San Francisco and Oakland have renewed their fight to try and make Big Oil pay for climate-change related infrastructure damage, asking a federal appeals court earlier this week to reconsider their previously dismissed lawsuits against five oil companies. San Francisco and Oakland argue that a federal judge wrongly kept their cases out of state court […]
President Trump issued two executive orders this past Wednesday that are meant to roll back energy regulations and promote fossil fuel development. In particular, the pair of executive orders are aimed at speeding up the permitting process for oil and gas infrastructure projects and curbing states’ ability to hold up approvals. Under Section 401 of […]
Culminating a process that began 11 years ago, the California State Water Resources Control Board last week unanimously adopted a revised policy to protect wetlands in the State. The policy creates a new definition of wetlands peculiar to California, gives a framework to determine a water of the state (nearly everything), and clarifies requirements for […]
April 8, 2019 | Category:
WaterThe U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“USEPA”) Administrator, Andrew Wheeler, iterated his beliefs that water quality issues are the most important threats to human health right now, outweighing those posed by climate change. USEPA plans to complete revisions to its Lead and Copper Rule in summer 2019. One goal of the revisions will be to replace […]
A jury on Wednesday awarded $80 million in damages to a California man who blamed Roundup weed killer for his cancer. The six-person jury in San Francisco returned its verdict in favor of Edwin Hardeman, 70, who said he used Roundup products to treat poison oak, overgrowth and weeds on his San Francisco Bay Area […]
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (“USEPA”) formalized its rescission of a 1995 policy that states that any facility that is considered to be a “major” polluter under the Clean Air Act (“CAA”) could never be categorized as a smaller polluter. The proposed rule was sent to the White House on February 25, 2019 for […]
March 12, 2019 | Category:
NewsThroughout last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) repeatedly confirmed that regulated entities could expect the EPA’s focus to be on compliance programs rather than harsher enforcement actions. This reprioritization included renaming the EPA’s previously titled National Enforcement Initiatives to the National Compliance Initiatives, working more cooperatively with businesses before resorting to more punitive […]
Assembly Bill 901, signed by Governor Brown in 2015 and codified as California Public Resources Code section 41821.5, requires that disposal, recycling, and compost facilities submit information directly to the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (“CalRecycle”) on the types, quantities, and destinations of materials that are disposed of, sold, or transferred inside or […]
The below is from the ConocoPhillips Press Release HERE. HOUSTON – ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) today announced that an international arbitration Tribunal ruled Venezuela unlawfully expropriated ConocoPhillips’ significant oil investments in the Petrozuata and Hamaca heavy crude oil projects and the offshore Corocoro development project. According to an International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) […]
The National Resources Management Act was approved yesterday by Congress in a landslide 363-62 vote. The Act is a sweeping public lands conservation package that will protect millions of acres of land and rivers across the country. It also designates over 1 million acres of new wilderness land, with almost 700,000 acres reserved for recreation […]
