On November 27, 2020, the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (Permitting Council) issued a proposed rule to add mining as a sector eligible for streamlined permitting under Title 41 of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act (FAST-41). Public comments on the proposed rule are due December 28, 2020. Enacted in 2015, FAST-41 created a new … Continue Reading
The Trump administration recently finalized updates to regulations for environmental impact review of large projects under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA was originally enacted 50 years ago to reorient federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of projects. It generally requires federal agencies to consider environmental effects of proposed projects before they are … Continue Reading
The Keystone XL Pipeline is back in the spotlight. In the first quarter of 2019, the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the injunction prohibiting TransCanada Keystone Pipeline, LP and TransCanada Corporation (TransCanada) from beginning construction on the Keystone XL Pipeline. On … Continue Reading
The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a statement on May 18, 2018 clarifying that the Agency will only analyze both upstream and downstream environmental effects of pipeline Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions when those effects are “sufficiently causally connected to and are reasonably foreseeable effects of the proposed actions.” The policy statement was part of … Continue Reading
Government agencies may soon use a different framework for evaluating the environmental impact of their decisions. The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the executive agency tasked with ensuring that federal agencies meet their obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), published a notice on June 20, 2018 seeking input from the public about changes to the … Continue Reading
On August 24, 2015, Judge H. Russel Holland of the US District Court for the District of Alaska dealt a blow to Pebble Limited Partnership’s (Pebble Partnership) efforts to obtain documents which it believes could support its claim that US EPA failed to comply with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) by coordinating with environmental … Continue Reading
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) proposes extending conservation credit to all landowners who participate in early voluntary conservation actions for declining or at-risk species. Currently, non-federal landowners are eligible to participate in a similar program known as the Candidate Conservation Agreements with Assurances. Under the proposed policy, however, parties may earn credit for efforts … Continue Reading
On March 7, 2014, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a decision in Kentuckians for the Commonwealth v. USACE limiting the scope of impacts to be considered under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when the US Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) issues Clean Water Act Section 404 permits for surface mining operations. Kentuckians involved the … Continue Reading
The court in Wildearth Guardians v. Salazar2 held that plaintiff environmental organizations lacked standing to challenge a decision by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) not to recertify the Powder River Basin as a “coal production region”. Wildearth was yet another case brought in an attempt to force the BLM to alter its management decisions … Continue Reading
