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Recentering Environmental Law: A Thought Experiment

Legal Planet

We thought that the key to reducing air pollution was to require better pollution control devices. Conventional pollution controls would have been seen as transition measures until the shift to clean energy, so the Clean Air Act would have been written differently.

Law 287
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PennEnvironment, Clean Air Council Win Record $42 Million Air Pollution Settlement Covering 3 US Steel Facilities In The Mon Valley, Pittsburgh

PA Environment Daily

District Court on Monday a proposed consent decree in settlement of their federal Clean Air Act lawsuit against United States Steel Corporation. Steel will pay a $5 million penalty -- by far the largest in a Clean Air Act citizen enforcement suit in Pennsylvania history, and one of the three largest ever nationally.

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More on the Clean Water Act at 50

Environment, Law, and History

An excerpt: The CWA as enacted a half-century ago was enormously ambitious and, with the benefit of hindsight, quite naive: in the law’s legislative findings, Congress declared that “it is the national goal that the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters be eliminated by 1985.” That obviously did not, and will not, happen.

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The Good Neighbor Provision on Steroids: Third Circuit Ruling Resurrects Clean Air Act Section 126(b)

The Energy Law Blog

In the recent ruling, the Third Circuit held that it was reasonable for EPA to interpret Section 126(b) to be an “independent mechanism for enforcing interstate pollution control,” thereby giving EPA authority to directly regulate a specific source in an upwind state. See GenOn REMA, LLC v. 12-1022, slip op. at 29 (3d Cir.

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The SEC’s Final Climate Disclosure Rule: Interrogating Preemption and Coherence with Other Domestic Regimes

Law Columbia

EPA, as well as state and municipal governments, use the information received from reporting entities to inform the development and implementation of rules and regulations prescribed by the Clean Air Act (CAA). Notably, and unlike the SEC and California rules, EPA’s GHGRP is not directed at investors or consumers.

Law 67
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State Air Regulations Can Go Above and Beyond National Standards 

Legal Planet

States and local air quality regulators have the legal authority to set particulate matter (PM), ozone, and nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions standards and adopt regulations for these pollutants when they are already in attainment of the national ambient air quality standards ( NAAQS ) set by the U.S.

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Catch 22 at the Supreme Court

Legal Planet

CT , the Supreme Court said this: We hold that the Clean Air Act and the EPA actions it authorizes displace any federal common law right to seek abatement of carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel fired power plants. In 2011, in AEP v. That description of the holding in AEP v. Milo Minderbinder would be very pleased.