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Cross-posted from Legal Planet. In my last post, I talked about how Obama's Clean Power plan was the right response to a changing grid. The grid is in the process of changing even more. It was designed for some relatively straightforward tasks. The main power plants, mostly burning coal (but sometimes natural gas or nuclear […]

Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Click here for the follow-up post. If you've been reading this blog or otherwise keeping up with environmental law, you've probably heard this a hundred times: In rolling back Obama's signature climate regulation, the Clean Power Plan, the Trump administration is relying on the idea that EPA's jurisdiction stops at the fence line. That is, according to the Trump folks, EPA can impose measures on each plant, but not measures that go beyond the fence line like requiring more use of renewable energy of a coal or natural gas generator. I've blogged previously about why this argument might not even apply because reducing your operating hours is something you can accomplish without getting close to the fence, let alone crossing it.

The Trump administration has few plans to protect workers from emerging workplace health and safety hazards, according to the regulatory agenda released by the White House on October 16. This is nothing new for this administration, which has consistently neglected to take up worker protections, instead focusing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA's) resources […]

This op-ed originally ran in The Hill.  While hurricanes like Florence are technically “natural” disasters, the Carolinas are experiencing the ways that the distinctly human-made problems of social and economic inequality reinforce and aggravate storm damage. Exhibit A is the catastrophic breaches and spills from the enormous manure “lagoons” located on North Carolina’s many factory-scale hog […]

The Trump administration's Fall 2018 regulatory agenda dropped late last night, and as with previous iterations of this preview of what's to come on the regulatory front, it is chock full of numbers – at least the kinds of numbers partisan ideologues and regulated industries care about. But what these numbers don't reveal are the […]

Cross-posted from LegalPlanet. In its desperate effort to save the failing American coal industry, the Trump administration promised to use emergency powers to keep coal-fired power plants in operation even though they're not economically viable. That would have been the kind of disruptive change that Trump promised to bring to Washington. But the effort seems to […]

To serve the cause of justice, law enforcement must be prompt, even-handed, and appropriate to the circumstances of individual cases. In their handling of an important recent pollution case, however, the enforcement activities of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) have been none of those things. The case involves the […]

This post was originally published as part of a symposium on ACSblog, the blog of the American Constitution Society. Reprinted with permission. Now that they have a fifth vote, conservative justices will march to the front lines in the intensifying war on regulation. What will their strategy be? Two tactics are likely, one long-standing and […]

This post was originally published as part of a symposium on ACSblog, the blog of the American Constitution Society. Reprinted with permission. Presidents since Ronald Reagan have, by executive order, required agencies to submit significant regulatory actions to the White House for review. Academic and public interest observers have variously criticized this review as slow, […]