I was fortunate enough to be asked to participate in a radio interview with Jeff St. Clair, WKSU Radio, regarding the Clean Power Plan. It was an interesting discussion of the legal questions surrounding the plan as well as a broader discussion of the state of environmental regulation in the United States.
Here is an
Last week, the U.S. District Court for North Dakota imposed a preliminary injunction against EPA’s implementation of its "Waters of the U.S. Rule" which defines the waterways and wetlands regulated under the Clean Water Act. See, North Dakota v. EPA. The Court issued its decision despite the EPA and Army Corps’ argument that exclusive
On June 29th the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that EPA was required to consider costs of compliance when deciding whether it was "appropriate and necessary" to regulate emission of mercury and other air toxics from power plants. (Michigan v. EPA, U.S., No. 14-46, 6/29/15). The majority decision, written by
For over a decade, U.S. EPA has embarked on a national enforcement strategy regarding combined sewer overflows (CSOs) and sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs) from municipal wastewater treatment systems. As part of the enforcement strategy, U.S. EPA has entered a large number of federal consent decrees which establish deadlines for the elimination of CSOs/SSOs. These decrees
We know that U.S. EPA budget is tight. Maybe that is why they are looking for new and innovative ways to reduce their work load. This is evident in the memorandum released on January 7, 2015 by EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.
The memorandum is titled "Use of Next Generation Compliance Tools
Following a failure of the dike at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee which received national attention, the Obama Administration announced it would re-evaluate regulation of coal combustion residuals (CCR) or coal ash.
The Administration’s key decision was whether to regulate CCR under Subtitle C of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) as
On November 25th, U.S. EPA finally issued the long anticipated proposal to reduce the ozone standard. The EPA is proposing to revise both the primary and secondary standards to a level within the range of 65 parts per billion (ppb) to 70 ppb. The current (2008) ozone standard is 75 ppb. Under the Clean
One of the issues that has prevented local governments from being more aggressive in addressing brownfields has been liability concerns associated with existing environmental contamination. Prior to 2009, some local governments learned the hard way that placing their name in the chain of title as an "owner" exposed the local government to liability under CERCLA
Back on December 14, 2012, EPA strengthened the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for fine particle pollution. The standard was strengthened from 15.0 micrograms per cubic meter (ug/m3) to 12.0 ug/m3.
Under the Clean Air Act, EPA first asks States to propose which counties should be deemed as not meeting the standard (i.e.
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Combating ozone pollution is really about time. When I was back at Ohio EPA, we had countless meeting discussing how Ohio could (or whether it could) accelerate progress dramatically in reducing ozone pollution. During that time we would discuss "on-the-books controls" versus new state initiatives.
"On-the-book controls" referred to a suite of federal air