The western burrowing owl was just recently elevated to a “candidate species” under the California Endangered Species Act (CESA) by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). As a candidate species, the owl now has
On April 8, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael S. Regan signed a final rule regulating six per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The final rule, which will become effective 60 days after publication in the Federal Register, sets individual maximum contaminant levels
Effective April 12, a new eagle take permitting regime will be in place. The eagle take permitting scheme has been criticized because of its overly conservative and burdensome requirements. These concerns culminated in a lawsuit filed against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Debra Shearwater et al. v. FWS, Case No. 14-CV-02830 (N.D. Cal 2015). The changes to the permitting regulations published on February 8 are the outcome of that litigation.
For anyone involved in the first round of the Clean Air Act regional haze program, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) action on the first business day of 2024 came as no surprise: EPA proposed to disapprove the regional haze plan for Kansas. If the past is any indication of the future, this proposal foreshadows what will likely be many more regional haze state plan disapprovals over the next 12 months, given that EPA has already been hauled into court once again to force it back on schedule.
*Chelsey Noble is a law clerk in the Richmond office and is not licensed to practice law in any jurisdiction.
On April 21, President Biden signed Executive Order No. 14096 (EO), titled “Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice For All.” The EO builds on prior executive orders by President Biden related to environmental justice, racial equity, and climate change, as well as on the original executive order on environmental justice issued in 1994 by President Clinton (Executive Order No. 12898). Overall, the EO establishes a stronger framework with specific milestones for implementing environmental justice across federal agencies. Below is a summary of the EO’s key provisions.
Following its March 2022 proposal to uplist the northern long-eared bat (NLEB) to endangered status, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS or Service) finalized the proposal on November 30, 2022. On January 25, the Service announced that these new protections for the NLEB will take effect on March 31, 2023, instead of January 30, as originally proposed. In addition, the agency proposed to list the tricolored bat as endangered on September 14, 2022. FWS has also indicated that it expects to issue a proposed listing decision regarding the little brown bat this summer.
Need a refresher on key developments in 2022 to prepare you for what’s next in 2023? Here’s a rundown of some high-profile happenings, along with some you might have missed.
Yesterday, EPA announced a proposed rule that would revise the agency’s regulations to include a requirement that water quality standards protect reserved tribal treaty rights. This proposal is a major milestone for the agency that has tried to incorporate reserved tribal treaty rights into its water quality standards program since at least 2015.
On April 20, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) issued a Final Rule, revising certain sections of its regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Final Rule represents “Phase 1” of the Biden administration’s plan to reverse the Trump-era rulemaking, which significantly revised the NEPA regulations for the first time since 1978.
NEPA, sometimes referred to as a “paper tiger,” requires federal agencies to take a “hard look” at the environmental impacts of certain proposed projects but does not mandate any particular outcome. In July 2020, the Trump administration issued its Final Rule, which represented the first update to the NEPA regulations in over 40 years. The 2020 rule contained numerous revisions, many of which were intended to speed up infrastructure projects by reducing delays and paperwork during NEPA reviews. It also revised the definition of “effects,” which traditionally included “direct, indirect, and cumulative effects,” by reducing it to one short paragraph and eliminating references to these three categories, and instead providing that “effects” should not be analyzed “if they are remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal change.”
On February 16, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) published in the Federal Register new interim guidance that is intended to facilitate the review and deployment of carbon capture, sequestration, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies. For those hoping for specific guidance that would accelerate the deployment of CCUS, the interim guidance is likely to disappoint. Congress recently signaled strong interest in accelerating CCUS as a national decarbonization strategy by providing billions of dollars of new investment to support the industry, but the guidance is largely silent on how the executive branch will match the urgency in ensuring on-the-ground deployment in the foreseeable future. Comments on CEQ’s guidance are due to CEQ by March 18.