PA Environment Daily

MARCH 19, 2025

We adhere to EPAs long-held core principles that the agency should be apolitical, professional, transparent, and dedicated to following the law and science. Actions that diminish EPAs capabilities will place at risk the quality of the air our children breathe, the water we all drink, and the waterways we swim, fish and play in.

Clean Air Act

Circle of Blue

APRIL 21, 2025

For example, the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act cleared sulfur dioxide and mercury from coal-fired electrical plant air emissions. In the 21 st century new provisions in law and incentives designed to slow climate change have yielded a clean energy and clean vehicles production industry that is generating new jobs.

Earth Day

Law Columbia

JANUARY 24, 2025

It does not seek to discuss every aspect of Trumps EOs, nor to answer every question about the lawfulness of various provisions, nor to set out the exact mechanics for whats to come. However, aspects of Justice40 and the Biden administration’s focus on disadvantaged communities are embedded in federal laws and programs.

Paris Agreement

Legal Planet

MAY 19, 2025

Senate may vote this week to revoke California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to cut pollution from cars and trucks. The Senate vote is on a resolution to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn three separate waivers EPA granted California to cut pollutants from cars and trucks.

Ozone

Legal Planet

DECEMBER 19, 2024

Environmental Protection Agency, agreeing to decide whether fossil fuel manufacturers have legal standing to challenge an EPA decision under the federal Clean Air Act. Supreme Court acted this week, the latest chapter in this longstanding legal and political saga. Both lawsuits were originally filed in the U.S.

Clean Air Act

Union of Concerned Scientists

FEBRUARY 18, 2025

establishing that heat-trapping emissions (or greenhouse gas emissions) are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. The court further mandated that, under the Clean Air Act, the EPA must set protective standards for global warming pollutants if the agency found them to be harmful to human health and welfare.

Fossil Fuels

Legal Planet

JULY 29, 2025

It is a huge step forward,” UCLA Law Professor Kate Mackintosh told me in an email. Mackintosh is the Executive Director of the UCLA Law Promise Institute Europe in The Netherlands where the World Court is also based. It could also have big impacts on refugee law as the number of climate refugees increases.

Fossil Fuels

Union of Concerned Scientists

MARCH 26, 2025

laws, including: the Clean Air Act; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) also known as Superfund; the Clean Water Act; the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA); the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA); and the Safe Water Drinking Act.

Toxic Substances Control Act

Union of Concerned Scientists

NOVEMBER 25, 2024

The Advanced Clean Cars II rule would require 100% EV sales in California by 2035 and strengthen tailpipe emissions standards, resulting in an estimated 1,200 fewer deaths fro m air pollution by 2040. The rule required a waiver because it’s stronger than the federal Clean Air Act, and 13 states have already approved similar standards.

Fossil Fuels

Legal Planet

FEBRUARY 20, 2025

This is an area where state-level action and grassroots politics could help push back. Political action is key here. Those communities already have higher pollution levels and higher death rates than average, something Trump seems happy to allow. Exiting the Paris Agreement. This was another expected action. It gives the U.S.

Paris Agreement

Legal Planet

MAY 1, 2025

is claiming that the Clean Air Act preempts state lawsuits from claiming damages for the effects of climate change because the CAA “displaces the ability of States to regulate greenhouse gas emissions beyond their borders. But it’s the substance of the suits that is even more galling. So by the U.S.

Clean Air Act

Legal Planet

MAY 7, 2025

My UCLA Ann Carlson wrote about the chutzpah of Trumps DOJ citing the Clean Air Act to preemptively go after state climate lawsuits like this one. For years, the states political leaders have told us that fighting Climate Change is a core value, writes Damien Newton at Streetsblog LA. Pods of the Week Gov.

Fossil Fuels

Legal Planet

MAY 2, 2025

Thats a huge opportunity to rapidly advance the zero and near-zero technologies that Congress invested in in the Inflation Reduction Act, and that we urgently need to meet ever-more-pressing air quality challenges, especially as attacks from the Trump administration mount.

Pollution Control

Union of Concerned Scientists

MAY 14, 2025

The American publicacross the political spectrumsupport clean air, water and land. Source: the Environmental Protection Network Over the past 40 years, regardless of political persuasion, presidential administrations have generally recognized EPAs vital function and funded it accordingly.

Clean Air Act

Legal Planet

JUNE 17, 2025

Since the inauguration, I’ve found solace in slowly rewatching The West Wing, a good bedtime story for anyone who feels nostalgia for partisan politics of yesteryear. And there are lessons from previous environmental protests relevant to the current political moment, as others have noted. Anyone else doing this? In April when Sen.

Clean Air Act

Law Columbia

APRIL 29, 2025

This post is part of a new Climate Law Blog series, 100 Days of Trump 2.0 , in which the Sabin Center offers reflections on the first 100 days of President Trumps second term across a variety of climate-related topics. To read other posts from the series, which will roll out over the course of this week, click here.

Climate Change

Legal Planet

NOVEMBER 14, 2024

Allan Marks is a partner at Milbank LLP and a lecturer at UC Berkeley School of Law and UCLA School of Law. Regulatory Uncertainty And Political Risk Energy is a quintessentially global business. This article was originally published in Forbes , for which he is a contributor, on November 7, 2024.

2025

PA Environment Daily

APRIL 13, 2025

Because In Politics Everything Is Connected To Everything Else-- -- Gov. Shapiro -- Post-Gazette: Shapiro Continues Criticism Of Presidents Tariffs, Saying They Deliver Chaos, Higher Prices -- WITF/LancasterOnline: Gov. Why? -- Warren Times: State Lawmaker Wants To Tax $1.2

Politics

Legal Planet

APRIL 10, 2025

This week saw a flurry of stories at the intersection of federal actions, tariff policy, and rule of law concerns How Trumps on-again, off-again tariff threats will raise the costs of building renewable energy projects in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Nitrogen Oxides

Legal Planet

JUNE 9, 2025

“The Trump administration’s Department of Justice is yet again showing its total ignorance and utter disregard for the law with this frivolous letter,” Vespa wrote. Southern California has for decades failed to comply with federal air quality standards for smog and could soon be fined. Supervisor Mitchell is right.

Regulations

Legal Planet

APRIL 23, 2025

Another judge temporarily blocked the Department of Energy’s plans to cut $405 million in annual research funds from universities, and a third federal judge ordered the Trump administration to immediately resume disbursing funds from the 2022 climate law and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.

Earth Day

PA Environment Daily

JANUARY 25, 2025

Bartolotta contends the federal Natural Gas Act mandates the federal Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has exclusive jurisdiction over an appeal which challenges any state agencys action in either approving or denying a permit when the state agency acts on the basis of federal law. Read more here.];

Natural Gas

Legal Planet

JULY 30, 2025

Much will be said about the weakness of the various justifications EPA and the Department of Energy offered yesterday about why greenhouse gases do not endanger public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act. Their basis in law, science, and economics was weak, to say the least. Massachusetts v. As a judge on the D.C.

Clean Air Act

Union of Concerned Scientists

JULY 20, 2025

And strikingly, the administration issued a misleading and insidious executive order that dismantles federal agency scientific integrity policies and purports to promote “transparency” and “reproducibility” that will actually undermine science in favor of political ideology in government decisionmaking.

Clean Air Act

Union of Concerned Scientists

JULY 16, 2025

Under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act, where the power plant carbon standards sit , a source category—such as the power sector—is only regulated if that source “causes, or contributes significantly” to air pollution demonstrated to endanger public health or welfare. There are a few critical pieces to unpack here.

Carbon Emissions

Legal Planet

JANUARY 30, 2023

In the previous three years, Congress had passed NEPA, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. Continuing the legislative wave, 1973 saw the passage of the Endangered Species Act (ESA. Like today, 1973 was a time of political turmoil. The first EPA Administrator took office in 1971.

Law

Legal Planet

AUGUST 7, 2023

That brings us to the second argument that companies could make, that any deception claims relate to speech intended to influence the political process and that political speech is exempt from liability even if it is false. Are the lawsuits preempted by federal law? The arguments come in two forms.

Clean Air Act

Legal Planet

AUGUST 26, 2021

The same is true in environmental law. Was it a fundamental paradigm shift, re-centering the law on new values? With all this in mind, here are the cases that I see as making up the canon and anti-canons of environmental law. The case involved the lynchpin of the Clean Air Act, EPA’s power to set national air quality standards.

Clean Air Act

Union of Concerned Scientists

JULY 3, 2022

The petitioners who brought this case include state-level political officials and coal companies who are single-mindedly determined to block climate action and perpetuate fossil fuel dependence to serve their narrow political or business interests.

Climate Change

Legal Planet

OCTOBER 18, 2022

The Clean Water Act (CWA), one of the nation’s most important environmental laws, is 50 years old today. In virtually all other nations, enforcement of water pollution control and other environmental laws is the sole responsibility of government regulators. ” That obviously did not, and will not, happen.

Clean Water Act

Legal Planet

OCTOBER 26, 2023

In these “carbon intensity” calculations, CARB is not allowed to count reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that are already required by law. At the federal level, agricultural operations are exempt from laws intended to prevent pollution to water and to the air. To CARB, installing digesters is a win-win.

Regulations

Legal Planet

SEPTEMBER 30, 2021

Today, climate change is the central, though by no means the only, concern in environmental law. The earliest mentions of these terms in the law review literature came in the late 1970s, and only one of the pre-1985 discussions took a comprehensive look at the problem. Third, there was so much else going on in environmental law.

Carbon Dioxide

Union of Concerned Scientists

JULY 9, 2024

If governments bypass or undermine science and public comments in policy making, our health could be in jeopardy from increased pollution, cases of foodborne illnesses, politically-driven medicine approvals or disapprovals, and more. This is a major federal law that governs if a chemical will be regulated, limited, or even banned.

Toxic Substances Control Act

Union of Concerned Scientists

APRIL 20, 2023

Multiple lines of analysis make clear that regardless of how cheap wind and solar power get, without directly addressing pollution from coal and gas plants, the country’s clean energy transition will not happen fast enough. Section 111 of the Clean Air Act constrains how EPA sets standards—but gives states wide latitude in implementation.

Clean Air Act

Legal Planet

APRIL 19, 2023

Wells Environmental Law Clinic and the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability have released a new report, Concentrated Overburden , that explores the connection between California’s history of racialized land use practices and environmental injustice throughout the state. The Frank G. Research conducted by students in the Frank G.

Government

Legal Planet

JULY 12, 2023

The bench trial took place last month in the state capitol, Helena, where 16 youth plaintiffs ages 5 to 22 made the case that Montana’s unwavering promotion of fossil fuels violates the state constitution’s guarantee to a “clean and healthful environment.” The admission says a lot about political will. I’m kidding, but only slightly.)

Fossil Fuels

Environment, Law, and History

MAY 6, 2022

Melosi, Carolyn Merchant, Roderick Nash, Adam Rome, and Paul Sutter, among many others—Coodley and Sarasohn offer here an exhaustive play-by-play account of the legislative battles between 1964 and 1976 that led to the passage of some of the most important environmental laws in the United States.

Toxic Substances Control Act