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America’s Leading Environmental Court

Legal Planet

The PUC was under no obligation to evaluate an energy project conceived of in 2012 the same way in 2022. And speaking of the urgency of the climate crisis the court said, ”The reality is that yesterday’s good enough has become today’s unacceptable. Indeed, doing so would have betrayed its constitutional duty.” Lawsuits against oil companies.

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Livestock Operations Are Responsible for Over Half of California’s Methane Emissions—Why Won’t CARB Regulate Them?

Legal Planet

The absence of baseline regulation of dairy operations isn’t limited to greenhouse gas emissions. At the federal level, agricultural operations are exempt from laws intended to prevent pollution to water and to the air. But here’s the thing: CARB itself has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from dairies.

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What’s Been Killing U.S. Coal?

Legal Planet

The decline probably wasn’t due to environmental regulation. The passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act and its major 1990 Amendments don’t show up at all in a graph of coal use. Coal began to really plunge in 2012, three years before Obama’s Clean Power Plan was issued. Download as PDF

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The New EPA Car Rule Doesn’t Violate the Major Questions Doctrine

Legal Planet

Conservative groups have claimed since then that virtually every government regulation raises a major question. None of these apply to the new car rule: The new rule is based on a legal provision that EPA has applied for decades to regulate cars, rather than an obscure and rarely used legal provision. The rule is not unprecedented.

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Improving EPA’s Latest Ozone Transport Rule

Acoel

This level of forced retirements is far in excess of any prior EPA projections of plant shutdowns resulting from implementation of a Clean Air Act rulemaking. For example, EPA projected a total of just 4,700 MW of coal capacity retirements under the 2012 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule.

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The Problems with the SCOTUS ‘Good Neighbor’ Arguments

Legal Planet

Clean air advocates outside the Supreme Court ahead of the EPA ‘Good Neighbor’ arguments on February 21 (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for SKDK) Megan M. Herzog (former Emmett/Frankel Fellow at UCLA School of Law 2012-2016) and Sean H.

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July 2017 Updates to the Climate Case Charts

Law Columbia

Circuit also rejected EPA’s argument that the court did not have authority to review stays issued under Section 307(d)(7)(D) of the Clean Air Act. Circuit concluded that EPA had acted arbitrarily and capriciously in determining that the four elements of the regulations that had been stayed met these requirements.

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