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Jenny Hernandez | October 29, 2024

Hispanic Heritage Month Climate and Environmental Justice Series: Jenny Hernandez, GreenLatinos

Latino and Hispanic people have played a significant role in struggles for racial, economic, and climate justice. In observance of Hispanic Heritage Month, our Senior Policy Analyst for Climate Justice, Catalina Gonzalez, reached out to several Latino advocates and organizers working on the frontlines of climate justice campaigns. Today, we are sharing a response from Jenny Hernandez of GreenLatinos.

air pollution

Daniel Farber | October 24, 2024

Six Sleeper Proposals in Project 2025

The Project 2025 report is 920 pages long, but only a few portions have gotten much public attention. The report’s significance is precisely that it goes beyond a few headline proposals to set a comprehensive agenda for a second Trump administration. There are dozens of significant proposals relating to energy and the environment. Although I can’t talk about all of them here, I want to flag a few of these sleeper provisions. They involve reduced protection for endangered species, eliminating energy efficiency rules, blocking new transmission lines, changing electricity regulation to favor fossil fuels, weakening air pollution rules, and encouraging sale of gas guzzlers.

Robin Kundis Craig | July 1, 2024

What’s Next After Supreme Court Curbs Regulatory Power: More Focus on Laws’ Wording, Less on their Goals

The Supreme Court's decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce means that federal courts will have the final say on what an ambiguous federal statute means. What’s not clear is whether most courts will still listen to expert federal agencies in determining which interpretations make the most sense.

James Goodwin | July 1, 2024

With Decision in Corner Post, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Assault on the Administrative State This Term Is Now Comprehensive and Complete

The U.S. administrative state does not merely protect Americans against those threats that we are unable to protect ourselves from on our own. It is essential to a healthy economy, it provides a crucial platform for democratic self-government, and it functions as a great social equalizer. All of this is now at risk after the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservatives issued four separate decisions largely along ideological lines aimed at eviscerating this crucial institution. The administrative state has been built over the course of nearly 250 years, slowly and pragmatically, since the founding; it has taken just three decision days for the Court to undo much of that work.

Robert Fischman | February 29, 2024

A Proposal to Leverage More Conservation Benefits from National Wildlife Refuges

How should the United States manage the largest biodiversity conservation system to be greater than the sum of its parts? This vexing question for the national wildlife refuges has received scant attention for the past quarter century. Now the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (Service), which administers the refuge system, has proposed a rule to guide specific refuge decisions to ensure they contribute to a national network rather than incrementally fray the web of conservation.

Robin Kundis Craig | January 11, 2024

A Supreme Court Ruling on Fishing for Herring could Sharply Curb Federal Regulatory Power

Fisheries regulation might seem to be unusual grounds for the U.S. Supreme Court to shift power away from federal agencies. But that is what the court seems poised to do in the combined cases of Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. vs. Department of Commerce.

Dan Rohlf, Zygmunt Plater | January 2, 2024

The Endangered Species Act: Lessons Learned from a Half-century of Protecting Ecosystems

In the history of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) — which President Richard Nixon signed just over 50 years ago on December 28, 1973 — no creature looms larger than the snail darter. As some lawmakers today seek to weaken the law’s promise to avoid human-caused extinctions, the long-ago battle over this little fish points […]

Shelley Welton | November 8, 2023

Environmental Justice via Industrial Policy

This summer, we marked the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the United States’ most significant climate change law. Many advocates for environmental justice, myself included, were disappointed by several features of the Act, including the greenlighting of certain fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Nevertheless, the law unlocked unprecedented streams of investment into clean energy via tax credits and direct spending mechanisms.

James Goodwin | October 2, 2023

The Hill Op-ed: Ecosystem Economics: How the Biden Administration Is Finally Giving Nature Its Due

If a tree stands in the forest, and there’s no economist around to tabulate its benefits to humans, do those benefits still exist? For government agencies, the answer has long been, “No.” But the Biden administration is poised to change that.