Laws & Regulations

"It was like a sequel to a bad movie. One month after I watched the California Coastal Commission whack the executive whose career was devoted to preserving and assuring equal access to the state's greatest treasure, I went to Diamond Bar on Friday to watch another massacre. This time the target was a man with more than three decades of experience fighting smog and improving public health in a region with some of the dirtiest air in the nation."

"Raleigh, N.C. — The state Department of Environmental Quality on Friday issued violations against Duke Energy for allowing wastewater to leak from coal ash basins at 12 facilities."

"Rooftop solar and distributed energy champions have advanced a ballot initiative to restore Nevada’s retail-rate net metering policy. However, they are facing legal challenges from a utility-backed PAC. Expect a vigorous courtroom battle."

"One of the last actions Oregon lawmakers took before adjourning Thursday was passing a landmark clean-energy bill."

"Water utilities in some of the largest cities in the US that collectively serve some 12 million people have used tests that downplay the amount of lead contamination found in drinking water for more than a decade, a Guardian analysis of testing protocols reveals."

"When it comes to water, only about half of Americans are very confident in the safety of what's flowing from their tap, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll, which found that trust is even weaker among minorities and people with lower incomes."

Some chemicals that are common in commercial products and processes are known to find their way into the environment and seriously (even fatally) harm human health. Yet current U.S. law makes it hard for EPA to keep companies from using them. Sometimes the chemicals used to replace them are just as bad, but the law does not even require those to be tested. A vast regime of secrecy based on unchallenged claims of "confidential business information" makes the danger to public health worse. Often, not even the EPA employees responsible for protecting people can access information about the toxic chemicals. The chemical reform bills now pending in Congress won't fix the problem.

"A few miles outside Glacier National Park in northwest Montana is land known as the Badger-Two Medicine, the ancestral home of the Blackfeet tribe. But it's also the site of 18 oil and gas development leases, and an energy company is heading to federal court March 10 to fight for the right to drill there after decades of delay."

"The Senate has approved a bill overhauling federal energy pipeline rules and reauthorizing the main agency overseeing pipeline safety in a vote Thursday."

"In a significant victory for the Obama administration, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Thursday refused to block an Environmental Protection Agency regulation limiting emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants from coal-fired power plants."