suit to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in January 2020 for its failure to act on greenhouse gas emissions from aircrafts. In a joint letter to the EPA’s administrator and director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality, the three groups–Center for …
A report, authored by the Environmental Integrity Project, Earth justice, Prairie Rivers Network, and the Sierra Club, found that groundwater near 90 percent of reporting Illinois coal ash sites contain toxic pollutants like arsenic, cobalt, and lithium. The report’s results are based on data sets made public for the first time earlier this year as …
The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is a pipeline built by Energy Transfer Partners to move oil from western North Dakota to Illinois, where it can be shipped to the Gulf Coast and points beyond. The Army Corps of Engineers approved the completion of the DAPL on February 8, 2017. The DAPL began operating June 1, …
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) applies to a major federal action that significantly affects the quality of the human environment. On June 30, several federal agencies took their own federal action which will likely have significant impacts in how NEPA is implemented in the future. In particular, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Department of …
At the beginning of this year, ELM forecasted that 2025 would be a big year for the National Environmental Policy Act (previously covered by ELM here), and so far, our prediction continues to ring true. In the latest NEPA news, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) published a notice in the Federal Register announcing the …